25 Years

It seemed like yesterday when the towers fell. Everyone who was alive at that moment has/had a September 11th story - where they were, what they were doing. And for several years afterwards the attacks loomed large over everything. Films, documentaries, conspiracy theories. Almost every writer of note, and a few who weren't, were expected to write their own 9-11 novel. There were memorials, official markings, solemn gatherings, minute silences. But then, this seminal moment of our time, a disaster that was as spectacular as anything Hollywood had served up, whose consequences devastated millions of people well beyond the long tail of casualty figures from the day, and utterly inescapable as an event has, weirdly, largely faded away.

Old father time could be the culprit. The world has sped up, culture is more fragmented, popular memory isn't what it used to be. You'd have to more or less be in your 30s to have first-hand memory of watching it happen live. And yet, that doesn't really work as an explanation. Arguably, the Kennedy assassination persists as a livelier presence in the popular imagination despite most people alive when it happened having gone. Looking at the perfunctory postings across British news sites on the quarter-century anniversary, they convey little sense of the shock that was sent through the transatlantic body politic. The only other event in recent years to match the wall-to-wall coverage of 9-11 is Covid at the height of the pandemic, and that too has been blotted out. In a world that's forever switched on, of endless positivity, trauma is to be negated by incorporation, usually as entertainment, or where that's not possible it goes unsaid and unremarked.

As we watched unfold on the news, there was a real sense of what now? What are the consequences? The myth of American invulnerability, an advantage it enjoyed during the two world wars, lay shattered and wrecked on New York's streets. It was a pivot point, a moment of carnage that changed everything. But did it really? Perhaps the fading of September 11th in wider culture is because, as things turned out, the trajectory of history, the direction American power has taken did not change in substance. Consider the counterfactual. How different would the world have been had the attacks not taken place? In their absence, would the invasion of Iraq, the million deaths that caused, and the resulting destabilisation of the Middle East not happened? Unlikely, seeing as Saddam Hussein's regime had nothing to do with 9-11 anyway. Afghanistan? The pressure for a "humanitarian" intervention there existed long before that sunny September morning. George W Bush's administration was hawkish, was stuffed to the gills with hard power advocates committed to maintaining US domination of the 21st century. The attacks were an excuse, a pretext for accelerating a timetable to remind the post-Cold War world who was boss by the crude assertion of military strength. The politics of that government had baked in war and catastrophe from the outset.

This is probably why 9-11 is fading. It was a shocking moment, but not one on which history turned. No attacks would not have made for a vastly different world to the one we've lived through since, which is why what-might-have-beens are absent. There was no innocence lost, nothing robbed save the lives cruelly taken. The future was set - the attacks only ensured we met it sooner than we otherwise might have.