The 9/11 Cult

slightly cruder episode than it wound up being. But I'm just gonna I'm just gonna delve into the script and uh, Chris Garrison, you guys, just buckle in, because the reason I have you both as guests on this is that you are both too young to remember nine That's not true. I remember, I remember why I remember? Were you like four?

I hope? So yeah, I was four, But I remember my mom like so she she was trying to explain the Pentagon, right, and so she has like a coaster on the ground and she's making an airplane with her hand is just going into anyway. So, as I said, neither of you properly remember nine eleven. I I don't remember that even I I was at the age where every moment of it is burnt into my into my brain.

As is the reaction. So I wanted you both on this because we're gonna talk about how nine eleven kind of became a cult um and how to maybe how to maybe deal with that, and then we'll be chatting about Glenn Beck's nine twelve project, which is something I'm

sure neither of you are very familiar with. Now. In its sixth season, the popular cartoons South Park ran an episode in which Jared Fogel, who was at that point just a subway spokesman and not a convicted child molester, came to town and announced the start of a new program to give everyone AIDS. Now, he was talking about dietitians and personal trainers to help people lose weight, but everybody heard AIDS the disease, which led to wacky hijinks.

That's the episode. It ends when everyone realizes they'd misunderstand good Fogel and they all laugh. Uh. This leads them to realize that AIDS is finally funny, because things that are tragic become funny exactly twenty two point three years after they occur. That's the joke in the episode, and went on to become a minor little internet joke that, like you know, once you hit that twenty two year point,

you can laugh about something tragic. We are now at like twenty one years and change since September eleven, two thousand one, and I think if we're all honest, most of us can admit that we've laughed at a lot of nine eleven jokes. We're recording this the day the Queen died, and people are like photoshopping her face to be the Twin Towers, and it's so it's quite a time on the old Internet. Now. I think the first I think the hardest at least that I ever laughed

at nine eleven joke. I'm sure it's not the first time was this picture of Trump Tower that was posted to Twitter like right after he got inaugurated, with the text George Bush, do you thing um? Still an excellent nine eleven joke? Now. The first person with any kind of platform to making an eleven joke was the recently

deceased comedian Gilbert Gottfried. In September twenty nine, two thous one, he took part in a roast of Hugh Hefner at the New York Friars Club, and I'm gonna play you the audio of that right now, I have to catch up flight to California. I can't get a direct flight. They said they had to stop at the Empire State Building party. Tame, extremely tame joke. Honestly not a great joke. UM, but it went on too. It was It's probably like maybe the most famous and like kind of stand up

history like bombs um. Gottfried and said himself said that he lost the audience more than anyone else ever has. UM. I think it caused some career problems for him. Um. He later said, like a few weeks after, this was days after. So this is at the Friar's Club roast of Hugh Hefner on September twenty nine. Is this work too soon? It's from UM, well yeah, this I mean, I don't I don't know that it originated there, but

this was the response to him. Um, and I think it's the first time I ever recall hearing someone say that. Godfried said that like the reason he decided to tell a joke this close to nine eleven was that he was personally offended by the fact that anything could be

too soon to make a joke about. Um. One of these is interesting about this A little side thing is that like, after bombing and getting shouted at by the audience, Godfried like decided to get them back by telling a particularly long and foul version of the Aristocrats, which is a meta joke about jokes primarily anyway. Um, it's basically just being his foul mouth to shoot can possibly be

to an audience. Um. And that that audio has been lost to time apparently, But boy, you can watch a fun documentary about the Aristocrats if you want to learn more about that now. I think the first good actual comedy bit about nine eleven came out a little bit after this. This is about two weeks after the day and a couple of months later at like the three month point. South Park season five aired, Uh, and they

ran an episode about nine eleven. Um has been criticized rightly so because there's some kind of racist bits of humor in there, using that's not surprising. Um. That said, it's also kind of a valuable snapshot of history. For one thing, The huge part of the episode is just kind of like the Afghan child counterparts to the main characters in the show, walking around their town as everyone

