Forget 9/11!

Yeah, granted, nothing will ever be the same again, but COME ON! we can't live our lives now based on what happened then.

"Remember it! Write it down, take a picture, I don't give a fuuck!"

I don't know if anybody still actually er remembers, but there were these long cords of empathy that stretched out and wove so many people together that day and all we have to show for it is a sterile row of pictures and names for the civilians and baroque montages of policemen and firefighters riding eagles into heaven or whatever. It's funny, it's almost as if the spirit of cooperation and fellowship directly following those attacks is these days more often portrayed as some kind of pre-9/11 mindset, before the entire world became America's enemy. So many people instinctively turned towards America as friends, but the right uses it to justify making enemies.

9/11 has been used by the us administration to pass the most outrageous martial law totalitarian legislation that the country has ever seen, violating your rights and riding roughshod over the rest of the world for gain.

when i'm in charge of a country, i hope all my subjects are as well trained as the average us citizen, it's gonna be sooo easy.

It's hard to sort out -- why is it so important? I know I'll never forget, just because it was one of the scariest, world-turned-upside-down days of my life, and also because I shared that feeling with a billion or two other people. But to hang on to the memory, to hold it close, to constantly bear witness... why? To what end? Just to make sure a grudge is always held? It would be one thing to remember to ensure that it doesn't happen again, or because the event teaches us something indispensable about humanity, the way the Holocaust does, but I'm not so sure 9/11 does that.

*cough*...orwell...*cough*

As a matter of fact, I actually made a point to tune in during the 7th inning stretch of the White Sox/Angels baseball game in order to see if they would broadcast some sort of overblown tribute. Well, if anything happened in the stadium, they didn't show it; they went to commercial!! This is the craziest fucking thing. I watch baseball games all year long, and on Sundays at least, the sports networks usually make a point to broadcast the singing of "God Bless America" during the 7th inning stretch. Well, they didn't show it tonight, on 9/11 itself -- although doubtless it was being sung in the stadium. Weird.

Maybe I just happened to conveniently miss everything between my remote abuse. But I doubt it. I even DID switch over to CNN occasionally out of curiousity and, nope, nothing. The only time I saw any burning towers was when I switched over to PBS to fleetingly catch bits of the special they were running about the response of the air defense system on 9/11. I mean, I knew there was a chance of seeing footage, but I wanted to catch some of this special, which was quite good incidentally.

So yeah, no outsized response this year, from where I'm sitting.

I got a lot of glurgy e-mail from relatives. I know that doesn't count as mass media, but it did annoy the hell out of me.

Maybe I'll sleep easier when I know that it's unlikely to happen again.

40,000 people are killed on the highways mostly due to accidents. This pre-meditated attack wasn't an accident. If 10,000 are vaporized in Baltimore on 10/21 from a terrorist bombing, I'm not going to be the one to say, "Oh, the same number would've died from colon cancer anyway."

I completely agree that no group should claim ownership of a tragedy of this magnitude. That goes for the president, congressmen, country-and-western singers, bumper-sticker makers, ministers, baseball owners, or Junior Leaguers.

We should move on with our lives, but we should never forget.

I don't know that posting those images were the best thing to do, but I do feel your sentiment. I guess I feared stating my own case as strongly as you.

I'll never forget it. I cried today, and I'm not a New Yorker, nor did I directly know anyone who perished. but there was a guy a felt pretty connected to, who perished. Bill Meehan was this great, fucking amazing writer and tactician who I read religiously. He always informed his writing with the personal, and I kinda felt like I knew the guy. As much as any of us on this forum feel like we know each other, I guess. So anyway, yeah, his nickname was "the Budman", cuz he liked to drink Bud. He was a normal guy, a family guy, and I cried for him and his family today. And I drank a lot of Buds for him as well.

Anyway, yeah, the comparison to driving a car is pretty stupid. When people get behind a car, as mundane as the act is, it carries a certain amount of risk. ya never know when some knucklehead drunk might be on the road, or whatever. When you go to work in the morning, it shouldn't be "a risk". I think that's the dif that milo's missing.

FWIW yes this year was the first time that I just went about my business as usual, and I din't see much coverage of it apart from a few documentaries about Osama and the Hamburg cell (but then, I don't live in the U.S.A.), but it's really not like I *needed* to be reminded of it; we're all still living it, every day, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

1,000 Americans now killed in Iraq because of a war against terrorists (justness of same left to side for the purpose of this headcount).

