Speaker 1: Uh, nine eleven is in a couple of days. I'm
Speaker 1: Robert Evans. This is it could happen here a podcast
Speaker 1: about nine eleven. Um, well, as as Garrison said in
Speaker 1: the intro, that we're not using it's about things falling apart,
Speaker 1: and boy did that happen on two things that fell apart? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Um yeah. So this was originally going to be a
Speaker 1: slightly cruder episode than it wound up being. But I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna I'm just gonna delve into the script and uh,
Speaker 1: Chris Garrison, you guys, just buckle in, because the reason
Speaker 1: I have you both as guests on this is that
Speaker 1: you are both too young to remember nine That's not true.
Speaker 1: I remember, I remember why I remember? Were you like four?
Speaker 1: I hope? So yeah, I was four, But I remember
Speaker 1: my mom like so she she was trying to explain
Speaker 1: the Pentagon, right, and so she has like a coaster
Speaker 1: on the ground and she's making an airplane with her
Speaker 1: hand is just going into anyway. So, as I said,
Speaker 1: neither of you properly remember nine eleven. I I don't
Speaker 1: remember that even I I was at the age where
Speaker 1: every moment of it is burnt into my into my brain.
Speaker 1: As is the reaction. So I wanted you both on
Speaker 1: this because we're gonna talk about how nine eleven kind
Speaker 1: of became a cult um and how to maybe how
Speaker 1: to maybe deal with that, and then we'll be chatting
Speaker 1: about Glenn Beck's nine twelve project, which is something I'm
Speaker 1: sure neither of you are very familiar with. Now. In
Speaker 1: its sixth season, the popular cartoons South Park ran an
Speaker 1: episode in which Jared Fogel, who was at that point
Speaker 1: just a subway spokesman and not a convicted child molester,
Speaker 1: came to town and announced the start of a new
Speaker 1: program to give everyone AIDS. Now, he was talking about
Speaker 1: dietitians and personal trainers to help people lose weight, but
Speaker 1: everybody heard AIDS the disease, which led to wacky hijinks.
Speaker 1: That's the episode. It ends when everyone realizes they'd misunderstand
Speaker 1: good Fogel and they all laugh. Uh. This leads them
Speaker 1: to realize that AIDS is finally funny, because things that
Speaker 1: are tragic become funny exactly twenty two point three years
Speaker 1: after they occur. That's the joke in the episode, and
Speaker 1: went on to become a minor little internet joke that,
Speaker 1: like you know, once you hit that twenty two year point,
Speaker 1: you can laugh about something tragic. We are now at
Speaker 1: like twenty one years and change since September eleven, two
Speaker 1: thousand one, and I think if we're all honest, most
Speaker 1: of us can admit that we've laughed at a lot
Speaker 1: of nine eleven jokes. We're recording this the day the
Speaker 1: Queen died, and people are like photoshopping her face to
Speaker 1: be the Twin Towers, and it's so it's quite a
Speaker 1: time on the old Internet. Now. I think the first
Speaker 1: I think the hardest at least that I ever laughed
Speaker 1: at nine eleven joke. I'm sure it's not the first
Speaker 1: time was this picture of Trump Tower that was posted
Speaker 1: to Twitter like right after he got inaugurated, with the
Speaker 1: text George Bush, do you thing um? Still an excellent
Speaker 1: nine eleven joke? Now. The first person with any kind
Speaker 1: of platform to making an eleven joke was the recently
Speaker 1: deceased comedian Gilbert Gottfried. In September twenty nine, two thous one,
Speaker 1: he took part in a roast of Hugh Hefner at
Speaker 1: the New York Friars Club, and I'm gonna play you
Speaker 1: the audio of that right now, I have to catch
Speaker 1: up flight to California. I can't get a direct flight.
Speaker 1: They said they had to stop at the Empire State
Speaker 1: Building party. Tame, extremely tame joke. Honestly not a great joke. UM,
Speaker 1: but it went on too. It was It's probably like
Speaker 1: maybe the most famous and like kind of stand up
Speaker 1: history like bombs um. Gottfried and said himself said that
Speaker 1: he lost the audience more than anyone else ever has. UM.
Speaker 1: I think it caused some career problems for him. Um.
Speaker 1: He later said, like a few weeks after, this was
Speaker 1: days after. So this is at the Friar's Club roast
Speaker 1: of Hugh Hefner on September twenty nine. Is this work
Speaker 1: too soon? It's from UM, well yeah, this I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know that it originated there, but
Speaker 1: this was the response to him. Um, and I think
Speaker 1: it's the first time I ever recall hearing someone say that.
Speaker 1: Godfried said that like the reason he decided to tell
Speaker 1: a joke this close to nine eleven was that he
Speaker 1: was personally offended by the fact that anything could be
Speaker 1: too soon to make a joke about. Um. One of
Speaker 1: these is interesting about this A little side thing is
Speaker 1: that like, after bombing and getting shouted at by the audience,
Speaker 1: Godfried like decided to get them back by telling a
Speaker 1: particularly long and foul version of the Aristocrats, which is
Speaker 1: a meta joke about jokes primarily anyway. Um, it's basically
Speaker 1: just being his foul mouth to shoot can possibly be
Speaker 1: to an audience. Um. And that that audio has been
Speaker 1: lost to time apparently, But boy, you can watch a
Speaker 1: fun documentary about the Aristocrats if you want to learn
Speaker 1: more about that now. I think the first good actual
Speaker 1: comedy bit about nine eleven came out a little bit
Speaker 1: after this. This is about two weeks after the day
Speaker 1: and a couple of months later at like the three
Speaker 1: month point. South Park season five aired, Uh, and they
Speaker 1: ran an episode about nine eleven. Um has been criticized
Speaker 1: rightly so because there's some kind of racist bits of
Speaker 1: humor in there, using that's not surprising. Um. That said,
Speaker 1: it's also kind of a valuable snapshot of history. For
Speaker 1: one thing, The huge part of the episode is just
Speaker 1: kind of like the Afghan child counterparts to the main
Speaker 1: characters in the show, walking around their town as everyone
Speaker 1: is murdered by US air strikes. UM. So it's it
Speaker 1: is not like the it stands kind of an opposition
Speaker 1: to sort of the kind of like bootlicking responses you
Speaker 1: got for For some context, the show The West Wing,
Speaker 1: which is the favorite show of everybody who runs anything
Speaker 1: in politics right now, ran an emergency nine eleven episode
Speaker 1: like a couple of weeks after the attack, which was
Speaker 1: the kind of turnaround you didn't do in TV at
Speaker 1: that point in time. So you put in a ton
Speaker 1: of effort to have this special nine eleven episode of
Speaker 1: The West Wing. Um that number one. In the alternate
Speaker 1: West Wing universe, there's no nine eleven. There's like some
Speaker 1: vague like there's basically basically the episode focus on like
Speaker 1: a bunch of kids on a tour getting stuck in
Speaker 1: the White House because it locks down because some vague
Speaker 1: terrorist attack thing happens in a fake country they made up.
