The World That September 11 Made

In the recent bestseller When the Clock Broke, John Ganz argues that the seeds of the rampant insanity at the heart of American politics today were planted in the 1990s. To take the title over-literally, the year we’ve been stuck reliving for more than three decades is, say, 1992. It’s a compelling and convincing argument, throughout which I couldn’t shake the subjective feeling that if forced to choose one point in political time that we are condemned to relive forever, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, it is the period between the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq. Going on vibes alone, it feels even more like the clock broke in 2002.

Richard Beck’s Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life is, at its core, this argument. He persuasively makes the case that we have lived for 23 years in the shadow of the burning Twin Towers and that almost no aspect of American life—economic, social, political, cultural—remains untouched by the collective trauma of 9/11 and our responses to it. All of us old enough to remember bits (or more) of the pre-9/11 world appreciate intuitively that something changed on that day; Beck’s achievement is to stitch together a coherent narrative of how a terrorist attack that we experienced, start to finish, in two hours became essential context without which our lives two decades later cannot be fully understood.

We are living in a golden age of Big Books, with authors like Malcolm Harris, Rick Perlstein, Adam Tooze, and many others turning out doorstop-size nonfiction that is as captivating as it is meticulous. Homeland throws its hat into this ring and holds its own among the very best recent examples of the genre. At just under 600 pages, the book is expansive but never leaves the reader adrift. Beck leads us skillfully through that museum of post-9/11 America, here a display on the Hummer H2, there a reminder that military planners and the federal courts seriously entertained arguments based on scenarios from Fox’s torture-porn TV series 24. Here something infuriating—Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Obama’s drone frenzy, “with us or with the terrorists”—and there something poignant like personal stories of loss and remembrance.

More than once Homeland felt like the twenty-first-century American version of the great Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy—other books may cover the events in finer detail, but none can equal it for giving the reader an authentic sense of having been there. In a few decades, when the large majority of Americans will know about 9/11 only as a historical event rather than as a lived experience, Homeland may be the book that comes closest to replicating the feeling of the contemporary reaction.  

Perhaps no book about 9/11 will spend less time recounting the events, strictly speaking, of 9/11 than Homeland. The odds are that you know that story already. If not, plenty of books exist to recount the minute details of who did what, when. Beck instead covers the day itself by reliving the singular experience of the television news coverage through which we almost universally experienced it (9/11 was in fact the final event we experienced collectively through media since supplanted or upended by the internet). Two decades is a long time in our fickle memories, and “What happened?” is now an easier question to answer than “How did we react?” or “How did it feel?”

Familiar names and phrases appear—Osama bin Laden, Flight 93, Rudy Giuliani, George W. Bush—but Beck succeeds more in recreating a sensory experience than a timeline of events. I already knew which planes struck which targets and when; Beck’s use of transcripts and video from television coverage of the day, highlighting the confusion, the emotions, and the disbelief of the on-air personalities, recreates the experience of seeing it happen in real time. I was 22 years old on 9/11 and thought that my memories of the day were clear and reliable. But Beck recounts news anchors on the evening of the attacks reacting in speculation-heavy confusion as explosions rocked Kabul—explosions that turned out to have nothing to do with the United States or the terror attacks that morning. Despite having watched it all live—and feeling confident that I remembered it accurately—I was stunned to read this detail. I had, and have, no recollection of it at all. This kind of memory-jog is a regular experience throughout the book, and worth the price of admission. 

Homeland covers an enormous amount of intellectual and narrative ground, and any book so ambitious risks becoming unwieldy. Beck effectively organizes it, though, around four intertwined crises either created or exacerbated by 9/11. First, and for my money most engrossingly, he examines the rising tide of militarism in American life. While this is most obvious in foreign policy, it is more pervasive (and interesting) in the quotidian aspects of American life. Our entertainment, our interaction with public space (think of how we attend a sporting event or use an airport now compared to, say, in 1996), our consumption habits, and our cultural affectations (such as the lionization of the first responder, a dynamic that has abetted the staggering growth of the power of domestic law enforcement in our lives and our politics) all bear the imprint of the humiliation, anger, and trauma that 9/11 provoked.

From the rise of surveillance culture to Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, Homeland finds the echoes of 9/11 everywhere and draws out the ways that paranoia and militant “security” posturing in our public space exacerbates, rather than reduces, fear. Whether discussing the fortress-like layout of the Ground Zero memorial or remembering how much we all loved a movie about a vigilante Good Guy who must use every cell phone in Gotham City to spy on the masses in order to keep them safe, Beck is not shy about dipping his toe in a lot of genres. The architectural criticism and film criticism are just a few examples that add color to what is, at its core, a work of political economy in the grand old tradition.

Fear and the quest for security quickly blossomed into Beck’s second crisis: the skyrocketing levels of xenophobia and racism that have been inseparable from the political, social, and legal responses to 9/11. The “war on terror” has been, in any meaningful analysis that isn’t devoted to exculpatory hair-splitting, a war on Muslims—Muslim Americans, people living in predominantly Muslim countries that have found themselves in the crosshairs of American wrath, and the incompatible messages from American leaders that Islam is a religion of peace yet every Muslim individual is inherently suspect. One need not look too hard at the politics of the U.S. (and most of Europe) over the past decade to see the logical end of that mindset. There is policy analysis at the macro level as well as heartbreaking, not to say infuriating, stories of individuals whose lives were derailed by Americans’ quixotic quest never to feel fear again.