10,000 Iraqi civilians now dead.

Who's killin' who?

And to be fair again, those combatants who died only became combatants after Iraq had been illegally invaded by an occupying army. It's not like Iraq had decared war on the U.S. And the terrorists who drifted in after the war had started would never have drifted in at all while Hussein was leader.

Yours truly, Devil's Advocate

And Maria hadn't even seen it when she started this thread. Must be in the air.

10,000 Iraqi civilians now dead.

Tying the terroist attacks from three years ago to the war in Iraq makes about as much sense as George W. Bush doing the same thing. In other words, it doesn't make sense. I think the casualties in the U.S. were horrible, and I think that the casualties in Iraq are just as bad, if not worse. If you want to get on a thread about how wrong it was that Bush invaded Iraq, there are plenty of them to choose from.

And this perhaps goes to what many are saying about "Let's Roll! Osama Yo' Mama! Boot in his ass!©©©©" Just because everyone from the president to Charlie Daniels to cocaine-mirror hawkers at Ground Zero have apprpriated that day doesn't mean that the rest of us have to give it to them or let them get away with it.

And in my opinion, letting them get away with it would mean forgetting about what happened to this nation on that day. Blowing it off like it's an annoying deodrant commercial.

I 100% agree that it would be healthier for the country to move on and not wallow in it. The US seems to be inching down that path. Everyone on here has mentioned how this year, the ceremonies and news reports weren't especially prevalent. However, you just have to keep in mind that it's going to be a loooonnnnnng time before it ever returns to normal again.

It was nice to see my friends upset over Texas beating Arkansas by a safety than by what they were upset over three years ago.

That's true. But the fact that GWB keeps conflating the two, and not letting people forget 9/11 in the aid of this war means the point is unfortunately relevant. I'd be much happier if Bush & Co dropped the pretense that this has anything to do with 9/11 and just admitted that it was always about wanting to get Saddam out of Iraq. Until they let go of that, people won't be able to move on, let alone actually internalize what 9/11 was actually about.

i believe this is the last time, as the new building on the WTC site will be well underway in a year.

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20040911/capt.whre11109111723.bush_sept_11_anniversary_whre111.jpg

This is precisely what needs to NOT happen (in my opinion). If there is any practical reason to "remember" it is to remember it as a historical event and learn from it, in the same fashion that one would remember the fall of rome. To remember what went wrong and how it can be prevented from happening again. But most certainly not to distill it down to some sort of symbol to be used in political campaigns.

Others apparently like to clutch their chest with both hands while the dude on the left is going for his gun.

i believe this is the last time, as the new building on the WTC site will be well underway in a year.

Are you kidding? They'll set up something near by and have the constructions workers read it out next time. After that, the concession stand owners.

True what someone said above about not comparing Iraq war deaths with 9/11 - but they still are conflated in the public mind. Yesterday there was a bit on the news about soldiers shipping out to Iraq to "fight the war on terror" and how fitting it was that they go on 9/11. I just keep being blown away by how gullible the US people are. If Bush wins another term, I'm going to secede from the union.

http://www.zen38066.zen.co.uk/yummy.gif

But maybe I'm wrong and USA were set on the two wars anyway. I haven't followed the story closely enough.

Anyway, not much evidence that these wars has prevented more deaths than they've caused, even American ones, as far as I can see.

even more interesting to consider, would the attacks ever have occurred with a stable, intelligent leader like clinton still in office? were the terrorists waiting til a cowboy like bush that would react just as they'd hoped got into power?

maybe the blame for 9/11 rests with the folks who rigged florida

Super eerie. A compilation of sleepy early morning just-before-9/11 footage.

'Fashion Week was just getting underway in New York. George W. Bush went for an early morning jog in Florida. Iraq shot down a Predator drone. The weather was still summer and perfect.. '

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMVTB2aVUg0

i took this picture yesterday. is this.. using 9/11 to sell a ford focus? i genuinely think that's what it's doing??

https://dzwonsemrish7.cloudfront.net/items/3b2P1h153W2B2H2N3Y3o/IMG_8576.jpg

is it just me or did people actually kinda forget about 9/11 after all

not literally but it feels like it's turned into exclusively a punchline. I hear the phrase "this is my personal 9/11" a ton lately. its kind of surreal, for years you couldn't joke about this, it was the one topic that was off-limits no matter what. and it was the conservatives who got really pissed whenever you did, I mean for God's sake the Dixie Chicks got blackballed for all of eternity for saying something with even slight undertones of forgetting 9/11. now the party is staffed with 9/11 truthers! the current Republican president went to the 9/11 anniversary memorial with someone who thought it was an inside job by the last Republican president!