Speaker 1: So when the West Wing needed to talk about Muslims,
Speaker 1: um and kind of like the breakout piece of this.
Speaker 1: While there's two breakouts, one of them is a very
Speaker 1: racist retelling of the story of Isaac and Ishmael that
Speaker 1: explains like why Muslims are always so angry all the time, um.
Speaker 1: And then the White House Press Lady C. J. Craig
Speaker 1: goes on a rant about how awesome the intelligence apparatus
Speaker 1: is and how like what good people uh CIA agents are,
Speaker 1: and how the best thing to do for politics sometimes
Speaker 1: is to have a guy dressed as a waiter murder
Speaker 1: somebody with a silence pistol like it was out of
Speaker 1: its mind, unhinged. That's the fucking like. So the fact
Speaker 1: that South Park does an episode that's like, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna murder a bunch of people in Afghanistan for no
Speaker 1: reason is like, not a not a bad response, not
Speaker 1: a bad thing to recognize about that day. Um, the
Speaker 1: other things that are like pretty good or pretty I
Speaker 1: think meaningful sort of bits in that episode. It opens
Speaker 1: with all of the kids at the bus stop wearing
Speaker 1: gas masks as they stand in line for the bus.
Speaker 1: There's a piece in that episode that kind of sticks
Speaker 1: with me today still, um that I'm gonna play for
Speaker 1: you guys. I don't know, I always found that bit fun.
Speaker 1: So when the school bus arrives, there's a cop on it,
Speaker 1: searching bags and confiscating items that might be used as weapons.
Speaker 1: The school classroom doors are reinforced with a massive military
Speaker 1: grade lock, which resonated more in a time when like
Speaker 1: school shootings weren't a constant thing. Um, and it it
Speaker 1: kind of hit me because, you know, when this episode
Speaker 1: came out and I watched it when it came out,
Speaker 1: I was at middle school, Clark Middle School in Plain, oh, Texas,
Speaker 1: and on nine eleven and twelve, the attacks were like
Speaker 1: the only topic of discussion that anyone had. And I
Speaker 1: have this vivid memory of a couple of girls in
Speaker 1: my US history class weeping because they were scared that
Speaker 1: Al Qaeda was coming for our schools next. Um, Like,
Speaker 1: this was a a very real worry for kids that
Speaker 1: I grew up with of what like Midland, Texas or something. No,
Speaker 1: it was, indeed, it's a big school. But like, I
Speaker 1: don't I'm certain that fucking Osama bin Laden had never
Speaker 1: heard the name plane of Texas, let alone the Joatha
Speaker 1: thing with like anytime a plane was like going down,
Speaker 1: people would point at it and be like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, um No. That was definitely a meme and
Speaker 1: there was, you know, one of the most famous ones
Speaker 1: was this this video called Triumph Dot a v I
Speaker 1: that started to spread on the Something Awful forums. That
Speaker 1: was just footage of the September eleven attacks set to
Speaker 1: yakety sacks um. And again, these were all kind of
Speaker 1: the comedy that that you know, the South Park put
Speaker 1: out here and that you saw, and stuff like the
Speaker 1: Triumph video were reactions to how fucking seriously everybody else
Speaker 1: took nine eleven right. Like I have to, I have
Speaker 1: to point out that like watching an episode like this
Speaker 1: or watching something like Trump felt like legitimately transgressive in
Speaker 1: the days and weeks after nine eleven, because it was
Speaker 1: kind of a as we'll talk about, had turned into
Speaker 1: kind of like a secular cult um. And I think
Speaker 1: people who were just a few years old then or
Speaker 1: born after nine eleven missed this part of nine eleven. Um.