Readers may be forgiven for thinking that the third crisis Beck identifies, an economic one, was the book until he zoomed out and saw greater possibilities (he does us the favor of letting slip that it was his favorite part to write). Here he produces a work of political economy that owes much to Mike Davis in its breadth, accessibility, and execution. Beck characterizes “Blood for Oil” arguments—the idea that corporate access to Iraqi oil resources somehow provided the decisive economic argument for invading Iraq—as more emotive than logical, falling apart rather quickly when we consider the actual numbers. He sifts the seemingly illogical choice by successive American administrations to commit more to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than the country could realistically hope to gain. Beck positions the U.S. of the 2000s as a hegemon in crisis—think of imperial Britain at the trailing edge of the Boer War—a fragile superpower more desperate to maintain appearances than to make rational investments of blood and treasure with expectations of future benefit. Interventionism, like nineteenth-century colonialism, transitioned from being an extension of American policy to the policy itself.

This is the meat of the book, the story of how political and economic elites used the national trauma of 9/11 as a fulcrum for a grand, and we must conclude disastrous, effort to assert American hegemony over a world system that no longer dances exclusively to tunes written in the White House and Pentagon. Though it is not entirely novel in its formulation or conclusion, Beck assembles perhaps the best answer I’ve yet seen to the deceptively simple question about everything the U.S. chose to do in response to 9/11: Why?   

The answer took me back to 1842, to the ignominious retreat from Kabul of the British Army—only a single man, a Dr. William Brydon, survived to reach Jalalabad out of nearly 16,000 people who embarked on the ninety-mile trek through enemy territory. It was a wound to early Victorian pride and British identity almost as severe as 9/11 was to modern Americans. The British response was to assemble what was openly called an “Army of Retribution” to march to Kabul, level it, and return to India. Nobody pretended the army would, or could, stay. Afghanistan would be no more under British control or influence after the infliction of violence than before it. They did it because they were frightened, and angry, and in a vengeful mood. They did it because they were mad, and because they wanted to, and to assert their role as the protagonists of reality in the global politics of the day.

So much energy has been expended since 2001 on attempting to understand how American policymakers could have been so foolish, and how they could have convinced themselves of the fantastical hogwash they recited with straight, earnest faces as the war in Afghanistan began and the war in Iraq was being sold to the public. Motivated reasoning is powerful and could of course explain some of it. What Homeland offers is a different frame for understanding the path we chose as a nation; it’s not that the Bush administration and its enablers believed they could win the game but that they were lying about what the game was altogether. Hegemony is a hell of a drug, and nations rarely behave rationally or find themselves persuaded by columns in a spreadsheet when attempting to hang onto it.

A fourth and final crisis, of accountability, rounds out the book. This section is arguably the least essential to the book, but that is no doubt colored by the fact that a tour through all the ways in which the architects and boosters of the “war on terror” and invasion of Iraq escaped accountability was less enlightening than it was simply infuriating. Unlike the rest of the book I didn’t feel like I gained any new perspective here on, say, Judith Miller’s poisonous reporting, Colin Powell’s legacy-killing pantomime show before the United Nations, the cartoonishly credulous and ugly rush to militaristic consensus, or the roaring cataract of lies from official sources on which the case for war was built. Living through it the first time was enough; reliving it only made me want to throw something.

With age I find myself ever more enchanted by truly Big histories, the kind where the authors can be forgiven for skimping on or mishandling some details in service of a resonant narrative that leaves the reader feeling like they truly see something they didn’t previously see. Trends in academic and popular history alike have been to focus on ever more granular detail, giving the reader a bulletproof and comprehensive history that isn’t particularly enlightening. It’s the difference, in effect, between The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Diffusion of Agricultural Implements in West Dorset, 1858–1863. The former takes many liberties, while the latter takes none; but at the conclusion, what has the reader earned for their trouble? Which lets the reader feel something?

Though the broad focus of our politics has shifted with the global rise of far-right political movements since 2014, we still inhabit the world 9/11 made—and indeed, Homeland touches on how the decade that followed the attacks abetted the rise of the likes of Donald Trump. It is a world in which we rationalize which rights (usually those of other people) we are willing to trade for the illusion of greater security from a terrifying kind of threat we have seen and can never unsee. To coopt a phrase a much younger person might resort to, there is little question that 9/11 still lives rent-free in our collective head.

There are nits to pick, as ever; the repeated use of the analogy between America’s response to 9/11 and the Indian Wars (an argument borrowed from Susan Faludi) eventually feels forced and distracting, for example. But the achievement of a really great book is that in the final telling, when the reader absorbs the last sentence and closes the cover, the appreciation of how it enlightened overwhelms the minor weaknesses. You can read better books about what happened on 9/11, but none can match Homeland for its recreation of the world that the attacks left in their wake.