is murdered by US air strikes. UM. So it's it is not like the it stands kind of an opposition to sort of the kind of like bootlicking responses you got for For some context, the show The West Wing, which is the favorite show of everybody who runs anything in politics right now, ran an emergency nine eleven episode like a couple of weeks after the attack, which was the kind of turnaround you didn't do in TV at

that point in time. So you put in a ton of effort to have this special nine eleven episode of The West Wing. Um that number one. In the alternate West Wing universe, there's no nine eleven. There's like some vague like there's basically basically the episode focus on like a bunch of kids on a tour getting stuck in the White House because it locks down because some vague terrorist attack thing happens in a fake country they made up.

So when the West Wing needed to talk about Muslims, um and kind of like the breakout piece of this. While there's two breakouts, one of them is a very racist retelling of the story of Isaac and Ishmael that explains like why Muslims are always so angry all the time, um.

And then the White House Press Lady C. J. Craig goes on a rant about how awesome the intelligence apparatus is and how like what good people uh CIA agents are, and how the best thing to do for politics sometimes is to have a guy dressed as a waiter murder somebody with a silence pistol like it was out of

its mind, unhinged. That's the fucking like. So the fact that South Park does an episode that's like, yeah, we're gonna murder a bunch of people in Afghanistan for no reason is like, not a not a bad response, not a bad thing to recognize about that day. Um, the other things that are like pretty good or pretty I think meaningful sort of bits in that episode. It opens with all of the kids at the bus stop wearing gas masks as they stand in line for the bus.

There's a piece in that episode that kind of sticks with me today still, um that I'm gonna play for you guys. I don't know, I always found that bit fun. So when the school bus arrives, there's a cop on it, searching bags and confiscating items that might be used as weapons. The school classroom doors are reinforced with a massive military grade lock, which resonated more in a time when like

school shootings weren't a constant thing. Um, and it it kind of hit me because, you know, when this episode came out and I watched it when it came out, I was at middle school, Clark Middle School in Plain, oh, Texas, and on nine eleven and twelve, the attacks were like the only topic of discussion that anyone had. And I have this vivid memory of a couple of girls in my US history class weeping because they were scared that

Al Qaeda was coming for our schools next. Um, Like, this was a a very real worry for kids that I grew up with of what like Midland, Texas or something. No, it was, indeed, it's a big school. But like, I don't I'm certain that fucking Osama bin Laden had never heard the name plane of Texas, let alone the Joatha thing with like anytime a plane was like going down, people would point at it and be like, oh my god,

yeah yeah, um No. That was definitely a meme and there was, you know, one of the most famous ones was this this video called Triumph Dot a v I that started to spread on the Something Awful forums. That was just footage of the September eleven attacks set to yakety sacks um. And again, these were all kind of the comedy that that you know, the South Park put out here and that you saw, and stuff like the Triumph video were reactions to how fucking seriously everybody else

took nine eleven right. Like I have to, I have to point out that like watching an episode like this or watching something like Trump felt like legitimately transgressive in the days and weeks after nine eleven, because it was kind of a as we'll talk about, had turned into kind of like a secular cult um. And I think people who were just a few years old then or

born after nine eleven missed this part of nine eleven. Um. I think you inherited the wars and the intrusions on civil liberties and the creeping fascism, but not the derangement by terror that had preceded it. Like everybody's permanently deranged from nine eleven, But you didn't really get to know people before that kind of happened and drove a lot of them mad. As a kid, it was like a

strange and exciting and scary moment. But I think my parents and I think the people who were kind of in their age range, um, completely lost their minds, and oddly that that South Park episode has kind of the best depiction of that too. There's a scene in which stand who is one of the main characters they're all like middle school kids, walks into his house and sees his mom like lying on the couch staring blankly ahead

