9/11 Culture serves as a useful introduction to the complexities of American culture in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. With a broad purview that includes film, music.
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That is what Ronald Reagan so clearly understood. And that is what, through words and images and budgets, he delivered to the national psyche. He set about mounting the largest peacetime military buildup in American history, including the B-1 and Stealth bombers and 16, new nuclear warheads to be added to a variety of new missile systems. That was the "strong" part. If his saber rattling at the Soviets meant an increased fear of nuclear attack at home, Reagan offered his space shield, "the means," he said in a televised speech, "of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
It was named Excalibur.
Almost everything that has come after that speech of March 23, , has worked to confirm, rather than undermine, the message that America was free to involve itself in other nations' troubles without bringing the violence of war home. We have, of course, the prime lesson of Desert Storm, the showcase for all those high-tech weapons systems Reagan funded into existence.
In the days just before, America held its breath at the high casualties predicted. Public support split right down the middle even as the first jets strafed Baghdad. But with every new image of robot "smart" bombs doing the dangerous work, with every grinning U.
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By the time CNN panned over the smear of immolated Iraqi bodies on the mile stretch of road out of Jahra, Kuwait, the verdict was clear. America was able to wage war on a grand scale against the fourth largest army in the world and suffer only a handful of casualties among its own fighting ranks. This is not recalled as an indictment of that war's aims, nor certainly in sympathy for Saddam's despotic rule. The point is to note the enormous disconnect communicated by Desert Storm. America could act with impunity, leaving Americans to turn their gaze back to the domestic pleasures of a surging economy.
Cultural influence of the September 11 attacks - Wikipedia
Naturally, the war would leave a residue of hatred in Iraq among those not only bombed but among the tens of thousands more starved and killed by disease due to years of sanctions, but this was not much of a concern for Americans because to us it seemed to be a fact without immediate, personal consequences.
Every once in a while, as the years unspooled, President Clinton would order the firing from some aloof aircraft a cruise missile into a military target in Iraq, a measure which inevitably killed some of the populace surrounding the target, but risked no American lives. And news of the event would quickly evaporate from page and screen in this part of the world. When the World Trade Center towers blew up for the first time in the lesson was again perversely reassuring to our psychology of immunity.
The towers, so technologically sound, stood. The losses were tragic but on the scale of a train wreck, nothing bespeaking "America under attack.
Security was beefed up and life went on. When the Federal Building in Oklahoma blew up, the lesson was, for different reasons, again perversely reassuring to the psychology of immunity. After a spasm of concern that the Jihad had really come to God's country, it was learned that the perpetrator was one of America's homegrown nuts. He had not attacked from without.
9/11 Culture
He had bored from within. And the nation's sleuths, so smart, so high-tech, had caught him in record time. America is now presided over by a president who is the son of the commander in chief of Desert Storm, and who has proposed his own "Son of Star Wars. This is a relatively new definition of the threshold for war, and speaks to how gingerly U.
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There hasn't been much appetite for risk, not for a long time, not since Vietnam. And so George W. America must play policeman in an unruly world, Kaplan asserts, yet Americans aren't likely to go along if the risks seem too tangible at home. A Bush National Security Council expert frets aloud that without NMD, countries with nuclear long-range missiles could "hold American and allied cities hostage and thereby deter us from intervention. It's not about defense. And that's exactly why we need it. But selling Americans on the dream of a world kept in line, and reshaped, by America will be a lot tougher now.
- Juicios literarios y artísticos (Spanish Edition);
- 9/11 Culture | American Studies | Cultural Studies General | Subjects | Wiley!
- A New World Order!
- Going Forward?
- Blood & Fire.
- Ghosts: in an English version.
- News travels fast.
Our psychology of immunity blasted, we are likely to examine the consequences in a far harsher, new light. What yesterday's terrible events demonstrate, for example, is the folly of believing a shield against "rogue nations" is anything but a psychological illusion. Given that some 50, people worked in the World Trade towers, the death toll may well reach nuclear proportions. And if Osama Bin Laden's shadowy multinational underground is in fact responsible, the enemy is nothing like a nation, rogue or not.
Yesterday, in between the gut-churning images of jumbo jets crashing into New York's monoliths and the carnage and wreckage below, there began arriving TV scenes of Palestinian men, women and children cheering the news. The sight was made even more chilling by the sight of their supposed leader condemning the act in a quivering voice. The celebrants, who live in a neighborhood wracked by fighting over the last year, are but the latest to live far, far from the daily lives of Americans, and to believe that they are at war with the United States.
The people of the United States either did not know it, or we knew it but felt sure it could not affect us right where we live. Their tactic was unfamiliar to aviation authorities. Previous hijackings had typically drawn attention to the demands of the perpetrators; a hijacked aircraft would be diverted to a specified destination and set down on a runway so negotiations could begin.
The simultaneous commandeering of multiple commercial airliners to convert their thousands of gallons of jet fuel into suicidal guided missiles was unprecedented. Nearly 3, people died as a result of the aerial assault on New York and Washington. The determined efforts of the brave passengers on United Flight 93 most likely prevented untold additional deaths at either the U.
The devastation experienced by those near the crash sites in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia left people in disbelief, groping for an explanation of what they had seen.
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Some likened it to a bomb blast or a volcano erupting. The events of the day penetrated the American psyche as citizens watched terror unfold in real time on television. The nation reluctantly came to grips with the fact that terrorism had arrived on the shores of what had been, throughout living memory, a comfortable continent. In the inevitable finger-pointing that ensued, some blamed American foreign policy and suggested that the nation had brought the audacious attack on itself.
While that debate may never end, one thing is certain: America was introduced to the new face of war, where threats of terror make places of business and even recreation the new battlefields. That first evening, in a brief televised address, President George W. But our resolve must not pass. Witnessing the perpetration of evil on such an enormous scale laid bare our vulnerability to murderous intentions—indeed the very worst of human nature.
Syndicated columnist George F. Will, in an article published within a day of the attacks, wrote: Americans were encouraged to get on with their lives and not let the threat of terror demoralize them. Terrorism not only creates fear but forces us to acknowledge that humans are capable of such depths of hatred.