Speaker 1: I think you inherited the wars and the intrusions on
Speaker 1: civil liberties and the creeping fascism, but not the derangement
Speaker 1: by terror that had preceded it. Like everybody's permanently deranged
Speaker 1: from nine eleven, But you didn't really get to know
Speaker 1: people before that kind of happened and drove a lot
Speaker 1: of them mad. As a kid, it was like a
Speaker 1: strange and exciting and scary moment. But I think my
Speaker 1: parents and I think the people who were kind of
Speaker 1: in their age range, um, completely lost their minds, and
Speaker 1: oddly that that South Park episode has kind of the
Speaker 1: best depiction of that too. There's a scene in which
Speaker 1: stand who is one of the main characters they're all
Speaker 1: like middle school kids, walks into his house and sees
Speaker 1: his mom like lying on the couch staring blankly ahead
Speaker 1: UM and just like weeping. She's surrounded by tissues. She's
Speaker 1: been crying for days, UM and as her husband says,
Speaker 1: she's just been watching CNN for like the last eight
Speaker 1: weeks straight. And the the image of her just kind
Speaker 1: of like lying on the couch staring at the TV
Speaker 1: is I can remember every adult that I knew as
Speaker 1: a kid doing that, and it really did go on
Speaker 1: for days, Like people moved around as if they were
Speaker 1: like in kind of a shocked stupor. I'm sure there's
Speaker 1: places where this wasn't the case, UM, But for my family,
Speaker 1: who were very very conservative people, and I think for
Speaker 1: people particularly who lived closer to the attacks, like it
Speaker 1: was just this period of um like post traumatic stress
Speaker 1: for the entire country. I think a good amount of
Speaker 1: research backs up the act that this it had this
Speaker 1: kind of and I think it is hard to understand
Speaker 1: if you weren't there impact on people. I found a
Speaker 1: Pew Research study that I'm gonna quote from now. Our
Speaker 1: first survey following the attacks went into the field just
Speaker 1: days after nine eleven. From September thirteenth seventeenth, two thousand one,
Speaker 1: A sizable majority of adults said they felt depressed. Nearly
Speaker 1: half said they had difficulty concentrating, and a third said
Speaker 1: they had trouble sleeping. It was an era in which
Speaker 1: television was still the public's dominant news source. Said they
Speaker 1: got most of their news about the attacks from television,
Speaker 1: compared with just five percent who got their news online,
Speaker 1: and the televised images of death and destruction had a
Speaker 1: powerful impact. Around nine and ten Americans agreed with the
Speaker 1: statement I feel sad when watching TV coverage of the
Speaker 1: terrorist attacks. A sizable majority seventy percent found it frightening
Speaker 1: to watch, but most did so anyway. Fear was widespread,
Speaker 1: not just in the days immediately after the attacks, but
Speaker 1: throughout the fall of two thousand one. Most Americans said
Speaker 1: they were very twenty eight percent or somewhat forty five
Speaker 1: percent worried about another attack. When asked a year later
Speaker 1: to describe how their lives changed in a age a way.
Speaker 1: About half the adults said they felt more afraid, more careful,
Speaker 1: and more distrustful or more vulnerable as a result of
Speaker 1: the attacks. And I think you can't separate this because
Speaker 1: the main people were talking about here and we're talking
Speaker 1: about the response to this. When we're talking about the
Speaker 1: people who got to make decisions, it's boomers, right, which
Speaker 1: is not all that different from how it is today,
Speaker 1: but even it was even more so boomers then. And
Speaker 1: you know, my parents and the people of their generation
Speaker 1: are all children of the Cold War. They both grew up,
Speaker 1: my parents on different military bases. Um. And I can remember,
Speaker 1: you know, my dad told me stories about doing like
Speaker 1: duck and coverage drills as a kid, like literally hiding
Speaker 1: under a desk to get ready for an atomic bomb. Um.
Speaker 1: His family like went out into the countryside during the
Speaker 1: Cuban missile crisis to hide because they were afraid all
Speaker 1: the cities we're going to get nooked. And this is
Speaker 1: not These are not uncommon experiences. So you have to think,
Speaker 1: like all of the all of the adults were either
Speaker 1: very close to this period or had spent most of
Speaker 1: their formative years, like constantly scared of being ordered by
Speaker 1: a nuclear weapon. Um. There have been clinical like studies
Speaker 1: and stuff that have shown that that fear of nuclear
Speaker 1: annihilation is a major factor and anxiety like it's not
Speaker 1: ever been properly I think explained how much that fucked
Speaker 1: up that generation. But what you had is all these
Speaker 1: people who had spent the first couple of decades of
Speaker 1: their lives living with the sort of damocles over their heads.
Speaker 1: And then the war ends, right, the Cold War ends,
Speaker 1: the USSR falls apart, and suddenly people aren't talking about
Speaker 1: nuclear warfare for the first time in anybody's memory. Um,
Speaker 1: And I think for most of that generation they felt
Speaker 1: safe for the first time. There was this kind of
Speaker 1: celebration that was pretty bipartisan that capitalism and democracy had
Speaker 1: triumphed and that like this kind of horror that had
Speaker 1: stalked through their childhood had been defeated. When people like
Speaker 1: Francis fuki Yama talked about the end of history, what
Speaker 1: Fukiyama meant was that liberal democracy was kind of, in
Speaker 1: his eyes, the end of the evolutionary road for states,
Speaker 1: which is a flawed idea, but the intern pritation that
Speaker 1: I think people like my parents had was that we
Speaker 1: didn't need to worry anymore, right, like that that's the
Speaker 1: end of history, right, our way of life had one,
Speaker 1: and we like we we didn't need to worry. And
Speaker 1: in nine eleven happens and suddenly this decade or so
Speaker 1: of relief from that all ends in a minute, and
Speaker 1: all of that fear that they lived with their whole
Speaker 1: lives came roaring back with abandoned. Nine eleven was like
Speaker 1: the emotional equivalent of splitting an atom. And and the
Speaker 1: Internet that was released by that is going to be
Speaker 1: used for something, right. I want to kind of touch
Speaker 1: on that a little bit, because I mean, I obviously
Speaker 1: don't remember the nineties because I wasn't there, And it
Speaker 1: is such a fascinating idea to me of like this
Speaker 1: time where nero liberalism kind of reached their paradise, like
Speaker 1: like we didn't we could we we? We we did
Speaker 1: the thing. We found the spot And how that you know,
Speaker 1: talk about like the edge of chaos theory, how it
Speaker 1: was built up to this super high point and then
Speaker 1: all because because it got so high and then immediately
Speaker 1: crumbled um and shot down. And there's this thing that
Speaker 1: one of my favorite there's graat. Morrison talks about how
Speaker 1: nine eleven kind of became this moment where the world
Speaker 1: of imagination and the world of like the lowest material
Speaker 1: visceral reality crashed into each other. Um. And he says
Speaker 1: a quote the collapse expressed itself in the material world
Speaker 1: when the twin towers of the World Trade Center were
Speaker 1: reduced to dust by determined extremists. When cement occurred, reality
Speaker 1: and fiction began their slow collapse into one another. After
Speaker 1: the fall of the towers, quote unquote, reality became more fictional,
Speaker 1: and quote unquote fiction became more realistic, I think plausible, realistic,
Speaker 1: superhero movies like The Dark Night films, fake news, deep fakes,
Speaker 1: a r VR, and the rise of magical thinking. Um.