UM and just like weeping. She's surrounded by tissues. She's been crying for days, UM and as her husband says, she's just been watching CNN for like the last eight weeks straight. And the the image of her just kind of like lying on the couch staring at the TV is I can remember every adult that I knew as a kid doing that, and it really did go on for days, Like people moved around as if they were

like in kind of a shocked stupor. I'm sure there's places where this wasn't the case, UM, But for my family, who were very very conservative people, and I think for people particularly who lived closer to the attacks, like it was just this period of um like post traumatic stress for the entire country. I think a good amount of research backs up the act that this it had this kind of and I think it is hard to understand if you weren't there impact on people. I found a

Pew Research study that I'm gonna quote from now. Our first survey following the attacks went into the field just days after nine eleven. From September thirteenth seventeenth, two thousand one, A sizable majority of adults said they felt depressed. Nearly half said they had difficulty concentrating, and a third said they had trouble sleeping. It was an era in which

television was still the public's dominant news source. Said they got most of their news about the attacks from television, compared with just five percent who got their news online, and the televised images of death and destruction had a powerful impact. Around nine and ten Americans agreed with the statement I feel sad when watching TV coverage of the terrorist attacks. A sizable majority seventy percent found it frightening

to watch, but most did so anyway. Fear was widespread, not just in the days immediately after the attacks, but throughout the fall of two thousand one. Most Americans said they were very twenty eight percent or somewhat forty five percent worried about another attack. When asked a year later to describe how their lives changed in a age a way. About half the adults said they felt more afraid, more careful, and more distrustful or more vulnerable as a result of

the attacks. And I think you can't separate this because the main people were talking about here and we're talking about the response to this. When we're talking about the people who got to make decisions, it's boomers, right, which is not all that different from how it is today, but even it was even more so boomers then. And you know, my parents and the people of their generation are all children of the Cold War. They both grew up,

my parents on different military bases. Um. And I can remember, you know, my dad told me stories about doing like duck and coverage drills as a kid, like literally hiding under a desk to get ready for an atomic bomb. Um. His family like went out into the countryside during the Cuban missile crisis to hide because they were afraid all the cities we're going to get nooked. And this is

not These are not uncommon experiences. So you have to think, like all of the all of the adults were either very close to this period or had spent most of their formative years, like constantly scared of being ordered by a nuclear weapon. Um. There have been clinical like studies and stuff that have shown that that fear of nuclear annihilation is a major factor and anxiety like it's not ever been properly I think explained how much that fucked

up that generation. But what you had is all these people who had spent the first couple of decades of their lives living with the sort of damocles over their heads. And then the war ends, right, the Cold War ends, the USSR falls apart, and suddenly people aren't talking about nuclear warfare for the first time in anybody's memory. Um, And I think for most of that generation they felt

safe for the first time. There was this kind of celebration that was pretty bipartisan that capitalism and democracy had triumphed and that like this kind of horror that had

stalked through their childhood had been defeated. When people like Francis fuki Yama talked about the end of history, what Fukiyama meant was that liberal democracy was kind of, in his eyes, the end of the evolutionary road for states, which is a flawed idea, but the intern pritation that I think people like my parents had was that we didn't need to worry anymore, right, like that that's the end of history, right, our way of life had one,

and we like we we didn't need to worry. And in nine eleven happens and suddenly this decade or so of relief from that all ends in a minute, and all of that fear that they lived with their whole lives came roaring back with abandoned. Nine eleven was like the emotional equivalent of splitting an atom. And and the Internet that was released by that is going to be

used for something, right. I want to kind of touch on that a little bit, because I mean, I obviously don't remember the nineties because I wasn't there, And it is such a fascinating idea to me of like this time where nero liberalism kind of reached their paradise, like like we didn't we could we we? We we did

the thing. We found the spot And how that you know, talk about like the edge of chaos theory, how it was built up to this super high point and then all because because it got so high and then immediately crumbled um and shot down. And there's this thing that one of my favorite there's graat. Morrison talks about how nine eleven kind of became this moment where the world of imagination and the world of like the lowest material

visceral reality crashed into each other. Um. And he says a quote the collapse expressed itself in the material world when the twin towers of the World Trade Center were reduced to dust by determined extremists. When cement occurred, reality

