The events of 11 September twenty-five years ago were personally unpleasant for me, which is the kind of statement one hesitates to make because, if you're not careful, it comes off like "well, I didn't die and nobody I knew died, but I did chip a nail," and that's not what I mean. I'm not trying to downplay or diminish what happened. I'm just ...

Look, I heard the news as it was happening -- as reports of the first plane strike in NYC were beginning to come in -- and for the first time, possibly the only time, in my life (I'm not dead yet, so I can't say for sure, but it hasn't happened again since then), I saw the future unfold before me, with complete clarity and in its entirety.

I saw a government which was already horrific -- remember, Junior Bush was absolutely the low point of the presidency until Trump came along, and not even my fit of clarity saw him coming -- using these events as a basis for even worse things -- for increased surveillance, for jingoism, for hatred, for establishing the dominance of the worst elements of our political society. I saw it as the lever they'd use to try to cement control.

I saw the thirty percent of this country who are horrible, hateful people use these events as a basis to become even more hateful, to use them to justify their hatred and fear of The Other, to try to achieve their goals of what the American populace should be and who "deserves" to be here.

All of this unfolded in my brain like I was watching a movie. But I couldn't, and didn't, articulate any of that at the time. I wasn't able to. My actual thought was something like "Oh, here we go," combined with a nauseated feeling in the pit of my stomach.

And then I went into the forums where I spent most of my online time, and I said something which was pretty fucking cavalier and obnoxious, in front of the forum admin, who was a New Yorker.

I'm not saying we've never spoken since then, and it's not like she was a close friend to begin with, but I was damned lucky not to get thrown out of the place. (I did apologize for my assholeness as soon as I realized what I'd done.)

A few years later, on an earlier anniversary of this crap, I told the story above and a much better friend of mine -- also, let it be said, a New Yorker -- mildly chided me about it. And they were right. I had said the wrong thing at the wrong time, and it doesn't matter that what I said was absolutely true. I should have known better, nonetheless. That forum -- a place where the admin was watching friends and neighbors die in real time -- was not ready. It was far too soon.

The problem is, some people still aren't ready. Some people are in denial. Some people will never be ready, not if they can help it.

I cut the New Yorkers far more slack on this than anyone else. It is still difficult to this day to say to a New Yorker "Yes, some people died. In terms of terrorist events, it wasn't even close to what some people in other countries experience every day of their lives, and yet in the United States it's treated as the worst thing that's ever happened in our lifetimes, simply because, for once in a blue moon, it happened to us." New Yorkers are not prepared to think that way, even now, because it wasn't people dying on TV to them. It was people dying right there. That's hard to shake.

Meanwhile, there are people everywhere else in the country who refuse to shake it, and in their case I believe it's deliberate. It's simply too convenient as an excuse, as a banner to rally for bad things.

Twenty-five years gone, and yet those events have set back the status of Islam in this country nearly a century (to cite just the most obvious example). There were already a lot of people who were itching for an excuse to demonize Muslims. They aren't going to give up the cult of 9/11 until we pry it from them -- or until they finally get the culture war they think they want, and it gets a lot more violent than that. We are inches away, people, inches.

New Yorkers get some leeway. The rest of the country doesn't. Sorry. (And, with bone-dry amusement, I note that NYC is currently one of the best and safest places to be a Muslim in the US ... which, alas, may not be saying much.)

It's fine to remember and honor the dead. It's a good thing. It's fine to be somber. It's fine to spend the day in reflection. The question is, upon reflection, what conclusions are you drawing?

If you're drawing conclusions like "We really need to do a lot better," then you can be my friend. If, on the other hand, you're drawing conclusions like "We never did nearly enough to punish Those People," you need to go straight to hell. Say hello to Charlie Kirk for me when you get there.

This is not rhetoric. Did you see some of the commentary today and yesterday, what with the confluence of 9/11 and Kirk's assassination a year ago (my god, time flies) and the GOP convention/Trump circus? It was fucking gross.

My online acquaintance Nora Reed likes to talk a lot about "civic religion." Go look it up, if you're not familiar with the concept. It's a useful concept, if for no other reason than when I first heard it, it finally gave a name to the kinds of things I have been rejecting instinctively my entire life. Civics-class stuff. Civics is useful in the limited sense that you should know something about how your elected leaders get elected and how to participate in your democracy, but in my schooling that was no more than about two percent of it, and the rest was rah-rah John Birch love-it-or-leave-it crap, and that shit didn't pass the smell test for me in elementary school and it hasn't gotten any less pungent since then.