Speaker 1: And I would extra plate that out to like stuff
Speaker 1: like you know Q and on um and you know
Speaker 1: the how just these images that we thought were only
Speaker 1: viewable in film and television, uh, became descended down onto
Speaker 1: the onto the dirtiest, most visceral material plane. Um. And
Speaker 1: then things that were fake, like this idea like the
Speaker 1: Perfect Nineties, It's gonna be this is gonna continue continue
Speaker 1: like dis forever that fiction. Uh, it felt almost more
Speaker 1: real like it like that that that should have been
Speaker 1: what's real and it's not anymore. Yeah, it feels like
Speaker 1: there's an alternate and I think that's part of why
Speaker 1: liberals are still so goddamn in love with the West wing.
Speaker 1: And by the way I talked about liberals, my parents,
Speaker 1: who loved Ronald Reagan more than life itself, watched every
Speaker 1: episode of that show. They thought it was wonderful. And
Speaker 1: the Republicans are always portrayed very sympathetically on the West wing. Right,
Speaker 1: it's very much this noble opposition sort of idea um
Speaker 1: and uh, the the that I think there's something in
Speaker 1: that that there's lists almost since that we've been locked
Speaker 1: out of the right reality. And that's that's what you know,
Speaker 1: That's what liberals are constantly harkening back to with with
Speaker 1: nine eleven. But it's also or with with stuff at
Speaker 1: the West wing. But it's also like what conservatives. I
Speaker 1: think for a while they were looking for that. I
Speaker 1: think that's what George W. Bush promised and failed to deliver. Um.
Speaker 1: It's what they were hoping to get with Romney and
Speaker 1: when that didn't happen. I think part of what's going
Speaker 1: on with Trump is this desire. Part of the desire
Speaker 1: to burn it all down is the inability to get
Speaker 1: back to this imagined If you're talking about the collapse
Speaker 1: of reality and fiction going into each other, that's what
Speaker 1: Donald Trump represents. He is this so fictional person that
Speaker 1: in order to meet this new world of reality and
Speaker 1: fiction the same thing, you need somebody that under that,
Speaker 1: that represents that. Um So they turned to him because
Speaker 1: he he was meeting the way they saw the world
Speaker 1: was going. The reality and fiction are going into each other,
Speaker 1: So you're going to get the reality television president who
Speaker 1: who who? Who kind of embodies that essence on a
Speaker 1: very very visceral level. And I think that's part of
Speaker 1: why when you have of nine eleven happen, you have
Speaker 1: all of this energy released. Both parties kind of come
Speaker 1: together in this idea that the United States should strike
Speaker 1: back and that we were at war. It's rightly pointed
Speaker 1: out by people that particularly protests against the Iraq war
Speaker 1: were massive, and they were, they were historically large. But
Speaker 1: President Bush was also the most popular president of our
Speaker 1: lifetime briefly, and it's because people were in line behind
Speaker 1: this idea that we need to hit someone well and
Speaker 1: and I think something that's important about this that's completely
Speaker 1: forgotten is that the invasion of Afghanistan there was like
Speaker 1: no protests. There were there were a few, but like
Speaker 1: the left imploded, Like here's I'm going to read a
Speaker 1: quote from Doug Henwood. This is an attack on us.
Speaker 1: There is a near certainty that something will be done soon.
Speaker 1: Clearly considerable use of force will have to be used
Speaker 1: to capture these motherfucker's um like Adolph read He's like
Speaker 1: talking about how like there's gonna have to be military action.
Speaker 1: Like a bunch of the people from like who like
Speaker 1: the the old school, like anti Vietnam War protesters like
Speaker 1: from STS are like, well, we don't oppose all wars,
Speaker 1: we just opposed bad wars, so like here we should
Speaker 1: go in vadive guys like everyone lost their minds. Well,
Speaker 1: and I wanna what I really the core of when
Speaker 1: I talked about today is why that happened. Because I
Speaker 1: think there's on particularly kind of some of the more
Speaker 1: superficial left wing analysis of this, this idea that like
Speaker 1: George Bush did what he did in response because he's
Speaker 1: like this Christian holy warrior um. And there's a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons people do this, including the fact that he
Speaker 1: once referred to the invasion of Iraq as a crusade,
Speaker 1: but as a general rule, what Bush did was not
Speaker 1: because of his Christianity and had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: any kind of conflict with Islam in particular. What it
Speaker 1: was was the reaction of a group of a kind
Speaker 1: of fundamentalists, fundamentalists of belief in the American state, reacting
Speaker 1: to an attack on the sanctity of that kind of idea.
Speaker 1: Uh um. And this is this is you know why
Speaker 1: all these liberals were on board at least with you know,
Speaker 1: the strike on Afghanistan or attacking Afghanistan. Christopher Hitchens probably
Speaker 1: no one embodies like what happened to a lot of
Speaker 1: the left better than Hitchens. Hitchens was a well known
Speaker 1: liberal journalist. He wrote an excoriating book about Henry Kissinger. Right,
Speaker 1: he's one of these people who was criticizing the Empire,
Speaker 1: who was attacking it for its excesses. For builds his
Speaker 1: career on that and the nine eleven happens. And the
Speaker 1: first big thing he does is he puts out a
Speaker 1: massive column titled Bush's Secularist Triumph, in which he argues
Speaker 1: that the war on Terror is not a crusade, but
Speaker 1: a battle to keep religion in public power separate. And
Speaker 1: I want to quote now from a study published in
Speaker 1: the Journal of Political Theology by William Kavanav of DePaul University.
