There has been much – and much publicized – Red hang wringing over the decision to have Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other guys (whom nobody cares nearly as much about) stand trial in a federal courthouse New York City. There’s been enough of this absurd theater, which so self evidently oxymoronic that it can only really be described as “belligerent worrying”, to support half an episode of The Daily Show. There’s obviously a lot of comedy to be had in the sight of chest thumping wanna-be warriors cowering in fear of a heavily shackled man, to say nothing of the easily mocked hypocrisy of serially over-reacting nimrods like Rudolph Giuliani. But there’s more to it than just the usual right wing cant of nouns, verbs and “9/11”s.
That refrain, so effective for so long, is fading into history right before our eyes. That is an unambiguous positive for the country as a whole. However, for those who’ve long seen it as their best rhetorical weapon it is a disaster of world changing proportions. This goes not only for office seeking members of the Republican Party, it runs straight down from them through the entire electorate. The 2001 attacks, which have been culturally shorthanded as “9/11”, were more than just a political weapon to be wielded by Bush the Younger and his adoring supporters. “9/11” was a cultural phenomenon that dwarfed any fad in recent history.
It was on t-shirts and bumper stickers, in popular songs and on television. It provided an all encompassing justification for American nationalism at every level from televised Washington talk shows to barbershops, barstools and beauty salons. Every time someone’s conservative uncle went off at a family picnic the entire cultural force of “9/11” was there to back him up. In every conversation about the wider world between teenagers (some of whom would grow up to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan), “9/11” was there. Long after the rubble was cleared and the victims mourned, “9/11” stayed. It quickly became less a terrorist attack and more a revival movement, perhaps the greatest America had seen in a century or more. But like the Great Awakenings, like the drive to prohibit alcohol, indeed like all revival movements, this one cannot sustain itself.
The first hard evidence that it was petering out was probably the 2006 election results. But it wasn’t until the last presidential campaign, especially as Giuliani became more and more of a cartoon, that speculation began in national media circles about how we were now living in a post-post-9/11 world. Cutesy phrasing aside, that was an astute point and now we’re seeing it put into reality. This is also part and parcel of why closing Guantanamo is such a bugaboo for terror crazed nationalists. Guantanamo is for prisoners of war, if it’s closing doesn’t that mean the war is ending too?
Putting Mohammed on trial in New York (and, as nobody but Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, even that still isn’t good enough) is the beginning of the end for the cultural fad of “9/11”. The event that everyone at the time agreed “changed everything” actually didn’t change very much at all. For people who go for kitschy “9/11” porn, like bald eagles with tears in their eyes, the 2001 attacks delivered on the failed apocalyptic promises of Y2K and those “Left Behind” books. It was the ultimate in righteous justification, but it wasn’t the apocalypse; after all, here we are eight years later.
None of the above is to suggest that there aren’t millions upon millions of Americans for whom the culture of “9/11” is still roaring along. There are; but there are less of them this year than there were last year and next year there will be even fewer. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? He’s just a name, albeit one that has the renown and malice of a spook story to significant chunks of the country. So long as he’s in legal limbo in some exotic tropical prison the myth of the all-capable terrorist mastermind can continue. But when he’s carted off to some anonymous, out-of-sight/out-of-mind concrete box, no different than any other convicted murderer, that’s when his name will fade.
It is in the interest of right wing politicians and their blabbering surrogates to object to that outcome. It will cost them a powerful bogeyman and erode the culture of “9/11” (which they have so egregiously exploited) even further. And so we are left with their belligerent worrying.
