American Culture Since 9/11

These are heroes then-among the plain people-Heroes did you say?
And why not? They give all they’ve got and ask no questions
and take what comes and what more do you want?
-Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes

September 11, 2002, has passed away, and so too the expected memory-fest. Pundits scurried about, as they had a year before, in order to ask the big question: have we changed as a nation or not? Our middlebrow magazines, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, pointed out that Americans were voting in record numbers to elect the next “American Idol”-the newest “reality” television event. Thus, we seemed to be settling back into our comfortable normalcy of vapid entertainment. Still others did their best to commodify our memory cells. The journalist Hanna Rosin explained, “Life magazine’s collections of haunting photos [of 9/11] has been turned into an heirloom edition-‘accented with pure 22kt gold and crafted to last for generations’-complete with its own satin-ribbon page marker. September 11 as coffee-table book, a display piece to help you ‘share’ such moments again and again ‘with your children and grandchildren.'” To remember this way seems not to remember at all.

Kevin Mattson teaches American history at Ohio University and is author of Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970.

...