and fiction began their slow collapse into one another. After the fall of the towers, quote unquote, reality became more fictional, and quote unquote fiction became more realistic, I think plausible, realistic, superhero movies like The Dark Night films, fake news, deep fakes,

a r VR, and the rise of magical thinking. Um. And I would extra plate that out to like stuff like you know Q and on um and you know the how just these images that we thought were only viewable in film and television, uh, became descended down onto the onto the dirtiest, most visceral material plane. Um. And then things that were fake, like this idea like the Perfect Nineties, It's gonna be this is gonna continue continue

like dis forever that fiction. Uh, it felt almost more real like it like that that that should have been what's real and it's not anymore. Yeah, it feels like there's an alternate and I think that's part of why liberals are still so goddamn in love with the West wing. And by the way I talked about liberals, my parents, who loved Ronald Reagan more than life itself, watched every episode of that show. They thought it was wonderful. And

the Republicans are always portrayed very sympathetically on the West wing. Right, it's very much this noble opposition sort of idea um and uh, the the that I think there's something in that that there's lists almost since that we've been locked out of the right reality. And that's that's what you know, That's what liberals are constantly harkening back to with with nine eleven. But it's also or with with stuff at the West wing. But it's also like what conservatives. I

think for a while they were looking for that. I think that's what George W. Bush promised and failed to deliver. Um. It's what they were hoping to get with Romney and when that didn't happen. I think part of what's going on with Trump is this desire. Part of the desire to burn it all down is the inability to get back to this imagined If you're talking about the collapse of reality and fiction going into each other, that's what

Donald Trump represents. He is this so fictional person that in order to meet this new world of reality and fiction the same thing, you need somebody that under that, that represents that. Um So they turned to him because he he was meeting the way they saw the world was going. The reality and fiction are going into each other, So you're going to get the reality television president who who who? Who kind of embodies that essence on a

very very visceral level. And I think that's part of why when you have of nine eleven happen, you have all of this energy released. Both parties kind of come together in this idea that the United States should strike back and that we were at war. It's rightly pointed out by people that particularly protests against the Iraq war

were massive, and they were, they were historically large. But President Bush was also the most popular president of our lifetime briefly, and it's because people were in line behind this idea that we need to hit someone well and and I think something that's important about this that's completely forgotten is that the invasion of Afghanistan there was like no protests. There were there were a few, but like the left imploded, Like here's I'm going to read a

quote from Doug Henwood. This is an attack on us. There is a near certainty that something will be done soon. Clearly considerable use of force will have to be used to capture these motherfucker's um like Adolph read He's like talking about how like there's gonna have to be military action. Like a bunch of the people from like who like the the old school, like anti Vietnam War protesters like from STS are like, well, we don't oppose all wars, we just opposed bad wars, so like here we should

go in vadive guys like everyone lost their minds. Well, and I wanna what I really the core of when I talked about today is why that happened. Because I think there's on particularly kind of some of the more superficial left wing analysis of this, this idea that like George Bush did what he did in response because he's

like this Christian holy warrior um. And there's a couple of reasons people do this, including the fact that he once referred to the invasion of Iraq as a crusade, but as a general rule, what Bush did was not because of his Christianity and had nothing to do with any kind of conflict with Islam in particular. What it was was the reaction of a group of a kind of fundamentalists, fundamentalists of belief in the American state, reacting to an attack on the sanctity of that kind of idea.

Uh um. And this is this is you know why all these liberals were on board at least with you know, the strike on Afghanistan or attacking Afghanistan. Christopher Hitchens probably no one embodies like what happened to a lot of the left better than Hitchens. Hitchens was a well known liberal journalist. He wrote an excoriating book about Henry Kissinger. Right, he's one of these people who was criticizing the Empire, who was attacking it for its excesses. For builds his

career on that and the nine eleven happens. And the first big thing he does is he puts out a massive column titled Bush's Secularist Triumph, in which he argues that the war on Terror is not a crusade, but a battle to keep religion in public power separate. And I want to quote now from a study published in the Journal of Political Theology by William Kavanav of DePaul University.

