9/11/26

 

For the last 25 years now I have tried to share my evolving and developing thoughts and ideas about 9/11/01 from my perspective, and every time it’s a different flavor of painful trauma, but also perhaps a healing means of functionally never forgetting. We all said we weren’t going to forget, and then everyone very much forgot. We forgot so hard that there are still prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. We forgot so hard that they never went back to allowing us free baggage on airplanes. We forgot so hard that the kids today have no idea what happened that day, or what it meant. At some point I hit the period of my life where more of it was in the post-9/11 world than the time before. When we just walked through a metal detector like reasonable people and airport security would occasionally wand us because of aggressive pant rivets. Now there’s a whole multibillion dollar branch of government that is paid union wages to sonar you naked and grope you to the side of the line. We forgot so hard that we didn’t realize the many ways the terrorists had clearly won, by making us attack ourselves from within.

One of the hardest things to watch has been the partisan division and the ongoing elephant versus donkey civil war. When in fact the war is anything but civil. There was this brief moment, on 9/12, where we all held our breath and prayed that how we responded would be swift, and just, and complete. I don’t want to romanticize that moment either, because there was also immediate and frightening hatred directed at Muslim Americans, Sikhs, Arabs, brown people in general. Basically anyone some terrified racist dipshit decided looked vaguely affiliated with the people he had watched fly airplanes into buildings the day before. So no, the world was not united on September 12th. Surprise turns into hatred with astonishing efficiency. But there was still this tiny window in which it felt possible that the enormity of what had happened might produce some equally enormous and humane response, some galvanizing moment where the world came together to heal and rebuild instead of immediately looking for the easiest place to bomb.

Instead we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and occupied one or both for the next two decades. Bush would later accidentally condemn the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq” while attempting to condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, realize what he had said, correct himself to Ukraine, and then mutter “Iraq too” while everybody laughed because apparently history eventually becomes comedy if you survive it long enough. Oopsies. Countless lives broken and lost, physical and mental trauma beyond reckoning, trillions of dollars sluiced through the grinding machinery of war and into an entire ecosystem of contractors and subcontractors and people who manufacture things specifically designed to explode other things, but at least we got to hang Saddam Hussein. That happened. Mission accomplished somewhere along the line. But let’s also attempt to be balanced in our hindsight, because twenty-five years later there is plenty of responsibility to smear around and no shortage of presidents willing to take their turn holding the blame bag.

Obama took out Bin Laden May Day 2011, two years into his first term, and spent another six years in Afghanistan with no clear reason, mission parameters, or exit strategy. I thought that was why we put boots on the ground in Afghanistan October 7th, 2001? By November 19th the federal bounty on Bin Laden was increased to $25 million. Ten years later SEAL Team Six finally flew into Pakistan in stealth helicopters and zero-dark-thirtied the man we had supposedly spent a decade and an astonishing amount of blood and treasure trying to find. I remember the strange celebration afterward, people gathering outside the White House and chanting and waving flags, and some of the people celebrating were kids when 9/11 happened, which produced this weird disconnect in me. What exactly were they celebrating? Justice, certainly. Revenge, probably. The death of a monster, sure. Maybe just the enormous psychic release of finally crossing a name off a list everyone had been carrying around since childhood. I couldn’t begrudge them that entirely, but I also couldn’t understand how killing one old man in a compound in Pakistan could possibly settle the score.

What really got me was what happened next, because we didn’t leave. That seemed like the moment, right? Obama should have walked out onto the deck of an aircraft carrier beneath an enormous banner and said, “OK folks, we got him for real this time. Really reals. Pack your shit. Welcome home to everyone who has served this great nation admirably. Let us all GTFO.” Drop the microphone. Fire up the grills. Exit, stage west. Parades. Steaks. Whatever patriotic ritual seems appropriate after spending a decade searching the mountains of Afghanistan for a man who was actually living in Pakistan. Instead we just sort of camped out. Six more years under Obama, four under Trump, and finally Biden was left holding the withdrawal when the whole thing collapsed behind us with all the dignity and orderly conclusion you would expect after twenty years of trying to force a coherent ending onto an incoherent war. At some point the mission had simply become the continuation of the mission, which is one of the great dangers of government and war alike. Once enough people are being paid to do something, the fact that nobody remembers why we are doing it becomes an administrative concern rather than a reason to stop. In truth we live in an age entirely absent of moral order or functional consequence.

