Ten years onward, and what can be said? It is a different world. But not in the ways people usually talk about. Not in airport security or the threat of future terror attacks.
There was a schism already deepening within American society before 9/11. There always has been something, ever since the beginning. We fought a horrifically bloody civil war over one such, and that was not the only one. North and south, rich and poor, white and black, young and old–many rifts over the years.
This one was already forming for some time. There has always been a break between conservative and liberal, but that was an ideological split that has been around for a long time. And while there have been conspiracy theories and acts of outrage rising from the rupture, such have been ones that lay on the fringe, engaged in by few. Perhaps the most popular conspiracy was the murder of JFK. This, however, has been brought down to earth by generations of debunking, and perhaps even by some of the wilder conspiracies, so that people shy away in order to avoid association.
People see patterns. I’ve seen my share. And sometimes, conspiracies are real. However, mostly, in reality, these patterns do not materialize from the events we see them in, but from what we want to see. We want to blame someone, we want to find meaning, we want to be in the know. But usually, there is the debunking. Usually people come out and provide reasonable doubt. I myself was very suspicious of Flight 93 and believed that it may have been shot down by the government, and then covered up so as to avoid the consequences of the action. I got talked down. Some people can’t be talked down. Okay, so be it. But how did we get to the point where, now, millions of people believe in theories far more ludicrous and bizarre than the grassy knoll?
The fact is, there have been conspiracies, or at least secrets which some attempted to hide. The Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate, and Iran-Contra, for example; serious government-led conspiracies to defraud the public and carry out secret agendas. There have been more personal affairs covered up, some better than others; there is good reason to believe that Reagan had Alzheimer’s and this was covered up. Few doubt that Clinton had many affairs beyond just Monica Lewinsky, or that George W. Bush used heavier drugs than just alcohol.
If one can believe in these, why not believe in the other conspiracies we hear about? Well, for one thing, some are simply too fantastic. 9/11 was orchestrated by the American government, for example. The terrorists were trained and planted by Bush administration conspirators, who also laced the World Trade Center with thermite explosives so they would collapse in a controlled manner, whilst a cruise missile was fired at the Pentagon to simulate a plane crash and Flight 93 was simply made up, the phone calls from passengers falsified.
True, not too many people buy into this. But a lot of people do. More than the number that believed in the claims that Bill Clinton ordered the political executions of dozens of people, but not nearly as many as the number that still believe that Obama is a Socialist Muslim intent on destroying America.
It’s all part of the same tapestry. The weaving began quite some time ago, and is often called the “narrative.” If you want to make the people do what you want, you have to create the narrative, a view of the world that will make them act the way that you want them to act. It’s not that people like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter are pawns or puppet masters. They are background noise. The truth is, there probably are no puppet masters. But there are opportunists. And 9/11 provided an opportunity like no other.
The thing that has really changed is that people in positions of authority have gone from debunking to demagoguery, as never before, and to extremes. Had everyone in respected positions, people like McCain or Boehner, debunked the idea that Obama was not born in the United States, or was secretly Muslim or socialist, the idea would not have caught on so much. Instead, these same people egged on such ideas, often even while pretending to scoff at them. Code language, such as McCain saying that Obama was some unknown mystery man, to outright statements by Palin that he “palled around with terrorists,” gave credence to the conspiracy theories.
Imagine, in 1980, Jimmy Carter or other high-level Democrats suggesting that Ronald Reagan was in cahoots with the Ayatollah, promising arms shipments in exchange for keeping the hostages throughout the election, and even wrecking the hostage rescue mission by sabotaging the helicopters. Such things were whispered on the fringe, but you never heard Mondale claiming that Reagan was “palling around with the Ayatollah” or Democratic House Representatives making outright accusations that the GOP was making deals to keep the hostages from coming home. Such would have been unthinkable.
What changed was 9/11. Many other things have come from it, but one of the most damaging was the politics of outrageous fear-mongering. 9/11 didn’t start it, but it gave cover to those who wanted to use it, and put the people in a state where they got used to it, and accepted it.
With Watergate, we became used to the idea of the media questioning the holder of the office of the presidency with any and all kinds of malfeasance, and we accepted it. With Oliver North and Iran-Contra, we got used to the idea of people getting away scot-free with bare-faced lying to Congress, and we accepted it. With Clinton and the Lewinsky scandal, we got used to the president lying under oath, and we accepted it. There are many more, but all work in the same direction: building up a tolerance to what we will accept.
9/11 allowed this to be taken to extremes. We got so, well, terrified that we accepted all manner of things, and got used to them. We saw the president and Congress unabashedly violate the Constitution, trashing the Fourth Amendment in warrantless wiretapping, bringing ruin to the Fifth through Eighth Amendments in Guantanamo and torture–and they got away with it. No penalty was paid, and we stopped being shocked when such things were done. We saw the president make bald-faced lies leading the nation to war in Iraq, statements we knew were lies at the time, many we could prove beyond any doubt were lies–but they were allowed to pass, and the figures who lied never truly paid for it. We’re now more inured to such acts, and will be less outraged the next time.
Much of this was due to the schism, which became wider than ever after 9/11, and was allowed to set these new standards by those on the left, out of respect and fear–respect for patriotism and the nation’s need for unity, fear of retribution should they challenge it. Those on the right discovered a powerful new weapon: never backing down, but doubling down, and backing it up with ferocious threats. If Obama or congressional Democrats dared try to prosecute anyone in the Bush administration, there would be a right-wing jihad called, they left no doubt about their intentions in that respect. And it worked.
This was not conspiracy, no more than 9/11 itself was a right-wing conspiracy. It was opportunism. It was a raw, destructive, searingly immoral form of power falling from the sky, and people in power found it could work for them, allowing them to do more than they could have previously dreamed.
This is the new movement of the right wing. The movement of opportunistic intimidation. They have learned that they can push us around, and we let them. Liberals with t-shirts along a presidential parade route are arrested, while right-wingers with fully-loaded semi-automatic weapons outside Obama rallies are allowed to walk unmolested.
And now we are used to it. It has become the standard. The Republican Party, for example, can hold the American and world economies hostage, making sincere threats to bring the whole game crashing down, and even causing a huge amount of damage–and they can get away with it. Oh, not entirely–they paid a price in the polls, and in other ways–but the thing is, all of the outrages of the past decade have had a price–just not a very big price, and each new outrage raised the bar for the next one. Such a ploy as Republicans carried out this year would not have been imaginable a few decades ago; it was the string of survived outrages since 9/11 that helped lead up to this.
Worse, now that we are past it, it has raised the bar still more–and what comes next will be even more outrageous.
This, and not actual terrorism, is the worst fallout from 9/11.