Speaker 1: It's kitled the War on Terror Secular or Sacred. There
Speaker 1: may be some Christians who think that we are fighting
Speaker 1: for Jesus, but the battle is being one in the
Speaker 1: name of secularism. George Bush may subjectively be a Christian,
Speaker 1: but he and the US armed for Is have objectively
Speaker 1: done more for secularism than the whole of the American
Speaker 1: agnostic community combined and doubled. While the left makes apologies
Speaker 1: for religious terrorists, the right supports their obliteration to protect
Speaker 1: our secular state. Secularism is not just a smug attitude.
Speaker 1: It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life
Speaker 1: that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had
Speaker 1: ruthlessly smashed the hold of clergy on the state. We
Speaker 1: are now in the middle of another such war and revolution,
Speaker 1: and the liberals have gone a wall. That's Kavanaugh's summary
Speaker 1: of hitchens is article, But like what's going on there
Speaker 1: is really interesting because Hitchens is proceeding as an a
Speaker 1: priori assumption that the attack on the Twin Towers is
Speaker 1: an attempt by a theocracy to take over and destroy
Speaker 1: a secular state, rather than an attempt to damage economically
Speaker 1: a military enemy um and goaded into a war that
Speaker 1: would weaken it socially, militarily and economically, which is exactly
Speaker 1: what had actually happened. The liberals that Hitchens attacks as
Speaker 1: former allies are basically saying, don't take the bait right,
Speaker 1: don't do the thing that he wants you to do,
Speaker 1: because it will it will lead to the results he
Speaker 1: wants to achieve. All Hitchens can see is that, like
Speaker 1: Muslim extremists are scary and they want to hurt him
Speaker 1: as an atheist, religion is doing things that hurt me,
Speaker 1: So I must destroy the people who believe in this city. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting because everybody, all of the people who
Speaker 1: are kind of on the side of this civic religion,
Speaker 1: which is which is why they're responding, because they're they're
Speaker 1: civic religion has been attacked and this strike on the towers,
Speaker 1: they all find kind of different ways to justify it.
Speaker 1: Hitchens is a prominent atheist, so it makes sense that
Speaker 1: he kind of sees it as a fight against theocracy.
Speaker 1: If you go through a lot of footage of news
Speaker 1: anchors in the immediate wake of the attack Garrison, you
Speaker 1: and I were doing this a couple of nights ago.
Speaker 1: There were numerous references that the Twin Towers, which were
Speaker 1: a symbol of capitalism, and that they represent capitalist and
Speaker 1: American supremacy over capital It's like it's it's it's like
Speaker 1: the American supremacy of the economic system and and and
Speaker 1: like a reified symbol of capitalism. Almost like it's like
Speaker 1: it's like an idol to like to the god of capital. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a number of different things you can
Speaker 1: find making this point. But in a column that published
Speaker 1: on nine twelve, uh, the Washington Post editorial board wrote,
Speaker 1: for three decades, the Twin Towers of New York's World
Speaker 1: Trade Center stood as the symbol of American economic might,
Speaker 1: as powerful an icon for capitalism as the Statue of
Speaker 1: Liberty is for freedom. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 1: No people were just saying this ship the day. You
Speaker 1: ever think that's funny about it. It's like no one
Speaker 1: thought this before, Like these are cheap fucking buildings, like
Speaker 1: the world trades like a license Like it's literally it's
Speaker 1: just like license is a name is license out. It's
Speaker 1: like that, you know, But that doesn't because again, what
Speaker 1: what you by saying this when they're saying like, for
Speaker 1: three decades, this was the symbol of American economic might.
Speaker 1: People and I keep going back to my parents, but
Speaker 1: I think they represent a lot of Americans saw the
Speaker 1: defeat of the so be A Union as being achieved
Speaker 1: by the U. S economy, by capital, right, and and
Speaker 1: that's the thing that ended history. That's the thing that
Speaker 1: got them to their neo liver paradise. It's the thing
Speaker 1: that saved them from the nukes. And so by taking
Speaker 1: these towers down, bin Laden basically killed Superman. Right, That's
Speaker 1: how they're reacting to it. Um. George Bush and Christopher
Speaker 1: Hitchins and the Washington Post editorial board, they all saw
Speaker 1: their support for war not as as not based in religion.
Speaker 1: All of them would have denied this right, Um. But
Speaker 1: Kavanaugh argues that they were motivated primarily by what he
Speaker 1: calls the civil religion of the United States, which is
Speaker 1: why I've been using that term. I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: his paper. Again, the United States has its own civil religion,
Speaker 1: which they're relying on the support of Christians and undoubtedly
Speaker 1: borrowing much from Christian imagery, transcends mere sectarian religion to
Speaker 1: unite all Americans on a higher ground. Indeed, this is
Speaker 1: what makes secularism compatible with civil religion. What Robert Bella
Speaker 1: calls traditional religion is privatized, while civic rituals revolve around
Speaker 1: a generic God who under its America's identity and purpose
Speaker 1: in the world. In this sense, Andrew Sullivan is right.
Speaker 1: This is a religious war. The war of which nine
Speaker 1: eleven was a significant marker, is not extremist and expansionist
Speaker 1: religion against a peace loving and neutral secularist order. It
Speaker 1: is rather the violent confrontation of Islamist terrorism with the
Speaker 1: civil religion of American expansionism, that is, the evangelical insistence
Speaker 1: that liberal social order is the only viable kind of
Speaker 1: social order. It is what Tarik Ali has called the
Speaker 1: clash of fundamentalisms. And I think that's important because I
Speaker 1: think one way area in which the left really got
Speaker 1: things wrong and sort of their interpretation of what happens
Speaker 1: in this period of seeing it as a clash between
Speaker 1: kind of Christian fundamentalists as embodied by George Bush and
Speaker 1: Islamic fundamentalists. No, no, no, The people who were leading
Speaker 1: this country, including Bush, but including most of liberals, were
Speaker 1: America fundamentalists. They were fundamentalists in the idea of the
Speaker 1: secular American state, and so were my parents. As conservative
Speaker 1: as they were. My family was never about you know,
Speaker 1: Christianity needing to be spread over there. It was about
Speaker 1: this this belief in America as something holy and that's
Speaker 1: something holy and sacred had been struck on September eleven.
