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Just after 9/11, my grandfather asked me if there was an American flag hanging at the local store where I worked. He assumed there wasn't because it was a hippy "health food" store. There was. But the way he asked was like a threat, like if I said no something bad would happen.
I had lots of interactions like that, where people were constantly testing my patriotism, my associations with punks and leftists, my dedication to the new national obsession with bloody revenge. It was like a million little casual McCarthy hearings.
There was eventually a huge and popular anti-war movement against the invasion of Iraq, but before that, any opposition to invading Afghanistan or waving the flag uncritically was risky business (though certainly less so for white guys like me compared to other dissenters).
Ask somebody who was alive and conscious in 2001-2003 how many times they heard somebody accusing somebody else of being "with the terrorists" for uttering even the most mildly critical comment about bombing Afghanistan or rounding up randoms at Guantanamo.
It was surreal. Before the smoke cleared in NYC, we had troops on the ground overseas, a prison camp built, and a whole new agency called "Homeland Security." Nobody even used the term "homeland" before then, but suddenly it was ubiquitous, like it was all on a shelf ready to go.
The speed at which all this happened contributed to the "truther" conspiracies about 9/11 being an inside job. American never did things this fast. And it all happened with so little opposition and so little criticism that it felt like being swept up in an authoritarian tornado.
At one point it seemed like the only guy still openly critical of the whole operation was Chomsky, waving his tenured little hands in the air saying "I told you so!" while everybody else hid in the corner or shed their supposed principles.
Folks like Bernie Sanders who had always voted against wars (at least Republican wars) suddenly voted for one. Hitchens aligned himself with the capitalist imperialists he always said he hated. Meanwhile the Dixie Chicks and Ward Churchill got canceled.
I think back about that time period constantly, how all the worst things today were set in motion back then, and how almost nobody questioned it at the time and how nobody since has seriously tried to dismantle it, including Obama who had at least two full years to try.
I don't really have a point to this thread other than to reflect on how insane that time was and how we learned nothing from it and how those who periodically criticized it (when their team wasn't in charge) are now trying to revise the history to soften it.
