The 9/11 Cult

Robert sits down to talk to his Zoomer colleagues about 9/11, and how it became the source of a secular revenge cult

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Uh, nine eleven is in a couple of days. I'm
Robert Evans. This is it could happen here a podcast
about nine eleven. Um, well, as as Garrison said in
the intro, that we're not using it's about things falling apart,
and boy did that happen on two things that fell apart? Yeah?
Um yeah. So this was originally going to be a

(00:27):
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?

(00:48):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:32):
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

(01:53):
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,

(02:14):
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

(02:35):
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

(02:57):
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,

(03:24):
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

(03:44):
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

(04:06):
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

(04:26):
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

(04:48):
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

(05:11):
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,

(05:33):
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

(05:55):
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

(06:17):
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

(06:40):
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

(07:01):
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.

(07:24):
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

(07:45):
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

(08:05):
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

(08:28):
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

(08:48):
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

(09:11):
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

(09:32):
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

(09:55):
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

(10:16):
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

(10:38):
for the entire country. I think a good amount of

(10:59):
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

(11:20):
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

(11:43):
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

(12:06):
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,

(12:27):
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,

(12:49):
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

(13:13):
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

(13:36):
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,

(13:58):
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

(14:19):
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

(14:41):
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

(15:03):
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

(15:25):
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.

(15:48):
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

(16:08):
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,

(16:30):
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

(16:51):
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

(17:13):
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

(17:35):
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

(17:58):
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

(18:19):
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

(18:40):
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

(19:02):
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

(19:23):
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

(19:44):
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,

(20:06):
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

(20:28):
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

(20:50):
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.

(21:13):
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

(21:36):
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

(21:56):
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.

(22:18):
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

(22:39):
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

(22:59):
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,

(23:21):
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

(23:41):
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

(24:02):
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

(24:23):
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

(24:46):
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

(25:07):
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

(25:28):
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

(25:49):
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.

(26:11):
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

(26:32):
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

(26:53):
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

(27:15):
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

(27:35):
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

(27:56):
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

(28:17):
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

(28:40):
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,

(29:03):
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

(29:25):
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,

(29:48):
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

(30:08):
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

(30:30):
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

(30:51):
building of a mosque because they still see Islam as
an enemy. Yeah, it's uh, it's interesting. But Americans were

(31:15):
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

(31:36):
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

(31:58):
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

(32:19):
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

(32:41):
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

(33:03):
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

(33:25):
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.

(33:47):
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

(34:08):
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

(34:29):
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

(34:51):
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

(35:11):
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,

(35:34):
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

(35:56):
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

(36:18):
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,

(36:38):
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

(36:59):
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

(37:22):
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

(37:42):
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

(38:03):
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

(38:24):
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

(38:47):
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

(39:08):
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

(39:29):
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

(39:53):
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,

(40:14):
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

(40:39):
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

(41:11):
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
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