Hey, guys -- I'm starting to think we overreacted to the terrorism thing.
Anyway, that made me look back at the lessons we've learned in the 12 years since the 9/11 attacks, and I've got to say, it's not encouraging. For instance, we found out that ...
#6. Terrorism Totally Works!
Photos.comAl-Qaida spent about $500,000 executing the 9/11 terror attacks. The U.S. government has spent up to $5 trillion fighting back. One expert estimated we're spending about $400 million per life saved.
In other words, for every dollar the bad guys spent, we lost 10 million. And that's not even counting the money lost due to the economic slump that followed. That, friends, is one hell of a return on an investment. Also: The
9/11 attacks killed 2,996 people. The response has killed 224,475 and displaced another 7.8 million refugees.
Thinkstock Images/Comstock/Getty ImagesOr to put it another way, the equivalent of every single living human in the entire city of New York.
And however effective terrorism might have been in the past, holy fuck does it work in the era of mass communication -- the World Trade Center attacks didn't happen once, they happened millions of times, as the news replayed the terrible orange/black blooms of impact over, and over, and over, and over. Amplifying the trauma, reverberating through the culture until every nerve was rubbed raw, creating what would come to be called the "Post-9/11 World." The sheer existence of that as an everyday term says it all:
Keep in mind, a tsunami killed a quarter-million people in 2004, and another one killed 16,000 people in 2011, but neither caused us to refer to a "post-tsunami world." Only terrorism can utterly dominate our thinking that way.
And as a result, a bad guy can now make the whole world stop dead in its goddamned tracks with nothing more than a device built with about a hundred bucks' worth of shit he got at Walmart. If you pick up a gun and shoot six people at your office over a change in dress code, you'll be gone from the front page of CNN by the next day. But build a crude bomb and kill three people in the name of jihad while cameras are rolling? You'll cause an entire city to go on lockdown, utterly dominate the consciousness of a nation for months, and create scenes like this:'
That's a video clip of camouflaged men with machine guns going house by house in a Boston neighborhood after the marathon bombing. Some of you watching that immediately thought, "Wait, the Army was just barging into people's houses during the manhunt?"
Soon after that event, in which a couple of kids made bombs out of black powder and pressure cookers, a random guy in New York Googled "pressure cooker bomb," as you'd expect in the aftermath of a huge news story about pressure cooker bombs. He was surprised to see the cops immediately show up at his house. It turns out his employers were monitoring his searches and called the police. And that, too, is part of our life now, because you can never be too careful in a Post-9/11 World, when absolutely everything we do and think revolves around avoiding terrorism, 24 hours a day.
And it didn't take long for people looking to take advantage to realize ...
#5. Apparently Anything Can Be Called "Terrorism"
Jupiterimages/liquidlibrary/Getty ImagesLet's be clear: I was absolutely, completely for the "War on Terror" in 2001. It seemed like the clearest-cut conflict in world history: the modern, democratic world versus primitive fundamentalist savages who thought they could rewind the clock on civilization by a thousand years if they blew up enough innocent children. My liberal friends who recoiled at the idea of a war on terror or asked things like "But how do we know when it's over?" seemed to be either terrifyingly oblivious or outright evil. "You're supposed to be progressive, but you're standing up for murderous medieval theocrats who consider women to be cattle? Grow some balls!"
Then, a weird thing happened. While 9/11 was fresh in our minds, on TV they started showing a PSA saying that anyone who bought or sold marijuana was also a terrorist:
Well ... OK. So the idea is that drug money funds terrorist groups indirectly? Sounds kind of shaky, but hey, you can never be too careful in a Post-9/11 World!
Then, several years later, when some Muslims wanted to build a new community center in New York, that was called an act of terrorism. Then I was told that a Middle Eastern news network was a terrorist organization. Then I heard a politician refer to labor unions as terrorists. Then we had the 2008 economic collapse, and that was called "economic terrorism." When Republicans in Congress demanded budget cuts, that was terrorism, too. The political stalemate over those cuts? Terrorism! The mass "Occupy" protests that were held in response? More terrorism, according to the FBI. A guy leaking secret government documents to the press? Terrorism, motherfucker!
Hey, it's a Post-9/11 World -- we can't take the risk of not calling something terrorism, goddamnit, or else people might not pay attention to it. In the last few years I've heard either pundits or politicians stick the "terrorist" label on pro-abortion-rights protesters, Republicans in Congress, WikiLeaks, Monsanto, Walmart, drug dealers, a teenager posting rap lyrics on Facebook, and people who are mean to you. So after 12 years, we've settled on a very clear definition of terrorism, which is "anyone doing something that is harmful in some capacity."