Yeah I think it's been pretty forgotten. But there's also no geopolitical reward to reap from the endless reminders anymore either. It was so intricately connected to the Bush era project.

One thing that always stuck with me was seeing some German footballer interviewed about the starting up again of the Bundesliga, saying something like "yes well it's tough but we have to get back to life".

maybe I'm just easily fooled but there did seem to be a genuine love of country in the aftermath that's now completely gone, now when you see American flags on pickup trucks you know it's a person who fantasizes about the pre-Civil rights era and wouldn't mind trampling on the Constitution to get back there. the only "American" value they truly treasure is their right to one day shoot someone. idk maybe it was hollow at the time too. but I do think about Dubya's 92% approval rating and how nothing like that will ever happen again in America. wasn't Trump one of the only world leaders to get basically no bump during Covid? but obviously it started before that, I mean imagine how ugly things would've gotten had there been a terrorist attack during Obama's term. this country seems so utterly cooked right now and in retrospect 9/11 was the catalyst

I agree there's a fundamental shift but why was 9/11 the catalyst? And can it be both forgotten and a catalyst. The former makes sense to me but not so much the latter

Oddly enough I worked in a flag store during those years, and look back on 9/11 as the last days of the era when American flags could still code as being a sort of wholesome nonspecific expression of civic pride. Seeing a flag sticker on someones car could mean anything about them. Then obviously in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, flags took on the generally nonpartisan message of "I dont think Americans should get blown up".

Ofc that only lasted a few months, and by the bombs were falling on Baghdad the message of displaying a flag had fully switched to its current meaning of "I love it when other people get blown up, including certain kinds of Americans".

I mean we're also approaching the point where a literal generation has passed, however defined. You could have been born on 9/11 itself and be married/have kids now.

well its not just 9/11 but I do think this massive demonstration of civic pride and rah-rah jingoism followed by two brutal and fruitless wars sold to us on completely false pretenses, followed by the housing market collapse, did wind up breaking a lot of brains. America came together like it never had before (in my lifetime, at least) only to blow all that goodwill and expose its evil heart almost immediately. and I think for a special sort of racist shithead all that combined with the election of Obama really broke some brains and turned politics into what you see today

We havent forgotten 9/11 at all *coughgazaracismcough*. If anything we have internalized the racism so deeply that we dont even remember where it came from

I dunno, I was a teen who had a lot of Americans on his AOLIM list* and the "kill the Arabs" shit started pretty much as soon as 9/11 happened.

* the very fact I was using AOLIM shows how americanized I was back then

but also 9/11 didn't start the racism, the muslim world had already been demonized in US media for decades back then, which prob helps explain why that impulse happened so instantly

you werent seeing it from the federal government though

Isn't that the Iraq War not 9/11 though?

Iraq is what contributed to what followed, and has the actual legacy. And while you can make the argument they're linked, I think they're distinct. There's a world where 9/11 happened but Iraq didn't. And another world where 9/11 never happened but Iraq happened anyway)

Obviously everything is linked and connected to varying degrees but if everything is because of something before it then there is no cause everything is just one "same as it always was" lane

you werent seeing it from the federal government though

That seems non sequitor if what we're discussing is civic pride and flags on pick up trucks.

And another world where 9/11 never happened but Iraq happened anyway

ive always wondered if this was possible but the two have always been very linked in my mind. the impression I got hearing Dems speak about it is they were hamstrung, they had no choice but to vote for it because of 9/11, though if not I'm sure they would've found another excuse

A majority of House Democrats and 40% of Senate voted against it. Democratic warmongers were already out of step with the wishes of the party voters and would have done so without 9/11.

One thing regarding the aftermath that I think about a lot was how it seemed almost nonpartisan to see Bush as going to far with presidential power and civil liberties. I remember thinking, cool Obama will get to roll all that back. Now here we are

xxp I remember that too Daniel but tbf the kinds of US folks in our AOLIM lists and other online spaces in the autumn of 2001 may not have been the most representative cross section of US society. There certainly was plenty of reactionary racism after the attacks in public & private, but idk if I'd say the nature of US patriotism was changed on 9/12 to where it ended up by the end of the Bush years. There was definitely a window, however brief, when displaying an American flag was pretty much generally understood to mean "I am sad 9/11 happened". Although separating the two things is dicey, imo the runup to the Iraq war did more damage to the US flag/patriotism/civic pride/etc than post-9/11 racism.