Speaker 1: I will say I I think, I I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's easy for me to see why people think about
Speaker 1: this on the left sort of as this Christian holy war,
Speaker 1: because like I grew up with a lot of people
Speaker 1: who like in the wake of this, who like really
Speaker 1: were full on into the crusade thing. Like I had
Speaker 1: classmates who are talked about how they were going to
Speaker 1: join the military to kill a Muslims, like there was
Speaker 1: I mean, like, I think this is a real thing.
Speaker 1: And that's what I mean, that's sort of analytics wrong,
Speaker 1: that's what that's what Kavanaugh saying, and that it's kind
Speaker 1: of scaffolded on Christianity, but like that's fun fundamentally, like
Speaker 1: the fact that there are some people who are going
Speaker 1: and there being like this is finally religious crusade doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that's like what the leadership of the country is doing.
Speaker 1: And as I have to do. I think that's part
Speaker 1: of why we get ump and the current Christian extremist
Speaker 1: surge is that, uh, it's a reaction to how kind
Speaker 1: of the neo cons go with this, because for the
Speaker 1: neo cons, this isn't really about this isn't about Christianity
Speaker 1: is something you use in this fight, but like that's
Speaker 1: not what you're fighting for here. Um. And I think
Speaker 1: there's there's a good amount of evidence for the fact
Speaker 1: that Americans identified something as being like holy about the
Speaker 1: Twin Towers, particularly after the attack. UM from Kavanaughs study
Speaker 1: in Public Theology. Quote in August two thousand and ten
Speaker 1: of poll found that fifty six percent of Americans regard
Speaker 1: Ground zero as sacred ground, and a slightly larger majority
Speaker 1: opposes construction of a mosque nearby. For this region, a
Speaker 1: sacred aura surrounds the identity of the nation that was
Speaker 1: attacked on that day, and the attacks concentrated that sacredness
Speaker 1: in a particular location in time. It is not necessary
Speaker 1: to go back to the more famously evangelical George W.
Speaker 1: Bush to make the link between piety and nine eleven
Speaker 1: and his speech at Ground Zero last September eleven, two
Speaker 1: th ten, Barack Oba talked about gathering at this sacred
Speaker 1: hour on hallowed Ground and talked about how those who
Speaker 1: are not only killed but sacrificed in the attacks. God
Speaker 1: was invoked, of course, but it was a generic God
Speaker 1: who belonged to no particular faith, because, as Obama made clear,
Speaker 1: the victims themselves were of many faiths. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: I mean one of the things that I think is
Speaker 1: interesting if you're actually trying to analyze this and you
Speaker 1: want to see kind of the degree to which why
Speaker 1: I think it's important to look at how people treated
Speaker 1: the space itself is sacred. Is how actual religion responded
Speaker 1: in the wake of nine eleven, and how Americans responded
Speaker 1: to religion in the wake of nine eleven. Um, because
Speaker 1: you know, it says they're about fifty percent of the country. See,
Speaker 1: this is like hallowed ground in some way. Um. And
Speaker 1: I think there's evidence that people kind of rose up
Speaker 1: to defend this civic religion more than they actually did
Speaker 1: their real faiths. Um and this is because primarily the
Speaker 1: reaction on a on a population basis to September eleven,
Speaker 1: as at religiosity in the United States continued to decline. Right,
Speaker 1: There's a public idea that it led to this like
Speaker 1: surge of people coming back to the church and getting
Speaker 1: religious again, but there's really no demographic evidence to back
Speaker 1: that up. And I want to quote from an article
Speaker 1: I found in Christianity Today. For a few weeks after
Speaker 1: nine eleven, people packed the pews, but it soon became
Speaker 1: apparent there was not a great awakening or a profound
Speaker 1: change in America's religious practices, as Frank M. Newport Gallop
Speaker 1: Pole editor in chief, told The New York Times in
Speaker 1: November of two thousand one. Barne Group confirmed that conclusion
Speaker 1: in two thousand six, attract nineteen dimensions of spirituality and
Speaker 1: beliefs and found none of those nineteen indicators were statistically
Speaker 1: different from pre attack measures. In other words, the nine
Speaker 1: eleven attacks didn't put American Christians on a trajectory towards
Speaker 1: more orthodox beliefs or more consistent habits of prayer, church attendance,
Speaker 1: or scripture reading. In so far as we can measure
Speaker 1: matters of faith, the decline of American religiosity continue to
Speaker 1: pace spiritually speaking, said barn As David Kinneman. It's as
Speaker 1: if nothing significant ever happened, and that's something evangelicals have
Speaker 1: had to grapple with ever since the US did not
Speaker 1: turn back to God demographically. And while hateful attacks against
Speaker 1: Muslims surged, you have to acknowledge that a lot of
Speaker 1: those were from people who were more or less secular
Speaker 1: um in the traditional sense. And this is part of
Speaker 1: why so many of the online atheists set Uh sided
Speaker 1: with the alt right in two thousand fifteen and two
Speaker 1: thousand and sixteen. Right, it's because there are a lot
Speaker 1: of those people, um, while they would have described themselves
Speaker 1: as an opposition to Christianity as well, were very much
Speaker 1: a part of the same civic religion as everybody else,
Speaker 1: and we're willing to engage in racist attacks against members
Speaker 1: of religion as a result of that. You know, when
Speaker 1: when you look at the fact that a majority of
Speaker 1: Americans saw ground zero with sacred and opposed building a mosque.