(Which BTW is why when some right-wing good-old-days-that-never-were asshole bemoans "we don't teach kids civics anymore," my reaction is, "and good riddance.")

Anyway. 11 September 2001 was the day our civic religion slid into fundamentalism. Ever since then, we've had to listen to right-wing frothers say things like "Thar will NEVAH be sharia law in this-here country, not while I got a breath in my body" ... and when you look an inch below the surface, you realize that what they want for this country is a repressive theocracy no better, and in some ways much worse, than any ayatollah ever had a wet dream about.

Actually, they both probably have wet dreams about the same thing.

The problem, though, is not Jimmy Blowhard (R-TX); he's been spouting crap his entire life. The problem, as always, is the number of citizens who are willing to take him seriously. And the answer, as always, is: far too many.

9/11 was when I began to first realize that thirty percent of this country doesn't care if everything goes to shit as long as there is someone they can shit upon. That if you give them some group -- Muslims, women, people of color, trans folk, gay folk, doesn't matter what -- and tell them it is socially acceptable to shit on that group, they will be so thrilled about that that they won't care when you loot the place and then raze it. They'll be so busy kicking The Other in the face that they won't notice everything else burning down around them.

This disillusions me, to say the least.

Of course, one major problem here is that 9/11 disillusioned a lot of other people in this country in an entirely different way. 9/11 was when American exceptionalism took a big blow. For many of my fellow citizens, it was the first time It's Not Like That Here, We're Different took any serious damage. And they didn't like it. They didn't like it a bit. They didn't like it so much that they began the Glinner Gallop -- they ran in the opposite direction, out of denial and rage and shame, and got much, much worse very quickly.

I don't know why so many people in this country have this need to cling to the idea of American exceptionalism so strongly, why it seems to be so intrinsic to their psychological stability. I do know that I can't explain the 9/11 reaction to any of my non-US friends. If I try to, and I have, it just makes us look ... deranged. Perhaps there's a reason for that.

I'm not saying that other nations don't do exceptionalism. Some of them are so obnoxious about it that I actually avoid working with people from those countries, as chauvinism of any form gives me hives. But I don't know any other country which has this national psychosis about always having to be We're Different, of always having to dominate or appear to dominate at everything, of never admitting their faults. I don't know how we got this way.

This psychosis is far stronger in the right wing, which is why you may not have noticed it as much, because if you're reading this you're probably pretty far to the left. But trust me. I grew up in Louisiana.

This is one of the several factors behind what the right would like to do to education in this country, for example: It genuinely bothers them that anyone would be teaching anything negative about this country. They want to sweep all criticism of the United States away forever. They feel that criticism of our nation's many serious flaws does not make us better, more aware citizens; they feel it makes us traitors.

And if you are in that group, 9/11 kind of broke your brain. No, that couldn't happen. Yes, that happens in other places, but they deserve it. We don't deserve it. We never deserved it. There's got to be some other way to look at this. There's got to be.

Well, we didn't deserve it. But none of the other places where terrorism happens deserve it either. Except maybe ...

... uh, never mind, that's a bridge too far even in this outspoken entry.

I have, over the last year, begun forming a Theory of the Collapse. It's actually very simple, and it comes in three parts:

1. Ronald Reagan took all the guardrails off, and made it acceptable and legal for capital to do the things that they always dreamed of doing but couldn't. (It's amazing the number of graphs about various things which are like "OK, here's the point where it clearly shows it all began to go completely to shit," and that point is 20 January 1981.)

2. 9/11 broke the brains of most of the citizens on the right. Suddenly not only were they not safe and secure, but they weren't as special anymore.

3. Coronavirus broke what was left of their brains. They were forced to endure minor inconveniences to try to safeguard the public health, and they felt this was unspeakable tyranny.

We might have eventually recovered from those three things, but when you throw Donald Trump into the mix, it looks a lot less likely. I haven't been sure we'd survive this since he got reelected. I grow less sure every day.

Anyway, so, this is all the stuff that was going through my head as I was reading Bluesky posts and newspaper articles and television chyrons and such (I eat lunch out on Fridays, and the TVs over the bar are always on talking-heads news programs at that time of day unless there's a World Cup). All day long.

So, yeah, respect to the dead, horrible tragedy, not belittling that ... but, nonetheless, it has not been a good day.