A quick dispatch today on what I know I’m not alone in thinking about 9/11. If you like what you see here, spread the word and support us with a paid subscription or a contribution to our Coffee Fund. Your dollars fund our independent, adversarial journalism. - jg
In my first year in what was once called “the newspaper business,” the city editor of the paper gave me my weekend assignment.
I was an intern, and weekend assignments were always pretty bad — some fluff story about a local Boy Scout troop raising money, or a casserole cook-off. It was not the type of stuff a youngish, hungover reporter with a Nelson Algren complex wanted to spend a Saturday writing about. If anyone under the age of 25 is reading this, I know it must make me sound pretty old, but this was only 16 years ago, and this was the way it had been for a long time.
So, on one of those warm-but-crisp Midwest autumn mornings, I drove my grumpy, hungover ass out to Canton, Illinois for a September 11 memorial event at a local church. The editor — who I think would call himself a Reagan Republican but was also a committed truth-telling journalist with Hunter Thompson quotes on his wall — had joked with me about the event, which featured a monster truck and dirt bike jumping.
“Ask the pastor what dirt bikes have to do with 9/11,” he told me. I thought he was joking. Maybe he was not.
At the entrance to the event was a mangled piece of steel from the World Trade Center that, during its demise, had formed into the shape of a cross. People solemnly looked at it as they entered a field near the church.
We billed the event as a “unique” 9/11 memorial. I took the pastor’s words about how the historic attacks that had occurred just nine years earlier were part of the reason that Americans should accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior, and folks who picked up their Sunday paper had a nice little story to read.
But the strange and, to me, troublesome blending of church and state — not to mention the religious iconography of what was, again, to me, a horrific tragedy that was nonetheless a historic event that had absolutely nothing to do with God and everything to do with U.S. foreign policy and its impact — was not lost on me. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were a terrible, violent shock to Americans. But they did not come completely out of nowhere. And on that day at the church in Canton in 2010, we knew that. By then, we had come to understand why the 9/11 attackers did what they did, as wrong and evil as it was.
Many Americans had also created a Christian-nationalist legend out of the attacks — a story that resulted in otherwise reasonable, perhaps more secular people, supporting or accepting a variety of authoritarian themes that continue to shape our society. Out of fear and anger, many Americans — for a time, myself included — went along with the nationalist fervor that followed 9/11, having little or no idea of its grave repercussions.
It wasn’t my job that day to explore these haughty topics, so I wrote up something that avoided any of that potential controversy and instead described the scene, got some quotes, and framed the event as one community’s way of remembering the fallen. We used to joke in the newsroom that anniversaries of events only really mattered when there was a five or a zero at the end of them. No one cared about the 59th anniversary of D-Day, for instance. But you better make a big splash on the front page when the 60th rolled around.
That muscle memory still resides in me, which is why I’m remembering that day in Canton on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and thinking a bit more about what it means.
***
By now, we know that the surveillance state that came in the wake of the attacks has become a daily part of our lives. The expansion of federal government and executive power has grown to a point that it seems there’s no going back. On September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security didn’t even exist. Now, it’s the largest federal law enforcement agency, with unbelievably sweeping powers to spy on and apprehend citizens and noncitizens alike. Under Trump, the vast powers initially granted to DHS out of our desire to never allow an attack like 9/11 to happen again have reached their inevitable, authoritarian scope.
DHS is now a fully-fascist paramilitary organization that answers only to Trump and Christian nationalist forces in our government. Even under Democratic presidents, its power has expanded well beyond its original intent. Left unchecked, the agency will continue to expand its presence in everyday American lives, further threatening the liberties of even native-born men and women.
But DHS isn’t the only example of the authoritarian shift in American society. That shift was relatively slow at first and threatened primarily those here from Muslim countries, but has expanded to focus on anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow definition of patriotism that has now expanded to anyone who doesn’t subscribe to a white, Christian-nationalist vision of American life. Under Trump, this dynamic has only accelerated.
Following 9/11, the nation developed what I call the automatic hero complex. Under this framework, we collectively agreed to grant all first-responders the title and stance of heroes. It didn’t matter whether they were firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center or a paramedic in Peoria. They were heroes. But that designation began to apply more to police than anyone else. With this granting of hero status, we also gave away some of our collective skepticism of the power of police.
American law enforcement has used this permission structure to collect more and more funding from cities and states, and more acquire surveillance and investigative powers. Perhaps most obviously — because we can see it with our own eyes in the gear and dress of the average police officer — American law enforcement has become almost absurdly militarized.
The attacks of September 11 helped to shift the public’s perception of being a cop, which data shows is less fatal than being a roofer, to men and women who are risking their lives on the frontlines of wars against evil in their own communities. In reality, they’re often just writing traffic tickets.
***
The great irony of 9/11 is that what began as a response to a war against us has become our own war against ourselves. Yes, 9/11 has been used as justification for our forever wars across the globe. But twenty-five years on, one of the unavoidable realities of our response to the attacks is that the American right has decided that as much as half the country is fundamentally anti-American for being skeptical or critical of the powers of law enforcement and right-wing government that have grown since that day.
Those who question or criticize the American right’s vision for the nation are effectively viewed as enemy combatants in this war.
At times, our post-9/11 war against ourselves has mostly been a culture war in which Republicans and conservatives decide who is, at heart, an American and who is not. But increasingly under Republican governments, the war is entering the physical realm, turning hotter.
Without a societal shift away from the authoritarianism of the American right — sweeping election wins for moderates, significant policy changes at the national, state and local levels, a rebuke of authoritarian belief systems and behavior at the community level — this war is only going to get hotter, and our decline will accelerate.
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