Darrin Klimek/Digital Vision/Getty Images"Hey! What did I tell you kids about doing terrorism inside the house?!"
Meanwhile, we kind of lost track of the fact that the thing we were originally calling terrorism -- extremists blowing the shit out of large numbers of innocent people -- had kind of stopped happening. Because as it turned out ...
#4. It's Actually Really Hard to Pull Off a Large-Scale Terror Attack
Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.comIf on September 12, 2001, you had predicted that we'd make it to 2013 with no further large-scale terror attacks, I'd have said you had your goddamned head in the sand. "Don't you know we're in the middle of an epic clash of civilizations, and either radical Islam or Western civilization itself will be wiped from the Earth forever? This shit is going to end in a mushroom cloud, bitch!"
After all, the only thing between a terrorist and a massive body count is the will to do it -- and 9/11 proved they have the will. Put some C4 in a backpack, go to a concert, boom -- 500 dead. Pack a car full of fertilizer, drive it into the lobby of an office building -- bang, 5,000 bodies in a collapsed building. This was the new reality, I thought -- the USA had become Palestine. Bombings would be weekly news, soldiers would stand at the entrance of the Mall of America with M4 rifles.
Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.comNo one would make fun of mall security ever again.
Right now some of you are saying, "Uh, I hate to break the news to you, asshole, but you just admitted that the nation was brought to a standstill by the horror of the Boston Marathon bombing." Sure, but the sheer fact that we're able to regard the deaths of three people and the wounding of dozens more as a massive event rather than "the 10th largest bombing of the month" is the point -- you get twice as many murder victims in an average weekend of Chicago gang violence.
The target of the Boston bombers was a dense crowd of 500,000 people standing shoulder to shoulder -- why were there three deaths instead of 300, or 3,000? Because it's really fucking hard to carry out a terror attack. The bombers didn't have any actual bomb-making materials -- no C4, no TNT, no truck full of ammonium nitrate. Instead they had off-the-shelf cookware and what appeared to be black powder they scraped from some fireworks.
Photodisc/Photodisc/Getty ImagesI assume they said "WHEEEE!" a lot while making them.
The truth is that law enforcement has done a fantastic job of monitoring the sale of black market bomb-making materials (the transatlantic bombers were being watched by more than a thousand agents -- they only got as far as buying the components before police swept in). See, we've been fooled by action movies, where any mobster can come up with a block of plastic explosive to stick under the car of a snitch. Hell, the Joker can buy entire buildings full of explosive liquids without anyone noticing. In the real world, it turns out that no, you can't really order large quantities of anything that goes "boom" without the government kicking down your door five minutes later.
Photos.com"Sir, step away from the Google search bar!"
#3. The Era of Awesome "Good vs. Evil" Wars Is Over
Photos.comI realize the actual event was more nuanced, but in popular memory World War II is basically The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars: a clearly evil bad guy dressed in black with a clearly evil army versus clearly good protagonists who take him out with a clean, neat ending where the bad guy dies and his dark empire lies in rubble, never to be resurrected. And when the war was over, it was over -- clear objective, clear outcome, good guys win, roll credits.
Yeah, I don't think we're going to get that kind of war again. The way wars go now is that some regime or group is doing something we don't like, then we either A) kind of throw cruise missiles and drone missions at them for a few months or B) land troops there and fight them for a few years until we get bored and quietly leave. Did we win Afghanistan? Or Iraq? These days there's no signing of a peace treaty, no ceremony, no liberated people cheering in the streets. When the last troops came home from Iraq, there was barely a whisper in the news. Actually, did you even know the troops came home from Iraq? Did you know we still had troops in Afghanistan?
And now as I write this, the U.S. government is in the middle of debating a strike against Syria. Again, no big declaration of war, no big shift from peacetime to war footing. Maybe the president makes a speech about it that gets carried on cable. At some point we'll probably just shrug and send a ship full of cruise missiles, like the cops dispatching a car to check out a domestic dispute. Do you even know, off the top of your head, who the good guys and bad guys are in Syria? Are we supporting their government or the rebels? Are the rebels progressive freedom fighters or Islamists angry that the government isn't jihadist enough? Is either side tied to al-Qaida? I've lost track.