9/11 took something that was already prevalent (hatred of foreigners) and turned it from what was racist pool party banter to something much more lethal.

It created a lot of new racists, but it also created a bunch of new believers in the surveillance state and the erosion of individual freedom and due process.

Shit that's happening now is basically a throughline from 9/11. Bush may not have ignored the rule of law outright, but he was the greatest purveyor of "signing statements", or basically statements that indicated his interpretation of the law he just signed, which usually differed from what the Bill actually said, worse than the line item veto (which was ruled Unconstitutional).

Which is a tame version of what the DOJ lawyers are doing now in regards to creative interpretation of law.

And the Iraq War campaign provided a template for mass deception - no, Republicans being liars wasn't a new concept, but Dubya violated even those norms of the time by the sheer breadth of the lies and misinformation.

A populace with the skepticism of 2025 might have pushed back more, but Dubya was more or less allowed to create his own narrative on a mass scale that got American voters and politicians alike to be agreeable to a pre-emptive strike against a nation that posed zero threat against it, purely as a cynical means of leveraging post-9/11 toughness into a second term (and revenge for his dad).

he benefitted from a mass media that was even more obsessed than they are today about removing all traces of "liberal" bias, and so greatly sanitized the reporting on what was really happening. many quickly accepted the non-existent link between 9/11 and Iraq simply because the news reported what Bush admin was claiming with few, if any voices offering any editorial skepticism.

They rubber stamped the bullshit premise (that the mere existence of WMDs in Iraq legitmized war), then few other than independent journalists made any real serious attempts to examine the WMD claims themselves.

They weren't even afraid to silence media critique by illegal means, like the "burning" of Valerie Plame thanks to her husband's op-ed. Like Dubya wasn't using Trump's tactics because he still obeyed court orders, wouldn't let Karl Rove in the situation room, etc.

But he kinda showed Republicans on a broader scale how they could create a cult of personality in the post-Reagan age. He wasn't a demagogue, but he created an appetite for one ("Bush was OK, but he left the woke liberals undo him, if only we has a version that didn't care about breaking laws).

Idk. Idk that this doesn't all happen even without 9/11 but 9/11 turned an alarming number of people in my circle into frothy, bloodthirsty conservatives, and only a few bounced back to any degree.

heard John Yoo on the radio describing how his extraordinary rendition/torture briefing was very much inside the law and contrasting it with the lawless Trump disappearing of Venezuelans... so there's definitely a continual through-line alllll the way back to that day

there are still dudes in Guantanamo Bay linked to 9/11

for years you couldn't joke about this, it was the one topic that was off-limits no matter what

one of my strongest memories of the day is ppl making jokes about it on the internet




and exceptionalist Americans insisting that you couldn’t, tbf

My friend made a jpg of my face in the smoke above the Twin Towers that same evening

Well obviously it being a societal taboo meant ppl would do it.

And the Iraq War campaign provided a template for mass deception - no, Republicans being liars wasn't a new concept, but Dubya violated even those norms of the time by the sheer breadth of the lies and misinformation.

Bush cared about the truth. So much so that he wanted to disguise falsehoods as truth. The lies of the time were designed to masquerade as the truth, and this requires there to be a truth to masquerade as.

What is being pumped out today isn't being pumped out with the intention of being believed. What we see today isn't with the intention of masquerading as the truth, the intention is to replace truth. This is fundamentally different

We were supposed to believe the WMD stories. We're not supposed to believe any of what is being said now, thats not the intention

one of my strongest memories of the day is ppl making jokes about it on the internet

well online is another thing, especially back in the day when no one was using their real name. idk if ILX was around back then but I do remember once reading the SomethingAwful thread in real time (well, not all 6000 pages or whatever) and the real time reactions were wild

ILX was indeed around back then: https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=40&threadid=1723

Yes, it was a lot less jokey about it than SA obv. Think the forum already had a very strong NYC contingent by then.

many people made jokes as a coping mechanism, which frankly helped deal with a scary and fluid situation - a lot of people were expecting a second salvo to come in shortly afterwards. though some were just edgelords trying to be funny.

my friends and I wrote fake Bush press conference speeches cos we were freaked out and needed laughs.

