On September 11, 2001, George W. Bush wrote the following impression in his diary: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” He wasn't alone in this assessment. In the days after the attacks, editorialists, pundits and citizens reached with impressive unanimity for this single historical precedent. The Sept. 12 New York Times alone contained 13 articles mentioning Pearl Harbor.
Five years after 9/11 we are still living with the legacy of this hastily drawn analogy. Whatever the natural similarities between December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, the association of the two has led us to convert–first in rhetoric, later in fact–a battle against a small band of clever, murderous fundamentalists into a worldwide war of epic scale.
The toll has been steep: more than $1 trillion will be spent for the ongoing combat and occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq; 2,900 dead American soldiers, 20,000 wounded, and somewhere between 50,000 to 150,000 dead Iraqi and Afghan civilians. We have detained hundreds of “enemy combatants” in Guantánamo, denying them due process, and until recently, habeas corpus. The terms “black sites” and “extraordinary rendition” have entered our lexicon, respective euphemisms for secret U.S. prisons abroad where torture occurs and for the practice of transferring prisoners to other countries that employ torture. Polls show international opinion of the United States at record lows.
How did we get here?
The best place to look for the answer is not in the days after the attacks, but in the years before. Examining the cultural mood of the late '90s allows us to separate the natural reaction to a national trauma from any underlying predispositions. During that period, the country was in the grip of a strange, prolonged obsession with World War II and the generation that had fought it.
The pining for the glory days of the Good War has now been largely forgotten, but to sift through the cultural detritus of that era is to discover a deep longing for the kind of epic struggle the War on Terror would later provide. The standard view of 9/11 is that it “changed everything.” But in its rhetoric and symbolism, the WWII nostalgia laid the conceptual groundwork for what was to come–the strange brew of nationalism, militarism and maudlin sentimentality that constitutes post-9/11 culture.
To fully understand what has gone wrong since 9/11, it is necessary to rewind the tape to that moment just before.
Before the storm
The late '90s was a strange time in American history. With the Cold War over, the country faced no overarching enemy for the first time in decades. The United States seemed possessed of no greater national purpose than making money through IPOs and an ever-expanding Dow. Our politics were dominated by the petty and trivial: from school uniforms to the president's sex life.
Memories of former glory rushed in to fill this vacuum. In 1994, the 50th anniversary of D-Day prompted both an NBC special commemoration hosted by Tom Brokaw and the publication of historian Stephen Ambrose's D-Day June 6, 1994: The Climactic Battle of World War II, which would go on to sell 800,000 copies. The book attracted the attention of Steven Spielberg–a man with a preternatural sense of the zeitgeist–who would launch the pop cultural phenomenon in all its excess in 1998 with Saving Private Ryan, which opened to rave reviews and grossed $433 million.