We’re just over a month away from the tenth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, and the first tiny ripples of the media tsunami have begun to wash ashore. The cover article of the August issue of Harper’s is a somewhat directionless article about remembrance and the utility of forgetting by David Rieff. Yesterday, David Sirota wrote a piece at Salon about the mental health costs that are still apparent even a decade hence. Many more in this vein are on the way.
Both articles make a fundamental omission, one that is likely to continue well into September as this whole phenomenon peaks. It can be can be most plainly seen in the heavy use of the distorting shorthand term “9/11” to refer to the trauma of 2001 and its aftermath. It’s a coinage that slips easily into many a sentence, yet it obscures the larger effects of one of the most lasting political and cultural events of American history. “9/11” implies that on one horrible day “everything changed” (to use another hoary, inaccurate phrase), but that isn’t quite how it happened.
Following shortly on the heels of the day itself were the after events that have done just as much to shape how we act and how we perceive ourselves. The most obvious part of that are the anthrax attacks, which both Rieff and Sirota neglect to mention. And while it’s true that the anthrax plotter acted in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks, it’s also true that they were two separate acts, with completely unlinked perpetrators and wildly different motivations.
But the anthrax letters don’t tell the whole story either. This was a time when the president’s spokesman said that Americans – Americans – needed to watch what they say. Members of the military taking part in the first phases of our still ongoing Afghan War refused to be identified in the media for fear that terrorists would attack their families. A late night host got fired for saying that men who flew the planes on suicide missions, however awful they may be, certainly weren’t cowards. One of America’s most respected writers found herself all but drummed out of polite conversation for writing a short essay that, in hindsight, looks both prescient and mild.
And, of course, there was the official fear mongering. Cryptic terror alert levels bounced up and down, always on credible but non-specific information, causing millions of people anxiety but preventing nothing. Uniformed and heavily armed troops took up residence in the perfectly safe locales of airport concourses. Media scare stories about the food and water supplies were filled with ominous quotes from government officials of every level. Hucksters sold survival gear with advertisements and sales pitches designed to heighten and exploit even the most improbable paranoia.
It was a national hysteria. And while it certainly wasn’t the first, similar bouts of mass panic go back at least as far as the Salem Witch Trials, it was the first to be conducted with twenty-four hour news channels, scary internet rumors, and top to bottom government encouragement. We warped our laws, demonized swathes of our fellow citizens, and muffled our own political debates. When objections were raised, they were shouted down in favor of wild speculation and close minded nationalism.
The attacks on that fateful September day came from beyond America’s borders, and it is those victims that will be commemorated ad nauseum in the coming month. But there was more to the national trauma than that, and the lasting damage has been overwhelmingly self-inflicted. On and around the anniversary, we’ll ignore that unpleasant truth. It cannot be safely contained in the hollow framework of memorial bromides and moments of silence, it’s too complex and depressing to grapple with, too far removed from the pleasant, snow white victimhood of one day’s dead.