ILX was around and there's a pretty chilling blow by blow series of threads here from that day (I wasn't here then).

xxpost and there you go!

In Grisso’s thread every post has the time and date stamp of September 10 at 8:00 p.m. ILX=IL Qaeda

I think this may have been due to the original posts being later converted from the Greenspun server?

A populace with the skepticism of 2025 might have pushed back more, but Dubya was more or less allowed to create his own narrative on a mass scale that got American voters and politicians alike to be agreeable to a pre-emptive strike against a nation that posed zero threat against it, purely as a cynical means of leveraging post-9/11 toughness into a second term (and revenge for his dad).

he benefitted from a mass media that was even more obsessed than they are today about removing all traces of "liberal" bias, and so greatly sanitized the reporting on what was really happening. many quickly accepted the non-existent link between 9/11 and Iraq simply because the news reported what Bush admin was claiming with few, if any voices offering any editorial skepticism.

man, I worked part-time at Miami's only indie bookstore -- a liberal institution -- and we had to order that awful Bernard Goldberg book Bias because so many customers requested it.

dj martian - an original 9/11 thread survivor

those ilx 9/11 threads are remarkable, absolute time capsule stuff.

Yeah, there's actually a lot of history on ILX now to peruse, though it can feel ghoulish to do so - 7/7 especially.

The story unfolding in real-time there is particularly resonant. I was in the air over the US when it happened, and only really learned the details after we'd been redirected to land in Canada, and settled in a hotel in Edmonton - a process which took hours - so by the time we found out what had happened, it was late in the evening. That in itself was a shock (as was being told by the captain of our flight that "two airplanes have flown into the WTC, and as a result we will be landing in Canada"), and I can only imagine how it felt to see it happening in the moment, which the threads here help bring to life.

how did you get to the US eventually?

I didn't, tbh. Was flying from the UK to LA, to interview Sum41, who were on tour with Blink182 in the US at the time. Landed in Edmonton, with all flights cancelled for the forseeable. Spent several days very drunk and scared with photographer and publicist in Edmonton on the record company dime, then jumped on the first flight to Toronto (where we bumped into Dismemberment Plan, who were playing there and who I'd befriended the year before, and who gave us all DP t-shirts and hoodies as we'd only brought a couple days' clothing) as the first flight back was more likely to come from there. Sum41, meanwhile, had returned home as the tour had been cancelled, and we did the interview and photo-shoot in Toronto, After four more nights in Toronto we were on one of the first flights back to the UK.

I was travelling to the US a lot back then, and the whole vibe - from customs and immigration checks at airports, to people I met on airplanes (many of which were three-quarters empty in the months after 9/11) - changed immeasurably. I remember a middle-aged woman screaming at me after she saw I was reading Daniel Ellsberg's memoirs, as she thought I was some awful peacenik (which I was), and ranting that people like me had made her very unpopular in school during the 70s, and that Vietnam was justified. Mere minutes earlier I had shown her how to use her television, and I promise you I am very polite and charming.

(the woman was sat next to me on a flight)

amazing

I accidentally tore the neck of my Dismemberment Plan hoodie while camping only just this weekend and am fairly broken-hearted about it, tbh. Gonna see if I can repair it somehow, as it is a beloved item of clothing with genuine emotional value to me.

When I got back and filed my story, my editor asked if I could link the 9/11 back-story to it somehow. I reckon I could do that now - I'm a better writer and could maybe finesse a contrast between the band and their music and the circumstances - but at the time I was like "We mostly talked about them throwing bags of diarrhea at racists, so I don't really think that will fly".

well, no one could fly then

I accidentally tore the neck of my Dismemberment Plan hoodie

Sounds like it could have been worse

it's just funny how I still see my hippie-ish friends touting about how 9/11 brought us all together, when even from the beginning I could tell it was a puncture wound that was going septic fast. formerly mellow-assed people started saying shit like "NUKE EM!" or burning Korans, beating up or killing Muslims/Arabs or people they thought were Muslim/Arab, and leading to a rise in militant nationalism amongst even non-engaged normies, not just the political junkies. so yeah, the fact that a few Hatfields and McCoys stopped shitting on each other's lawns wasn't enough to offset that for me.

anything that created Chris Kyle = a net negative

and even that 'comradery' that legit did happen in the days following 9/11, it's not like 3 months from then these people weren't back to yelling at each other and being shitty to their wives