Speaker 1: Because of that, a decent chunk of those people are
Speaker 1: not Christians. Who opposed the building of a mosque, right
Speaker 1: they're a religious or their atheist, and they opposed the
Speaker 1: building of a mosque because they still see Islam as
Speaker 1: an enemy. Yeah, it's uh, it's interesting. But Americans were
Speaker 1: not moved to embrace religion by the attacks um and
Speaker 1: the deterioration of our sense of security that followed, and
Speaker 1: I think that evangelicals have never been able to actually
Speaker 1: accept this. A two thousand thirteen Barnard Group survey found
Speaker 1: that most Americans, but particularly born again Christians, believe nine
Speaker 1: eleven quote made people turn back to God. And this
Speaker 1: again has led to kind of a fetishization of the
Speaker 1: period right after nine eleven UM. The writer of that
Speaker 1: Christianity Today article I cited earlier theorizes quote. My first
Speaker 1: suggestion is what we thought was hope wasn't lost at all.
Speaker 1: It was less Christian trust and character and redemption of
Speaker 1: God than American optimism coated with not quite biblical bromides
Speaker 1: that when there's bad, good will follow. Americans love to
Speaker 1: believe that everything happens for a reason, and that after
Speaker 1: a short period of time, sorrow will always turn into
Speaker 1: joy and suffering into sanctifications. We quote Romans, we know
Speaker 1: that in all things God works for the good of
Speaker 1: those who love him, and incorrectly interpreted to mean that
Speaker 1: everything that happens to us will also somehow work out. Okay,
Speaker 1: And I think that they're onto something here and this
Speaker 1: really that this goes back to what Kavanaugh was saying
Speaker 1: about how this civil religion is kind of grafted on
Speaker 1: over the bones of Christianity, right, Um, And it's it's
Speaker 1: there's so much. Part of what's interesting to me here
Speaker 1: is that well, I think it's it's worthwhile that he
Speaker 1: quotes Romans. I have to think that this, this belief
Speaker 1: that Americans have that everything happens for a reason, is
Speaker 1: at least as undergirded by like Disney as it is
Speaker 1: with scripture. It's undergraded by the way we tell stories,
Speaker 1: by the way fiction works in our society, which is
Speaker 1: a very unique to us. Right, Every culture does not
Speaker 1: tell stories the same way. Well, and I think, like,
Speaker 1: if you want to trace that out to like, I
Speaker 1: think that's part of the reason why people are so
Speaker 1: unbelievably any conspiracy theories here. Yeah, if everything needs to
Speaker 1: have a reason, that it's part of an overarching grand
Speaker 1: narrative that ties everything together. Yeah, and it's obviously again
Speaker 1: I don't want to like underplay, and perhaps we should
Speaker 1: do an episode maybe behind the Bastards on the reaction
Speaker 1: of the religious right to nine eleven, which was nuts
Speaker 1: and it was vicious and horrific. I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: trying to deny that, but I think one of the
Speaker 1: things that happens in this period is they grow increasingly
Speaker 1: infuriated that that is not shared by a majority of
Speaker 1: the country, that it doesn't bring a religious revival right,
Speaker 1: that that doesn't follow September eleven. Um. Now it is
Speaker 1: kind of there's a couple of things that are interesting here. Um.
Speaker 1: One of them is that, uh, the apocalyptic Christian believers,
Speaker 1: they do have kind of this this in with the
Speaker 1: Bush administration. We know that at one point a bunch
Speaker 1: of apocalyptic like Christian representatives, like people who were kind
Speaker 1: of heading churches and stuff that believe there's this belief
Speaker 1: among certain Christians that you need to rebuild the Temple
Speaker 1: in Jerusalem and bring about the end of days and
Speaker 1: all this stuff. There's a bunch of ship that has
Speaker 1: to happen in Palestine in order for the apocalypse to come,
Speaker 1: and they're trying to get US presidents to make it happen.
Speaker 1: This is why Trump made some of the calls that
Speaker 1: he made, was to deliberately like give those people a
Speaker 1: win um, which is why some of the ship that
Speaker 1: happened in Jerusalem during the Trump administration um was able
Speaker 1: to happen. All of that stuff is stuff that they
Speaker 1: went to George Bush. They had a two hour meeting
Speaker 1: with him and Elliot Abrams and a bunch of his
Speaker 1: staff where these representatives of kind of like the Pentecostal
Speaker 1: movement tried to get him to carry out this wishless
Speaker 1: policy of acts around Israel and Iraq to help them
Speaker 1: bring about the rapture. And the Bush administration didn't really
Speaker 1: do any of that. They have to take the meeting right,
Speaker 1: they bring these guys in, they don't give them what
Speaker 1: they want. It's not until Trump that a lot of
Speaker 1: these guys get what they want. And what you what
Speaker 1: happens here because you've got this this death cult Christi
Speaker 1: group who see this as a crusade and who want
Speaker 1: to war with Islam, and they're constantly frustrated by the
Speaker 1: fact that even though he's supposed to be their guy,
Speaker 1: Bush doesn't go all the way for them, right, And
Speaker 1: this is part of why his military adventurism gets criticized
Speaker 1: effectively by guys like Trump who win the evangelical right,
Speaker 1: because the evangelicals say, like, well, if we're not going
Speaker 1: to have a holy war, then like, what was this stuff?