There are still 15 people detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2026. Think about that for a minute. There are human beings swept up in the War on Terror era who have spent enormous portions of their lives confined within the strange legal twilight we deliberately constructed outside the ordinary protections of American courts, because if you physically place a prison inconveniently enough on a map the rights enshrined in the Constitution become more intangible. Beyond the scope of justice. Twenty-five years after the attacks we continue carrying pieces of that terror around with us. We take our shoes off. We buy travel-sized shampoo. We shuffle through increasingly sophisticated machines built to make certain none of us have weaponized our underpants. Airlines discovered somewhere along the way that the emergency baggage fees everybody tolerated in a crisis could simply become baggage fees forever, because capitalism is very good at recognizing which temporary inconveniences can be transformed into permanent revenue streams. Terrorism altered the American travel experience so successfully that an entire generation now thinks dragging your possessions through an airport while paying increasingly theatrical fees for the privilege is simply how airplanes work.

25 years later, I am still trying to explain what any of this meant to people who weren’t alive when it happened. Yesterday I was sitting in a room where all but one of the people around me had been born after 9/11, and there is something profoundly uncomfortable about becoming the person describing the historical event. This is how people used to talk to me about Kennedy being shot, or Vietnam, or Pearl Harbor. I understood what they were telling me, but I didn’t (couldn't) fully comprehend. There is a difference between knowing that something happened and having an ordinary morning violently divide your life into before and after. There is a difference between watching archival footage and watching live television while nobody on the screen has any idea what is going to happen next. Those kids can know every fact about 9/11 and still never know what it felt like to watch the second airplane hit and realize in one hideous instant that the first one had not been an accident. Seeing your friend's knees hit the floor and say the words “The Pentagon’s been hit.”

I think about this now in relation to COVID, because we have already started forgetting that too. We have crossed from the post-9/11 world into the post-COVID world without ever really acknowledging the transition, and when I have compared the two with friends I have been told that the pandemic simply did not create anything approaching the societal transformation of 9/11. I think that response may actually prove the opposite. We have never psychologically processed what happened during COVID because doing so would require admitting the almost incomprehensible scale of the thing. Millions of people died around the world. More than a million Americans. But there was no singular photograph that could contain it. Fire and explosions and bodies falling from skyscrapers are spectacular in the oldest and most terrible meaning of the word. People quietly suffocating in hospital rooms while their families watch them die through screens are not. There was no enormous object collapsing against a blue sky to represent COVID. Just hospital beds. Refrigerated trucks. Empty classrooms. Nurses with bruised faces. Numbers crawling across monitors until the numbers became so large that they stopped feeling like people and started looking like weather. Many survived the worst of it, but COVID got Grandma Mary after years of dodging it. I’m grateful for the time we dodged, but it’s maddening to see everyone continue to diminish and forget it. 

Maybe that is another way we protect ourselves. Forgetting maintains our ability to function. Then there’s the scale. At a certain scale grief becomes mathematics. One person dies and there is a funeral. Twenty people die and there is a memorial. Three thousand people die and there is a national wound. A million people die and apparently we get bored with the subject and start arguing about whether the virus came from bats spitting on pangolins or somebody at a Wuhan laboratory accidentally putting the apocalypse in their pocket on the way home. I would like to know what happened. Of course I would. Origins matter and investigation matters and understanding what went wrong might prevent another catastrophe. But this is not Bessie the Cow kicking over a lantern in Chicago where eventually somebody finds a scorched hoof print and says case closed. Disease is extraordinarily difficult to trace backward through millions of infections, ecological systems, human movement, politics, secrecy, and time. Someday perhaps we will know exactly what happened, and then we can enact the sweeping public policy of not storing our bats and pangolins next to each other. I am already personally committed to this precaution.

