“At the time, all I knew was that there had been a huge loss of life, and now there would be war.” — Hari Kunzru, “Death Valley,” Harper’s, September 2021
Shadows. That’s what I most think about when I consider the World Trade Center. The way the towers, at one point among the tallest buildings in the world, cast the surrounding neighborhood in darkness. I can remember standing outside the courier van I drove one summer in college, waiting for passengers to bring back to North Brunswick. It was mid-summer, but I was chilly, the massive twin towers blotting out the sun, commanding even the weather.
The WTC cast other kinds of shadows, effectively erasing an entire neighborhood of commercial businesses — known as Radio Row — and coming to dominate lower Manhattan’s skyline and business profile.
It dominated our sense of New York, as well, capturing our imagination with its sleekness, its size, offering filmmakers an iconic shorthand they could use to stamp their films as authentically New York.
In 1993, I was working as a reporter for The Central Post, the paper that covered my hometown and that I would eventually take over as editor. I was in my office in Dayton when we got the news that a bomb was set off at the World Trade Center. Muslim extremists were involved in the — a fact that triggered an upsurge in anti-Muslim attacks and hate crimes, that grew, from different shadows, from historical definitions and distrust, from the narrow conception of Americanness as whiteness, as Christian, that saw Muslims as other.
Muslims had been denied citizenship until 1944 and, since at least the Iran Hostage Crisis of the late 1970s, policy makers and public opinion have portrayed Islam as inherently radical and violent, Muslims as a monolith. The 1993 WTC bombing only accelerated this thinking, this Islamophobia — a word that came into common use after 9/11 — casting its own shadows. We were invited to see the attacks in 1993 through the lens of a “clash of civilizations,” a phrase coined by Samuel P. Huntington in an essay in Foreign Affairs. Huntington argued that Islam was inherently incompatible with western ideas, with the enlightenment and democracy itself, and that it was imperative that we treat construct our foreign policy with this incompatibility in mind, an argument that would frame so much of the Neo-conservative world view and so much of the public imagination regarding the Muslim world.
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Fast forward eight years. To Sept. 11, 2001. To the day on which we convinced ourselves that the world changed, that we changed. In many ways it did, we did, but not in the ways we remember. And certainly not in the ways we wish to think.
I remember watching on a television at the gym as the attack unfolded, still unsure what I was watching.
I remember leaving, driving to the office, dispatching my reporters to local transit hubs, to community candlelight vigils, fielding calls, checking the TV, the radio.
I remember the skies that morning. A surreal blue that on any other Tuesday would have imposed a sense of calm, that seemed to contradict the violence we were watching — and the even more extreme and costly violence to come.
I remember seeing an old classmate’s name listed among the missing and, probably six months later, seeing another classmate escape an elevator in one of the towers before they crashed. He would later commit suicide.
It was the worst of times. Terrorists had killed nearly 3,000 Americans, leveling a chief symbol of American capitalism and breaching the nation’s military headquarters and, in doing so, it dragged the worst of us from the shadows and into the light. There was talk of unity, highlighted by the image of the full Congress standing on the Capital steps, an image they would repeat annually with less and less credibility. ''We literally and figuratively stand shoulder to shoulder,'' Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic majority leader said at the time, and we believed him.
We believed George W. Bush, a president in way over his head, when he told us this was not about Islam, even as he prepared for war in two Muslim countries and pointed to a third as the enemy.
“We respect your faith,” he told Muslims around the world.
“It's practiced freely by many millions of Americans and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.”
I believe he meant what he said. Or thought he did. As many of us said the same things, attempted to make distinctions, to separate the extremists from the broad community of the faithful. We failed. Our historical distrust of the other cast a shadow. Made making these distinctions almost impossible.
I wrote a column in September 2001 called “Looking Deeper at the Cause of Terrorism.” In it, I quoted the writer Christopher Hitchens — an arch leftist in the process of becoming a defender of war and aggression. Hitchens was an important influence up until that moment for me, but his increasing belligerence and unwavering certainty would drive me away.
It was just two weeks after 9/11. The column asked “What could cause such a barbarous attack? What is it about America that could engender such hate?”
The answers, I admitted, were not simple.