It's kitled the War on Terror Secular or Sacred. There may be some Christians who think that we are fighting for Jesus, but the battle is being one in the name of secularism. George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he and the US armed for Is have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. While the left makes apologies for religious terrorists, the right supports their obliteration to protect

our secular state. Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution,

and the liberals have gone a wall. That's Kavanaugh's summary of hitchens is article, But like what's going on there is really interesting because Hitchens is proceeding as an a priori assumption that the attack on the Twin Towers is an attempt by a theocracy to take over and destroy a secular state, rather than an attempt to damage economically a military enemy um and goaded into a war that would weaken it socially, militarily and economically, which is exactly

what had actually happened. The liberals that Hitchens attacks as former allies are basically saying, don't take the bait right, don't do the thing that he wants you to do, because it will it will lead to the results he wants to achieve. All Hitchens can see is that, like Muslim extremists are scary and they want to hurt him as an atheist, religion is doing things that hurt me, So I must destroy the people who believe in this city. Yeah.

And it's interesting because everybody, all of the people who are kind of on the side of this civic religion, which is which is why they're responding, because they're they're civic religion has been attacked and this strike on the towers, they all find kind of different ways to justify it. Hitchens is a prominent atheist, so it makes sense that he kind of sees it as a fight against theocracy.

If you go through a lot of footage of news anchors in the immediate wake of the attack Garrison, you and I were doing this a couple of nights ago. There were numerous references that the Twin Towers, which were a symbol of capitalism, and that they represent capitalist and American supremacy over capital It's like it's it's it's like the American supremacy of the economic system and and and like a reified symbol of capitalism. Almost like it's like

it's like an idol to like to the god of capital. Yeah, there's a there's a number of different things you can find making this point. But in a column that published on nine twelve, uh, the Washington Post editorial board wrote, for three decades, the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center stood as the symbol of American economic might, as powerful an icon for capitalism as the Statue of Liberty is for freedom. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, Yeah, it's amazing.

No people were just saying this ship the day. You ever think that's funny about it. It's like no one thought this before, Like these are cheap fucking buildings, like the world trades like a license Like it's literally it's just like license is a name is license out. It's like that, you know, But that doesn't because again, what what you by saying this when they're saying like, for three decades, this was the symbol of American economic might.

People and I keep going back to my parents, but I think they represent a lot of Americans saw the defeat of the so be A Union as being achieved by the U. S economy, by capital, right, and and that's the thing that ended history. That's the thing that got them to their neo liver paradise. It's the thing that saved them from the nukes. And so by taking these towers down, bin Laden basically killed Superman. Right, That's

how they're reacting to it. Um. George Bush and Christopher Hitchins and the Washington Post editorial board, they all saw their support for war not as as not based in religion. All of them would have denied this right, Um. But Kavanaugh argues that they were motivated primarily by what he calls the civil religion of the United States, which is why I've been using that term. I'm gonna quote from

his paper. Again, the United States has its own civil religion, which they're relying on the support of Christians and undoubtedly borrowing much from Christian imagery, transcends mere sectarian religion to unite all Americans on a higher ground. Indeed, this is what makes secularism compatible with civil religion. What Robert Bella calls traditional religion is privatized, while civic rituals revolve around a generic God who under its America's identity and purpose

in the world. In this sense, Andrew Sullivan is right. This is a religious war. The war of which nine eleven was a significant marker, is not extremist and expansionist religion against a peace loving and neutral secularist order. It is rather the violent confrontation of Islamist terrorism with the civil religion of American expansionism, that is, the evangelical insistence that liberal social order is the only viable kind of social order. It is what Tarik Ali has called the

clash of fundamentalisms. And I think that's important because I think one way area in which the left really got things wrong and sort of their interpretation of what happens in this period of seeing it as a clash between kind of Christian fundamentalists as embodied by George Bush and Islamic fundamentalists. No, no, no, The people who were leading this country, including Bush, but including most of liberals, were America fundamentalists. They were fundamentalists in the idea of the

secular American state, and so were my parents. As conservative as they were. My family was never about you know, Christianity needing to be spread over there. It was about this this belief in America as something holy and that's something holy and sacred had been struck on September eleven.

