Everyone has a Sept. 11 story, and on this, the tenth anniversary, it feels like most of them are being told. The events of that day are almost too large to look at with our usual tools of distance and detachment, because they fail to describe what we remember. What happened, in one way or another, wounded everyone, so to understand it, we feel an obligation to break it into manageable little stories.
I haven't even tried to read that much of what has appeared about it -- just enough to figure I might as well pitch in my thoughts as well. I've seen a lot of older writers, baby boomers, who still seem astonished that something happened in the full flush of their adulthood that shaped an entire era. And I've read a lot of recollections from kids who were in college or in high school at the time, who have lived with this as part of their life.
I don't have anything to say about the event itself, a crime of such horror and evil that words fail. So I'd take the opportunity to look at another angle of it. Perhaps one can make too much of it, but I think about this through the lens of my generation, that awkward thing between Gen X and Gen Y, that slacker, post-slacker whatever that seems to hold together mostly by coming into consciousness in the 1990s, during that profound "vacation from history."
My freshman year of high school I had a history teacher who shook his head at us kids and how it was impossible to understand how important the collapse of the Iron Curtain was. My sophomore year of college, a kid in one of my English classes told us he was going off to Seattle to work for a company that would sell books on the World Wide Web, and it sounded both very exciting and kind of ridiculous.
Whenever I look back at what I wrote in those years, and remember with any candor to myself what I thought, I was concerned that we were a generation that's biggest challenge was that it had no big challenge. The dream of peace that preoccupied genearations before had arrived -- if we made a concerted effort to avoid looking at the Balkans or the Caucuses, which wasn't that hard. The economy felt like it had, by some magic, sorted itself out in an inevitable and permanent way. The Internet seemed to offer a bottomless pit of potential. Optimism was something you took for granted. Our biggest political conundrum was a bullshit impeachment caused by a blow-job, which, once the fun was had, was laughed off before it got too serious. At the start of the decade, AIDS was a death sentence, by the end, it was a tough, but manageable, chronic condition.
But culturally, we were a bit adrift -- the spell of the Baby Boomers, and the Golden Era of the 60s was still heavy. I wasn't alone in having that strange feeling that everything great had already happened, during a time when people lived more dangerous, serious lives. "Here we are now, entertain us," indeed. Of course, that was baloney, and mostly in my head. I was always willfully looking at the green grass everywhere except under my feet.
By the time 2001 came around, there were already plenty of dark clouds overhead. The dot-com bubble was in mid-burst. The 2000 election was a trauma that would be stuck in our memory a lot more if it hadn't been completely overtaken by events.
And then, there was that bright, clear September morning... I was in Washington at the time, and I earned the amusement of my friends later when they found out I was still at home when the attacks happened. I was supposed to go cover an Energy Committee markup that started later in the morning, and it didn't really make sense for me to go to the office in Arlington and then back to Capitol Hill. So I spent the day watching television, except for a quick trip to 7-11, where a homeless guy that I used to see around the neighborhood was walking around the aisles muttering to himself, "Osama Bin Fuckin' Laden." I've always found it poignant that he had access to better intelligence and more common sense than many people in the White House bunker did at that moment. And I remember the next few days, the spirit of community, of sitting on a friend's balcony in the evening watching the fighters fly long, flat ovals patterns over the capital. Everyone had the feeling of knowing that you were living through a massive historical event that would knock everything off the table, and the future we thought was before us was gone, to be replaced by something completley, radically different.
In the desperate effort to find some kind of cause for hope in the face of such a thing, a lot of commentators then -- and a few now -- talked about how this would snap us back to reality. That there would be a new seriousness in our demeanor, and that we'd take more care to slow down and appreciate the important things in life. Family. Friends. The gentle breeze of a summer evening blah blah blah. That was the most pernicious kind of wishful thinking, an early victory for the hollow idea of "hope."
Looking back now, the attacks themselves aren't as surprising as how completely, relentlessly awful the ten years that followed have been. The avoidable wars, the hurricanes, the political climate tumbling from ripe to rancid. The way the economy has never seemed to be right since that dot-com bubble burst (although, that could just be my perspective as someone who chose journalism as a profession). In every sphere of human endeavor, we've bonked further and further down the staircase, making sure to hit each sharp edge on the way down. I keep telling myself that in 1992 the economy was crap too, and that when things turn around it'll happen fast and feel destined. But it never comes.
I think I wanted this to somehow justify why my generation has a right to feel sorry for itself because we lost our promising dawn. That we grew cozy with a very beautiful feeling and that it was washed away in the most awful, sudden manner possible. But the very idea of that "holiday from history" is a little infuriating because in hindsight, you see all the things we should have been doing. For example, we never really engaged with the idea of a post-Communist world, about what would happen if everyone just agreed that unchecked, rapacious capitalism was the best we as a species could do. We spent a lot of time chatting about what the mind-blowing advances in technology would mean for our economy, culture, and society, but couldn't agree on anything. And it very often feels as if we only think about Sept. 11 to weave impressive conspiracy theories or moan about taking off our shoes at the airport.
There's nothing comforting in this. It was the end of a "holiday," but so what? Most of human history has been nothing but plague, famine, marauding strangers from distant lands, and the routine exploitation of man by his fellow man. Did what happened change anything, or just reaffirm what we always kinda knew?