“American foreign policy and the reach of our economy and culture have stirred resentments,” I wrote, calling for a shift in our foreign policy away from the invasive, big-foot approach we had engaged in since World War II. This would not be enough, I then claimed, overreaching in my analysis, echoing the simplistic arguments we were hearing from Bush and company. The terrorists would find new justifications, new rationales. This attack, 9/11, somehow was different, the terrorists were different, “extremists” who lacked the normal motivations other actors displayed.
This is not "the chickens coming home to roost," as some would imply, but an attack on American freedoms, plain and simple, because American-style freedoms are at odds with the theocratic states for which Mr. bin Laden and his supporters long.
I was channeling Bush, and then quoted Hitchens:
What they abominate about “the West,” to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don’t like and can’t defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.
The terrorists were engaged in “a holy war,” I added, “one designed, as the president said, ‘not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.’”
This is nonsense, of course, the kind of “clash of civilization” argument that resurfaces over and over, that dove us into two wars under Bush, into multiple military actions under Barack Obama, that puffed up Donald Trump. It is a distasteful and racist argument, and yet here I was was making it.
Shadows.
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Writing about 9/11 is difficult. Not because it triggers such difficult memories, or because people have forgotten about it, but because people remember. It is because of the way they remember and how those memories structure their thinking about the world at large. The absence of the towers casts its own shadows, as Art Spiegelman made clear in In The Shadow of No Towers.
A lot has been written over the last 20 years about the attacks and what they mean. A lot will be said today about them, as well. A lot of it will be melodramatic, or sentimental, or cloyingly cliche. I know this, because that is the track record of writing about 9/11, a track record that includes so much of what I’d written early on. I know this, because my first few attempts at writing this piece suffered from the same failures, were lost in the darkness of the moment’s shadows..
The legacy — the shadows — of the attacks, to me, goes beyond the day and the immediate aftermath. It goes beyond the nearly 3,000 we lost that day (including a high school friend), beyond even those who died later from various illnesses, physical and otherwise (another high school friend committed suicide a few years after, likely tied to his feelings of survivor’s guilt caused by his escaping the towers when so many others didn’t).
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, put the nation on a war footing and led us foolishly into a project of remaking a region that had no interest in our efforts. It led us to a two-decade occupation of Afghanistan that has only just ended. It led us into Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, triggered the Arab Spring (good), but also a series of civil wars across the region that have resulted in millions of deaths.
The 9/11 attacks brought out the best in us, but just for a moment, inspiring a rare sense of unity that lasted for just a flash. A Congress mired in disagreement, in partisan dysfunction, gave way to what would prove to be the chimera of singular purpose, a statement of unity that proved to be little more than a photo-op, the full Congress standing on the Capitol steps.
That unity lasted for just a split second, but resulted in so much damage, more damage than the terrorists managed to inflict on that sunny September morning. It ignited the worst in all of us, even those who should have known better, leading us to engage in or support the kind of repressive tactics we accused the terrorists of supporting.
There was the massive expansion of the surveillance state and the curtailment of civil liberties through the USA Patriot Act, which was written and passed so quickly that few in Congress bothered to read it.
There was the open-ended declarations of hostilities that the Bush administration used to justify its invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and that stayed on the books, empowering both Barack Obama and Donald Trump to meddle in the region.
Nearly 3,000 Americans died on 9/11, and likely thousands more from related conditions, as I said. But the death toll across the Muslim world tied to our actions responding to 9/11 has been much greater and our unwillingness, even today, to acknowledge this overreach is part of the legacy of 9/11, just as important as each of those American deaths.
This may seem impolitic, outrageous and offensive to some, an affront to the memory of those killed in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on Flight 93. But I see no other way to explain the last 20 years of American history and the erasure from our minds of the decades immediately preceding the attacks. The attacks caused a kind of erasure of history. Nothing before mattered. Not our place in the world, the ways in which we manipulated other nations, the harm we inflicted. It was all wiped away.
Today marks 20 years since the towers were taken down by hijacked passenger jets. We will spend the day remembering, engaging in the kind of cliches that ultimately erase emotion, that extend the shadows. We will talk about the world changing, but not ask how, not really. We will remember, but not truly recall, not truly admit to ourselves what that day really means for us as a nation. The cliches will overwhelm us. We remain in the darkness.