Humor becomes difficult, because humor is one of the coping mechanisms I personally know actually works. There is a reason gallows humor exists. If circumstances are so awful that you cannot control them, extracting something funny from it all is at least one tiny act of theft against total despair. You take something back. Gilbert Gottfried famously tried a 9/11 joke within weeks of the attacks and somebody yelled “too soon,” which is about the worst possible audience feedback for a comedian because it acknowledges the joke may someday work but informs you that tonight you are the asshole. Seth MacFarlane has subsequently constructed what amounts to an entire minor canon of 9/11 jokes, but he also narrowly missed being on board one of the hijacked flights out of Boston, so perhaps proximity to death earns additional joke permissions. I don’t know the rules. Nobody knows the rules. That is the problem with grief. There is no referee, there is no clock, and there is no universally accepted moment when tragedy becomes history and history becomes available for comedy.

I know humor helps me, but I don’t know whether it helps society. I don’t know what actual collective healing would look like anymore. Maybe everybody needs therapy forever? Which seems expensive, yet necessary. We used to distribute some of that emotional work into churches and neighborhoods and clubs and hang outs and families and community organizations, all of which are themselves struggling against fragmentation, loss, and isolation. Increasingly we process the events of our lives by dumping them into computers for strangers and algorithms to react to, which brings me to another depressing thought I have been wrestling with as an artist: I’m not sure whether there is any single work of art capable of genuinely gathering the attention of a civilization anymore? Maybe there never was. Maybe that was another comforting myth. But it certainly feels harder now, because everything arrives simultaneously and everything competes with everything else and the greatest tragedy in the world exists one thumb movement away from a video of a raccoon stealing a sandwich.

It is all white noise, and every once in a while you can get your voice above it if you do something sufficiently strange. I have considered some fairly crazy things over the years in the ongoing effort to attract human attention toward things I think matter. Some of them I wisely abandoned and some of them you never heard about, which is the problem with being involved in a secret society: if nobody knows what you’re doing then congratulations, everything is functioning perfectly. I spent years trying to infiltrate the Masons only to discover that the ultimate secret of Freemasonry is that you have to pay dues until you die. At which point I pulled the plug on that investigation. People barely have the attention span for public societies anymore, let alone secret ones. Everybody has work in the morning. That may in fact be the most effective counter revolutionary mechanism ever devised. The 40 hour work week. The only thing preventing millions of Americans from storming the institutions that endlessly disappoint and exploit them is that we all have to work tomorrow.

Maybe allowing the richest people to run everything has not gone as well as advertised? As long as we’re asking the big questions. Fun experiment!(?) We gave an increasingly small group of people an increasingly enormous share of the resources and trusted that their superior access to capital must somehow correlate with superior wisdom, ethics, and concern for humanity. Then we hoped some of that money might trickle downward as they bought newspapers, social networks, politicians, islands, bunkers, rockets, and whatever else a person purchases after money ceases to correspond to any meaningful material need. Perhaps civilization was never meant to be managed primarily by whoever won capitalism hardest? I don’t know. I am just one aging theater person pacing through a parking lot in September, trying once again to figure out why twenty-five years after the most traumatizing morning of my adult life the world appears wealthier, more technologically capable, more interconnected, and yet somehow ever less able to agree that we should stop making everything worse.

Underneath every one of these arguments, every president, every war, every ridiculous airport ritual, every joke, every pandemic, every billionaire, every failed artistic attempt to get above the white noise, there is still that morning. It is etched into me in a way almost nothing else is. Raw terror succeeded at being lasting terror. Credit where it is due. Put yourself inside one of those airplanes for even a moment and the imagination recoils. Put yourself inside an office above the impact zone and it gets worse. Look out the window. Smoke filling the halls behind you. Fire below. No roof evacuation. No stairway. No rescue coming. Then look down. I have seen those images for twenty-five years now, because we have all seen them for twenty-five years. Every anniversary the airplanes hit again. The towers burn again. The towers fall again. The people fall again. What was once a horrifying days long live television experience became archival footage, then documentary footage, then thirty-second anniversary footage, then lesser content. Like almost all human information, it has been reduced to the smallest useful package capable of generating attention in the search for capital.