That's not very comforting. All I want is for shit to just... go better. It used to seem easy.
I guess we'll always have Portland...
I haven't even tried to read that much of what has appeared about it -- just enough to figure I might as well pitch in my thoughts as well. I've seen a lot of older writers, baby boomers, who still seem astonished that something happened in the full flush of their adulthood that shaped an entire era. And I've read a lot of recollections from kids who were in college or in high school at the time, who have lived with this as part of their life.
I don't have anything to say about the event itself, a crime of such horror and evil that words fail. So I'd take the opportunity to look at another angle of it. Perhaps one can make too much of it, but I think about this through the lens of my generation, that awkward thing between Gen X and Gen Y, that slacker, post-slacker whatever that seems to hold together mostly by coming into consciousness in the 1990s, during that profound "vacation from history."
My freshman year of high school I had a history teacher who shook his head at us kids and how it was impossible to understand how important the collapse of the Iron Curtain was. My sophomore year of college, a kid in one of my English classes told us he was going off to Seattle to work for a company that would sell books on the World Wide Web, and it sounded both very exciting and kind of ridiculous.
Whenever I look back at what I wrote in those years, and remember with any candor to myself what I thought, I was concerned that we were a generation that's biggest challenge was that it had no big challenge. The dream of peace that preoccupied genearations before had arrived -- if we made a concerted effort to avoid looking at the Balkans or the Caucuses, which wasn't that hard. The economy felt like it had, by some magic, sorted itself out in an inevitable and permanent way. The Internet seemed to offer a bottomless pit of potential. Optimism was something you took for granted. Our biggest political conundrum was a bullshit impeachment caused by a blow-job, which, once the fun was had, was laughed off before it got too serious. At the start of the decade, AIDS was a death sentence, by the end, it was a tough, but manageable, chronic condition.
But culturally, we were a bit adrift -- the spell of the Baby Boomers, and the Golden Era of the 60s was still heavy. I wasn't alone in having that strange feeling that everything great had already happened, during a time when people lived more dangerous, serious lives. "Here we are now, entertain us," indeed. Of course, that was baloney, and mostly in my head. I was always willfully looking at the green grass everywhere except under my feet.
By the time 2001 came around, there were already plenty of dark clouds overhead. The dot-com bubble was in mid-burst. The 2000 election was a trauma that would be stuck in our memory a lot more if it hadn't been completely overtaken by events.
And then, there was that bright, clear September morning... I was in Washington at the time, and I earned the amusement of my friends later when they found out I was still at home when the attacks happened. I was supposed to go cover an Energy Committee markup that started later in the morning, and it didn't really make sense for me to go to the office in Arlington and then back to Capitol Hill. So I spent the day watching television, except for a quick trip to 7-11, where a homeless guy that I used to see around the neighborhood was walking around the aisles muttering to himself, "Osama Bin Fuckin' Laden." I've always found it poignant that he had access to better intelligence and more common sense than many people in the White House bunker did at that moment. And I remember the next few days, the spirit of community, of sitting on a friend's balcony in the evening watching the fighters fly long, flat ovals patterns over the capital. Everyone had the feeling of knowing that you were living through a massive historical event that would knock everything off the table, and the future we thought was before us was gone, to be replaced by something completley, radically different.
In the desperate effort to find some kind of cause for hope in the face of such a thing, a lot of commentators then -- and a few now -- talked about how this would snap us back to reality. That there would be a new seriousness in our demeanor, and that we'd take more care to slow down and appreciate the important things in life. Family. Friends. The gentle breeze of a summer evening blah blah blah. That was the most pernicious kind of wishful thinking, an early victory for the hollow idea of "hope."
Looking back now, the attacks themselves aren't as surprising as how completely, relentlessly awful the ten years that followed have been. The avoidable wars, the hurricanes, the political climate tumbling from ripe to rancid. The way the economy has never seemed to be right since that dot-com bubble burst (although, that could just be my perspective as someone who chose journalism as a profession). In every sphere of human endeavor, we've bonked further and further down the staircase, making sure to hit each sharp edge on the way down. I keep telling myself that in 1992 the economy was crap too, and that when things turn around it'll happen fast and feel destined. But it never comes.
I think I wanted this to somehow justify why my generation has a right to feel sorry for itself because we lost our promising dawn. That we grew cozy with a very beautiful feeling and that it was washed away in the most awful, sudden manner possible. But the very idea of that "holiday from history" is a little infuriating because in hindsight, you see all the things we should have been doing. For example, we never really engaged with the idea of a post-Communist world, about what would happen if everyone just agreed that unchecked, rapacious capitalism was the best we as a species could do. We spent a lot of time chatting about what the mind-blowing advances in technology would mean for our economy, culture, and society, but couldn't agree on anything. And it very often feels as if we only think about Sept. 11 to weave impressive conspiracy theories or moan about taking off our shoes at the airport.
There's nothing comforting in this. It was the end of a "holiday," but so what? Most of human history has been nothing but plague, famine, marauding strangers from distant lands, and the routine exploitation of man by his fellow man. Did what happened change anything, or just reaffirm what we always kinda knew?
That's not very comforting. All I want is for shit to just... go better. It used to seem easy.
I guess we'll always have Portland...
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