Speaker 1: We just wasted a bunch of of money and a
Speaker 1: bunch of treasure and a bunch of young men for
Speaker 1: nothing over there. Um. And that's part of like what
Speaker 1: Trump wins on now, these two factions, these neo cons,
Speaker 1: the guys who wind up, by the way, the guys
Speaker 1: who are sort of on the civic religion side of
Speaker 1: the response to nine eleven are all the people who
Speaker 1: wind up running the Lincoln project right when you're talking
Speaker 1: about the Republicans on that side of thing. And then
Speaker 1: the part the folks who break off the evangelicals, the
Speaker 1: people who want to holy war, that's who winds up
Speaker 1: making the core of Trump's support. Um and yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's uh, I think mostly where I'm going to leave
Speaker 1: us for today on nine twelve. Next week we'll have
Speaker 1: another special episode about Glenn Beck's nine twelve project that
Speaker 1: will be kind of the finishing of this. But I
Speaker 1: want to end, because we're talking about why I did this,
Speaker 1: and why I started by talking about jokes about nine
Speaker 1: eleven is because I think understanding understanding the attack on
Speaker 1: the towers as like an attack on what had effectively
Speaker 1: become a god to a lot of Americans, even if
Speaker 1: they didn't realize it, right, the sanctity of this kind
Speaker 1: of neoliberal capitalist order, and it's it's it's um, it's
Speaker 1: historic inevitability. Right. The fact that that's what was going on,
Speaker 1: that that that was so dear to people, that justified
Speaker 1: so much violence, twenty years of war, of bombing's, millions
Speaker 1: of deaths is part of why I think there's a
Speaker 1: value in joking about nine eleven, which is not to
Speaker 1: say that what happened wasn't terrible. Three three thousand and
Speaker 1: change innocent people were murdered um in a in a
Speaker 1: truly horrific way. If you actually sit down and watch
Speaker 1: the footage the people falling out of the buildings, it's
Speaker 1: a nightmare. If you think about stuff like Flight ninety three,
Speaker 1: it's it's really stirring. You have these people who one
Speaker 1: moment they're heading to like see their families, or go
Speaker 1: on a work trip or something you're on a plane experience.
Speaker 1: I'm sure everybody has, where you're just like trying to
Speaker 1: get from A to B and in the space of
Speaker 1: like a few minutes, they have to all decide they're
Speaker 1: going to charge a bunch of terrorists, fight in hand
Speaker 1: to hand combat, and then pilot a plane into the
Speaker 1: ground in order to stop it from killing other people.
Speaker 1: That's that's powerful stuff. Um. What what I think is
Speaker 1: important is de sacralizing it, because there's nothing sacred about
Speaker 1: mass murder um, and there's nothing there's we shouldn't see
Speaker 1: what happened there is anything but what it is, which
Speaker 1: is a tragic um, a tragic act of violence against
Speaker 1: innocent people. But taking it as like an attack on
Speaker 1: our soul, as an attack on like our our collective god. Um,
Speaker 1: when you start to do that again, it kind of
Speaker 1: justifies any sort of violence, like there's nothing, there's nothing
Speaker 1: that's off the table, And in in the first few
Speaker 1: years after nine eleven, there was nothing off the table. Um,
Speaker 1: And we're never getting back to the world that we
Speaker 1: had before, which is ultimately like what all that violence
Speaker 1: was about, right, all of everything terrible that was on
Speaker 1: in the wake of nine eleven was justified, even if
Speaker 1: people didn't say it in the desire to get back
Speaker 1: to where we were in the nineties right in their
Speaker 1: heads and their sense of security. I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: anything is like courses, economic projections. I'm talking about in
Speaker 1: the sense of like optimism and basic security. And I
Speaker 1: think one of the people who got this best in
Speaker 1: the immediate wake of the attack was Hunter S. Thompson,
Speaker 1: who you know, was still alive at that point for
Speaker 1: a couple of years, and he wrote a column. I
Speaker 1: think it was for ESPN dot com because that's who
Speaker 1: he was writing for in those days. His career was
Speaker 1: well past its peak. Um, but he wrote probably the
Speaker 1: best thing anyone wrote a week after nine eleven, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to read you the end of that. Now,
Speaker 1: we're war now, according to President Bush, and I take
Speaker 1: him at his word. He also says this war might
Speaker 1: last for a very long time. Generals and military scholars
Speaker 1: that will tell you that eight or ten years is
Speaker 1: actually not such a long time in the span of
Speaker 1: human history, which is no doubt true. But history also
Speaker 1: tells us that ten years of martial law and a
Speaker 1: wartime economy are going to feel like a lifetime to
Speaker 1: people who are in their twenties today, the poor bastards
Speaker 1: of what will forever be known as Generation Z are
Speaker 1: doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will
Speaker 1: grow up with the lower standard of living than their
Speaker 1: parents enjoyed. This is extremely heavy news, and it will
Speaker 1: take a while for it to sink in. The twenty
Speaker 1: two babies born in New York City while the World
Speaker 1: Trade Center burned, will never know what they missed. The
Speaker 1: last half of the twentieth century will seem like a
Speaker 1: wild party for rich kids compared to what's coming now.
Speaker 1: The party's over, folks. Yeah, that is kind of the
Speaker 1: feeling growing up in the early two thousand's and not
Speaker 1: not knowing, not never actually experiencing the nineties. And yea,
Speaker 1: in some ways, you know, nine eleven feel it is
Speaker 1: very similar to me as something like Pearl Harbor, Like
Speaker 1: they're both things that happened, I guess before I was around,
Speaker 1: and it just they created the world that already existed
Speaker 1: in like it never it never like it, you know,
Speaker 1: it never changed the world I was in. It just
Speaker 1: became the world that I was in. For me, nine
Speaker 1: eleven is my first memory, Like that is the first
Speaker 1: thing I remember and yeah, we got exactly the world
Speaker 1: that you would expect from your first ever reading nine eleven.
Speaker 1: Yeah it's um, I mean again for me, I think
Speaker 1: the thing I identify most is that little clip I
Speaker 1: played from South Park where one of the kids is like,
Speaker 1: do you remember when everything didn't suck? It's not really um?
Speaker 1: So yeah, go out, um, tell a tasteful joke about
Speaker 1: nine eleven, and uh, try not to worship the state.
Speaker 1: It doesn't end well. It could Happen Here as a
Speaker 1: production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
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