I will say I I think, I I don't know, it's easy for me to see why people think about this on the left sort of as this Christian holy war, because like I grew up with a lot of people who like in the wake of this, who like really were full on into the crusade thing. Like I had classmates who are talked about how they were going to join the military to kill a Muslims, like there was I mean, like, I think this is a real thing.

And that's what I mean, that's sort of analytics wrong, that's what that's what Kavanaugh saying, and that it's kind of scaffolded on Christianity, but like that's fun fundamentally, like the fact that there are some people who are going and there being like this is finally religious crusade doesn't mean that's like what the leadership of the country is doing.

And as I have to do. I think that's part of why we get ump and the current Christian extremist surge is that, uh, it's a reaction to how kind of the neo cons go with this, because for the neo cons, this isn't really about this isn't about Christianity is something you use in this fight, but like that's not what you're fighting for here. Um. And I think there's there's a good amount of evidence for the fact that Americans identified something as being like holy about the

Twin Towers, particularly after the attack. UM from Kavanaughs study in Public Theology. Quote in August two thousand and ten of poll found that fifty six percent of Americans regard Ground zero as sacred ground, and a slightly larger majority opposes construction of a mosque nearby. For this region, a sacred aura surrounds the identity of the nation that was attacked on that day, and the attacks concentrated that sacredness

in a particular location in time. It is not necessary to go back to the more famously evangelical George W. Bush to make the link between piety and nine eleven and his speech at Ground Zero last September eleven, two th ten, Barack Oba talked about gathering at this sacred hour on hallowed Ground and talked about how those who are not only killed but sacrificed in the attacks. God was invoked, of course, but it was a generic God who belonged to no particular faith, because, as Obama made clear,

the victims themselves were of many faiths. Yeah, this is I mean one of the things that I think is interesting if you're actually trying to analyze this and you want to see kind of the degree to which why I think it's important to look at how people treated the space itself is sacred. Is how actual religion responded in the wake of nine eleven, and how Americans responded to religion in the wake of nine eleven. Um, because you know, it says they're about fifty percent of the country. See,

this is like hallowed ground in some way. Um. And I think there's evidence that people kind of rose up to defend this civic religion more than they actually did their real faiths. Um and this is because primarily the reaction on a on a population basis to September eleven,

as at religiosity in the United States continued to decline. Right, There's a public idea that it led to this like surge of people coming back to the church and getting religious again, but there's really no demographic evidence to back that up. And I want to quote from an article

I found in Christianity Today. For a few weeks after nine eleven, people packed the pews, but it soon became apparent there was not a great awakening or a profound change in America's religious practices, as Frank M. Newport Gallop Pole editor in chief, told The New York Times in November of two thousand one. Barne Group confirmed that conclusion in two thousand six, attract nineteen dimensions of spirituality and beliefs and found none of those nineteen indicators were statistically

different from pre attack measures. In other words, the nine eleven attacks didn't put American Christians on a trajectory towards more orthodox beliefs or more consistent habits of prayer, church attendance, or scripture reading. In so far as we can measure matters of faith, the decline of American religiosity continue to

pace spiritually speaking, said barn As David Kinneman. It's as if nothing significant ever happened, and that's something evangelicals have had to grapple with ever since the US did not turn back to God demographically. And while hateful attacks against Muslims surged, you have to acknowledge that a lot of those were from people who were more or less secular

um in the traditional sense. And this is part of why so many of the online atheists set Uh sided with the alt right in two thousand fifteen and two thousand and sixteen. Right, it's because there are a lot of those people, um, while they would have described themselves as an opposition to Christianity as well, were very much a part of the same civic religion as everybody else, and we're willing to engage in racist attacks against members