What's that? He's not president anymore? Thank God! Was it the CIA who took him out with a targeted assassination, or did his own people rise up and overthrow him in a coup? Oh, he left office on his own? Because his term ran out? Because presidents in Iran are limited to two terms, just like in the U.S.? Wait, they have elections there? Well, shit. Looks like we missed the window on that one.
#2. Patriotism Got Really Weird at Some Point
Comstock/Comstock/Getty ImagesAmerica is a wonderful country, and a lot of the liberal counterculture types who call it a fascist wasteland in reality live a very comfortable and fulfilling life there. That's why Eddie Vedder never moved away -- the people who bitch the loudest would miss it the most.
So in the face of attacks by extremists who objectively hate core progressive values such as women's rights and freedom of religion, why weren't a whole bunch of artists stirred to create music that really got to the heart of what we love about the USA? Even if musicians are all liberals, we're fighting an enemy that hates liberalism, right? Let's have some awesome anti-Islamist diss tracks, Eminem!
Instead we got this:
Patriotism shouldn't make you stupid, right? Or racist? Wasn't there a bunch of great patriotic music during World War II? Did our ability to be patriotic in non-ridiculous ways die with Vietnam?
These days, if an organization has "patriot" in the name, I get scared. Seriously, Google the word "patriot" -- once you get past the links involving the NFL and that Mel Gibson movie, you get shit like Patriot Depot, which sells shirts that say things like "Due to Price Increase on Ammo, Do Not Expect a Warning Shot."
Somebody tell me when the entire concept of patriotism got hijacked by the pickup truck and gun rack brigade. It's at the point where if anyone I knew wore a shirt with an American flag on it, I'd assume they were being ironic, unless it was the Fourth of July. If I pass a crowd of protesters waving American flags, I assume somebody in the group is also wearing a T-shirt bearing a racist caricature of Barack Obama.
Photos.com"And this flag shirt is just some kind of big stupid rectangle of fabric!"
#1. Sometimes the Alarmist Tinfoil Hat Crowd Is Right
Photos.comIn the underappreciated 1982 sequel to the wacky slapstick satire Airplane! (Airplane II: The Sequel), there's a scene where security agents monitor a body scanner in a futuristic airport. The joke is that the scanner shows the agents images of the passengers' naked bodies as they pass through.
If you had told me in 2002 that in 10 years that technology would be real, specifically that A) every passenger would be made to stand in a scanner that displays their naked body to security and B) 99 percent of fliers would be perfectly fine with it, I would have laughed you out of the room and told you to take off your goddamned tinfoil hat and stop sharing your weird sci-fi sex fantasies. We're talking about Americans here, the most famously prudish, fiercely private, and violently anti-government people in the world. And you're telling me that in this supposed future, if we refuse the scan, we get frisked? I'm telling you that we would fucking burn down the airport before we let that happen.
But as I mentioned in this week's podcast, we got here little by little. One terror warning at a time, one replay of the WTC attacks at a time, one report of a failed terror attempt at a time.
If you had told me that, in the name of stopping terrorism, the U.S. government would spend $2 billion building a gargantuan 1.5-million-square-foot sprawling mass of humming supercomputers for the purpose of (apparently) monitoring absolutely everyone's email and/or phone calls, I'd have said that was even more ridiculous and dystopian than the penis scanner. If you'd told me that virtually everyone would be OK with that save for a few vocal activists on the Internet, I'd have said that was impossible, unless we had reached the point where terrorists had leveled half of our cities.
Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty ImagesEven worse than riots after major sports events.
After all, if you're under 30, you were still a kid when 9/11 happened, living at home. What the rest of us are calling "a Post-9/11 World" you know only as "the world." If I try to tell you about the good old days when you could correspond with friends and absolutely know that no one was listening in, you'll tune out when you realize that I'm also talking about a time before the Internet and cellphones existed. We don't want to go back to that, right?
Goodshoot/Goodshoot/Getty ImagesI saw that cord and immediately vomited.
And over time, we'll just come to accept that typing a weird search into Google might get you a visit from the cops, that a crude joke on Facebook might get you arrested and/or fired, that certain things uttered in phone calls might land you on a no-fly list, that suspicious conversations might be recorded by a nearby pair of Google Glasses. And so, over time, you make a mental note to not say anything too weird, or make crude jokes, or think too far outside the box. You'll learn to automatically rein in that crazy, irresponsible part of the brain that incidentally also has resulted in all human creativity through history.
Jupiterimages/Comstock/Getty ImagesNeeds more dicks.
And apparently it always will be.
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