Everything changed that day.
Or did it? As we near the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, it's worth questioning that widely held cultural assumption, which gained currency even as Ground Zero, the Pentagon and a meadow outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, smoldered.
For family and friends of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the crashes of four hijacked airliners that day, life changed considerably and horribly. For the rest of us, though, what seemed like a watershed event has begun to take the shape of another ridge line in history's wrinkled topography; a significant, resonant event whose significance and resonance will recede with time. To acknowledge this does not belittle the losses of that day, nor does it imply that we should forget about them; it only means that perspective and judgment should begin to temper raw passions and snap judgments.
In a curious way, though, it would seem those most responsible for exercising judgment, and administering justice, have forgotten. We supplanted the Taliban regime of Afghanistan, which harbored the masterminds of the 2001 attacks, but we let bin Laden and his maniacal crew escape. The president, who immediately after the attacks blustered about taking bin Laden "dead or alive," earlier this year told us, essentially, that he no longer cares about him; we'll get him someday, eventually.
This points to what might be the central cultural shift of the last four years, stage-managed by the Bush Administration and effectuated by its Fox-and-blogger minions: Through mesmeric repetition, they have made mutually exclusive notions simultaneously valid in the public mind. Bin Laden is Public Enemy No. 1 and not all that important; Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of September 11, 2001, but it is the front line in the War on—er, check that, the Global Struggle Against Terrorism. We're fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we don't have to fight them here, but they're in Iraq mostly because we're there. The strategy we stubbornly prolong clearly cannot defeat them, yet we must "stay the course" until it does. Fortunately, though, fratricidal factions have agreed on a constitution upon which they cannot agree.
Although Bush's poll numbers have been slipping lately, apparently enough of the public mind remains bewitched by this up-is-down-but-down-is-up voodoo that all viable opposition is confined to Camp Casey outside Crawford, Texas—recently converted to a road show. That, and a few persistent columnists and bloggers. With her usual brisk sarcasm, Maureen Dowd noted a few weeks ago in The New York Times that the Crawford-encamped chief executive, who has spent the equivalent of a year on vacation, passed another anniversary there August 6. Four years earlier on that date, also at the ranch, he'd been handed the CIA's secret Presidential Daily Briefing unambiguously titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S."
To be fair, anyone might have read that, stroked his chin and returned to chopping wood. It didn't say, "bin Ladin will fly jumbo jets into buildings on September 11," after all. And the Clinton Administration might have done more to thwart this menace than lob a few missiles; Clinton, you'll recall, was a tad distracted by an impeachment. But evidence shows that Clinton aides, including demoted holdover Richard Clarke, tried unsuccessfully to stress the peril to the new administration. The 9/11 Commission report, released a year ago, made it clear without quite saying so that intelligence and policy neglect lay behind a failure to prevent that awful day, and more recent disclosures have made that failure seem even more fateful.
About once every six months in the years before 2001, a network news program or newspaper series would show how easy it was to smuggle weapons onto flights, but no one paid attention, and 3,000 people were killed, in essence, with box-cutters.
Perhaps this year, as the anniversary passes, we'll start to hear more about these lapses. But as the rebuilding and memorial-planning at Ground Zero bumbles on, it seems we're still missing the point. That bin Laden's boys struck us to destroy our freedom became the instant cover story for the attacks, and it's stuck. So a bland, tortured and probably unrentable "Freedom Tower" will rise from a memorial plaza twisted into an interest-groups' therapy forum, complete with a "Freedom Center" that has already become a blogger's bashing toy. When New York Gov. George Pataki asserted this summer that he would censor politically challenging art exhibitions in the "Freedom Center," yet another irony enshrined itself in the 9/11 Hall of Contradictions, right next to the Patriot Act's curtailment of liberty in the defense of freedom.
What really changed that day is that our government deftly obscured its failure to protect us by convincing us that everything changed that day.
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.