of religion as a result of that. You know, when when you look at the fact that a majority of Americans saw ground zero with sacred and opposed building a mosque. Because of that, a decent chunk of those people are not Christians. Who opposed the building of a mosque, right they're a religious or their atheist, and they opposed the building of a mosque because they still see Islam as

an enemy. Yeah, it's uh, it's interesting. But Americans were not moved to embrace religion by the attacks um and the deterioration of our sense of security that followed, and I think that evangelicals have never been able to actually accept this. A two thousand thirteen Barnard Group survey found that most Americans, but particularly born again Christians, believe nine eleven quote made people turn back to God. And this again has led to kind of a fetishization of the

period right after nine eleven UM. The writer of that Christianity Today article I cited earlier theorizes quote. My first suggestion is what we thought was hope wasn't lost at all. It was less Christian trust and character and redemption of God than American optimism coated with not quite biblical bromides that when there's bad, good will follow. Americans love to believe that everything happens for a reason, and that after a short period of time, sorrow will always turn into

joy and suffering into sanctifications. We quote Romans, we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, and incorrectly interpreted to mean that everything that happens to us will also somehow work out. Okay, And I think that they're onto something here and this really that this goes back to what Kavanaugh was saying about how this civil religion is kind of grafted on over the bones of Christianity, right, Um, And it's it's

there's so much. Part of what's interesting to me here is that well, I think it's it's worthwhile that he quotes Romans. I have to think that this, this belief that Americans have that everything happens for a reason, is at least as undergirded by like Disney as it is with scripture. It's undergraded by the way we tell stories, by the way fiction works in our society, which is a very unique to us. Right, Every culture does not

tell stories the same way. Well, and I think, like, if you want to trace that out to like, I think that's part of the reason why people are so unbelievably any conspiracy theories here. Yeah, if everything needs to have a reason, that it's part of an overarching grand

narrative that ties everything together. Yeah, and it's obviously again I don't want to like underplay, and perhaps we should do an episode maybe behind the Bastards on the reaction of the religious right to nine eleven, which was nuts

and it was vicious and horrific. I'm not I'm not trying to deny that, but I think one of the things that happens in this period is they grow increasingly infuriated that that is not shared by a majority of the country, that it doesn't bring a religious revival right, that that doesn't follow September eleven. Um. Now it is kind of there's a couple of things that are interesting here. Um. One of them is that, uh, the apocalyptic Christian believers, they do have kind of this this in with the

Bush administration. We know that at one point a bunch of apocalyptic like Christian representatives, like people who were kind of heading churches and stuff that believe there's this belief among certain Christians that you need to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem and bring about the end of days and all this stuff. There's a bunch of ship that has to happen in Palestine in order for the apocalypse to come, and they're trying to get US presidents to make it happen.

This is why Trump made some of the calls that he made, was to deliberately like give those people a win um, which is why some of the ship that happened in Jerusalem during the Trump administration um was able to happen. All of that stuff is stuff that they

went to George Bush. They had a two hour meeting with him and Elliot Abrams and a bunch of his staff where these representatives of kind of like the Pentecostal movement tried to get him to carry out this wishless policy of acts around Israel and Iraq to help them bring about the rapture. And the Bush administration didn't really do any of that. They have to take the meeting right, they bring these guys in, they don't give them what they want. It's not until Trump that a lot of

these guys get what they want. And what you what happens here because you've got this this death cult Christi group who see this as a crusade and who want to war with Islam, and they're constantly frustrated by the fact that even though he's supposed to be their guy, Bush doesn't go all the way for them, right, And this is part of why his military adventurism gets criticized effectively by guys like Trump who win the evangelical right, because the evangelicals say, like, well, if we're not going

to have a holy war, then like, what was this stuff? We just wasted a bunch of of money and a bunch of treasure and a bunch of young men for nothing over there. Um. And that's part of like what Trump wins on now, these two factions, these neo cons, the guys who wind up, by the way, the guys who are sort of on the civic religion side of the response to nine eleven are all the people who wind up running the Lincoln project right when you're talking

