The katechōn has spoken: in response to the Orlando attacks, Hillary Clinton believes we need to return to “the spirit of 9/12.” I’m glad she gave us a day to reflect, because the spirit of 9/11, as I remember it, was one of confusion and even awkwardness. On the morning of 9/11, my roommate said, “They bombed the World Trade Center!” From his wording, it sounded similar to the attempted, much smaller attack a few years previous. I got ready and went to do some software training, and during the session, there was definitely an air of… “Should we actually be doing this? I guess we already are?” I arrived in class, and it was decided — apparently on the spur of the moment — that classes would be cancelled. It was as though no one knew they were living through a world-historical event. We make fun of George W. Bush for reading “My Pet Goat” while the attack was occuring, but we were all like that.
For me, the spirit of 9/12 is the dawning horror of realizing, not only what has just happened, but what the US was going to do for revenge. It was my senior year at the very conservative Olivet Nazarene University, and I felt pretty alone in my concerns. I very distinctly remember a group of students crowded around Craig Keen — a professor I would come to treasure, but of whom I was very suspicious precisely because he was popular among Olivet kids — more or less begging him to say something that made sense and wasn’t arbitrarily cruel. I don’t remember what he said, but he met those basic requirements, which was a rare thing in those days.
The thing with 9/11 is that it really did feel like it came out of nowhere. Yes, I know that the short-lived X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen virtually predicted 9/11 and, difficult as it is to believe, the iconic War on Terror show 24 actually started prior to 9/11. Maybe it was percolating in our collective unconscious, but it was genuinely shocking. And that’s why this current tragedy can’t and won’t be a new 9/11 — because it’s all too common. It’s a theme and variation of the standard mass shooting, of which there have been hundreds. We all feel pain and anger and even shame about this, but not the shock of someone turning a plane into a suicide bomb. No one woke up on 9/11 and thought, “Oh God, this again?”
Almost everything the US did in response to 9/11 was unforgivable, but in one single respect, we did the right thing: we did exactly what was necessary to prevent another attack like that. Now it is physically impossible to do what the 9/11 terrorists did. Assuming the regulations remain the same, a 9/11-style attack will never happen again. I have my doubts that we will enjoy the same results this time, and not only because politicians are cowardly or corrupt. Box cutters and easy access to the cockpit were not a deeply embedded part of American culture. No one’s sense of belonging and identity hinged on being able to wait in line for the bathroom at the front of the plane.
UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that this post may be interpreted as being too soft on the horrible crimes the US committed in the wake of 9/11. It may surprise those readers to learn that this is not the first and only thing I have ever written. See, for example, this recent piece on George W. Bush.
An und für sich 
I recall having the same fear in the days and weeks after 9/11. A response was necessary but what form would the Bush response take? I expected a public outcry for revenge. In particular I was afraid a nuclear weapon would be employed. As weeks passed without a retaliation my concerns eased and I felt that the reaction would be less shoot-from-the-hip and more measured and thoughtful. Instead we got an unwarranted, opportunistic invasion of Iraq.
Currently reading the timely *Orgies of Feeling*
“In political discourse, melodrama often elides any form of suffering that cannot be reduced to an effect of the villain it explicitly names to be the cause of national pain. The suffering produced by common experiences of structural inequality, racism, homophobia, gun violence, corporate globalization . . .military action and Islamophobia remain unmarked – and at times, calling attention to them is deemed an assault on the nation itself. The mark of a good American, in melodrama, is the capacity to suffer with others, but only in their experience as joint victims of sanctioned villainy. In other words, melodrama’s moral economy generates national out of an attachment to a shared virtue injured by villainy, and at the same time both homogenizes and renders illegible more commonplace effects of political violence not produced by the evil that melodrama diagnoses.”
– Elisabeth Anker *Orgies of Feeling*, 34.