I cannot reduce the number of people falling. They have followed me through all of it. I wrote about them years ago because they represented the place where every system failed simultaneously. Architecture failed. Fire suppression failed. Evacuation failed. Aviation security failed. Intelligence failed. Government failed. But physics did exactly what physics was supposed to do, which was perhaps the worst failure of all. There were no helicopters swooping between those impossible towers. No parachutes hidden under desks. No Spider-Man (despite the withdrawn film preview). No Superman. No Jesus physically appearing out of the heavens. No Allah reaching through the smoke. No secret technology beneath a military hangar in Nevada. No future human civilization breaking the laws of spacetime to intervene. There was only the building, the fire, the open air, and sirens.

For years I would get to this place in writing about 9/11 and stop because there was nowhere else to go. I could rage about the wars, mock the TSA, condemn torture, mourn the dead, blame presidents, blame terrorists, blame ourselves, tell jokes until the jokes stopped working, but eventually I arrived back at those tiny human beings suspended against an enormous blue sky and understood again that I could not help them. Everything had already happened. History was closed. The dead were dead. Every 9/11 reflection I have ever written ultimately carried that same terrible limitation somewhere inside it, whether I admitted it or not. This one does not. This one comes with a solution.

Einstein developed the theory of relativity by thinking about a man falling from a window. What would that person experience in free fall? What if nothing existed to generate his fall? What did gravity mean from his perspective? From that thought experiment came the equivalence principle, relativity, and eventually an entirely new way of understanding space, time, and gravity. I’ve spent a substantial portion of my own life thinking about a bunch of falling people. This has admittedly produced more trauma than equations, but eventually it created its own thought experiment. Timeline extraction. The concept is simple even if the physics are presently beyond us: if a person exists at a specific location at a specific moment in spacetime, and if some future technology allows spacetime to be controlled rather than merely observed, then death does not have to be prevented by changing history. The person only has to be removed immediately before the fatal event. Before the airplane hits. Before the building collapses. Before the fire reaches them. Before the falling human reaches the ground. Extraction.

I do not have the machine. I have the idea, and ideas have always arrived before machines. Humanity imagined flight long before Kitty Hawk, imagined travel to the Moon long before Apollo, imagined instantaneous global communication before we filled our pockets with devices capable of contacting nearly anyone on Earth while simultaneously showing us advertisements for snorkels and AI pornography. There is nothing particularly mystical about believing that our understanding of spacetime will continue changing. It has changed before. It is changing now. Maybe timeline extraction will prove impossible, but I am done granting impossibility permanent jurisdiction over the future. For twenty-five years I have looked backward at 9/11 and thought about all the things we should have done differently. This year I am allowing myself to look forward and imagine what we may someday be able to repair backward. 

That is where the thought became much larger than the tragedy that created it. History is filled with extraction points. Battlefields. Fires. Shipwrecks. Concentration camps. Plagues. Famines. Hospitals. Tornadoes. Bedrooms. Highways. Every place where a human being reached the terrible final moment in which everyone around them had run out of options. If spacetime ever becomes navigable, history stops being merely a record of people we failed to save and becomes a map of people waiting for us to extract. I began by trying to figure out how to save one falling person and realized that there is no satisfactory stopping point short of everyone.

So this 9/11 reflection ends differently from everyone that came before it. I will not leave them in the windows. I will not leave them in the diving airplanes. I will not leave them falling forever through the same thirty seconds of content. To the people who died that morning, wherever and whenever you are, I make this promise on behalf of a future I hope to see: we are coming back for you. We will learn. We will build. We will stumble, fail, and try again. We will succeed. We will pull you out. We will catch you. We will save them all, and then, dear reader, someday we will save you too. Salvation guaranteed.