about the Republicans on that side of thing. And then the part the folks who break off the evangelicals, the people who want to holy war, that's who winds up making the core of Trump's support. Um and yeah, and that's uh, I think mostly where I'm going to leave us for today on nine twelve. Next week we'll have another special episode about Glenn Beck's nine twelve project that

will be kind of the finishing of this. But I want to end, because we're talking about why I did this, and why I started by talking about jokes about nine eleven is because I think understanding understanding the attack on the towers as like an attack on what had effectively become a god to a lot of Americans, even if they didn't realize it, right, the sanctity of this kind of neoliberal capitalist order, and it's it's it's um, it's

historic inevitability. Right. The fact that that's what was going on, that that that was so dear to people, that justified so much violence, twenty years of war, of bombing's, millions of deaths is part of why I think there's a value in joking about nine eleven, which is not to say that what happened wasn't terrible. Three three thousand and change innocent people were murdered um in a in a

truly horrific way. If you actually sit down and watch the footage the people falling out of the buildings, it's a nightmare. If you think about stuff like Flight ninety three, it's it's really stirring. You have these people who one moment they're heading to like see their families, or go on a work trip or something you're on a plane experience.

I'm sure everybody has, where you're just like trying to get from A to B and in the space of like a few minutes, they have to all decide they're going to charge a bunch of terrorists, fight in hand to hand combat, and then pilot a plane into the ground in order to stop it from killing other people.

That's that's powerful stuff. Um. What what I think is important is de sacralizing it, because there's nothing sacred about mass murder um, and there's nothing there's we shouldn't see what happened there is anything but what it is, which is a tragic um, a tragic act of violence against innocent people. But taking it as like an attack on

our soul, as an attack on like our our collective god. Um, when you start to do that again, it kind of justifies any sort of violence, like there's nothing, there's nothing that's off the table, And in in the first few

years after nine eleven, there was nothing off the table. Um, And we're never getting back to the world that we had before, which is ultimately like what all that violence was about, right, all of everything terrible that was on in the wake of nine eleven was justified, even if people didn't say it in the desire to get back to where we were in the nineties right in their heads and their sense of security. I'm not talking about anything is like courses, economic projections. I'm talking about in

the sense of like optimism and basic security. And I think one of the people who got this best in the immediate wake of the attack was Hunter S. Thompson, who you know, was still alive at that point for a couple of years, and he wrote a column. I think it was for ESPN dot com because that's who he was writing for in those days. His career was well past its peak. Um, but he wrote probably the best thing anyone wrote a week after nine eleven, and

I'm going to read you the end of that. Now, we're war now, according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this war might last for a very long time. Generals and military scholars that will tell you that eight or ten years is actually not such a long time in the span of

human history, which is no doubt true. But history also tells us that ten years of martial law and a wartime economy are going to feel like a lifetime to people who are in their twenties today, the poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with the lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed. This is extremely heavy news, and it will

take a while for it to sink in. The twenty two babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned, will never know what they missed. The last half of the twentieth century will seem like a wild party for rich kids compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. Yeah, that is kind of the feeling growing up in the early two thousand's and not

not knowing, not never actually experiencing the nineties. And yea, in some ways, you know, nine eleven feel it is very similar to me as something like Pearl Harbor, Like they're both things that happened, I guess before I was around, and it just they created the world that already existed in like it never it never like it, you know, it never changed the world I was in. It just

became the world that I was in. For me, nine eleven is my first memory, Like that is the first thing I remember and yeah, we got exactly the world that you would expect from your first ever reading nine eleven. Yeah it's um, I mean again for me, I think the thing I identify most is that little clip I played from South Park where one of the kids is like, do you remember when everything didn't suck? It's not really um?

So yeah, go out, um, tell a tasteful joke about nine eleven, and uh, try not to worship the state. It doesn't end well. It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.