Remembering 9/11

I remember September 11, 2001, very well. That day presents an odd challenge to me. As a professional historian, I make sense of the past from the scraps and remainders that other people have left behind, most of whom lived long, long ago. It is not my usual practice to draw upon my own direct recollection as a source for understanding the past. That infamous date—9/11—tosses me across the gap between history and living memory.

Early that morning, a little after 6:00 am, I stopped into my office at NSA. I had to grab a few things before running the kids to school. I was in the office for only a couple of minutes. Roy Atwood had also come in early, and so I wished him a happy birthday. Roy was NSA’s first president whose tireless leadership placed the college upon a solid footing. Roy left quite a legacy to our next president, Dr. Merkle, another great man who now is faithfully leading our college to even greater heights. That morning Roy and I exchanged a few lame birthday jests about aging. It was the usual stuff of office banter between a subordinate and a boss who get along well. Such banter has been a commonplace at NSA for thirty years, a workplace where folks labor really hard while also laughing at themselves. I retain definite memories of office banter as much as I retain definite memories of breathing. Yet I definitely remember the minute-long exchange I had with Roy that morning. We talked about his birthday and also about an odd report I heard on the radio on the way in. Some pilot had crashed a plane into the World Trade Center. Huh. On with my day.

I headed back home to resume our morning routines. On the way, I heard a report that a second plane had crashed into the other tower. Up to that point, I had been loosely imagining a sad aviation mishap involving a wayward pilot in a small private plane. Not anymore. This had been deliberate. When I got home, we turned on the TV to see the news. Brenda and I watched as we (mostly Brenda) got the kids fed and prepped for school. We saw the smoke billowing from the two towers, and those poor news anchors were groping for morsels of information. Then, at around 7:00 am, we watched the South Tower collapse. I knew those towers were huge, and the workday was well underway back in New York, so I surmised that I and my family had just witnessed a tremendous loss of life. The North Tower came down as I was running the kids to school.

When it comes to calibrating death tolls, my one-track-brain habitually ransacks the past for analogies. I’m built that way, for better or for worse. I remember guessing to myself that I was likely seeing something more deadly than Pearl Harbor or the D-Day landings. Could I be witnessing death at the scale of Antietam back in 1862—America’s bloodiest day? These comparisons wandered through my history-burdened mind, and then it struck me: today I am experiencing an event that one day I might teach. (The prediction later came true.) Every day I experience things that happen, but it is not every day that I experience history.

My brief conversation with Roy at the office, together with my family’s morning routines that followed, are now historical events. What do they represent? Now, with twenty-three years of hindsight, I have a lot more to say about 9/11, and I still have a lot to learn.

The events of that day highlight a transition from the modern era to the postmodern era. Consider how we are informed and entertained. Back in 2001, we all watched the coverage on television. But it was cable television, a shift away from the broadcast medium that television once was. TV grew up as a medium dominated by three major networks. Back then, everybody knew the Beatles, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, Michael Jordan, and The Cosby Show. If you weren’t a fan, you were nonetheless familiar with it. The icons of mainstream culture were never something we all liked or agreed upon, yet they were points of reference that we could talk about with one another. As we observed the events of 9/11, we tuned in to a major network or to one of the upstart cable networks. New cable channels were sprouting up every week, and the more they proliferated, the more the old networks receded into the white noise. This cable TV media-scape unseated the Big Three networks and paved the way for the streaming services we now have. No longer do we tune into the same sources of entertainment or information. Today’s college student may love listening to music, and yet he has never even heard of the band his neighbor listens to. The shows he watches never stream on his neighbor’s screen. No longer do we experience a cultural mainstream that forms a point of reference we all can talk about. Now we live in siloed niches that we have curated for ourselves. Now we all inhabit our own self-fashioned tribes of information and entertainment.

On 9/11, Nokia dominated the cell phone market. Cell phones were not connected to the internet. The many onlookers who captured footage of 9/11 had used their personal camcorders, which were increasingly common. The rest of us could view this harrowing footage only after a private camera operator shared it with a cable news outlet. A generation earlier this would have been unheard of; back then, the footage you saw on TV would have been captured by a TV cameraman. The camcorders that captured 9/11 served as another indicator that times were changing. Five years later, in 2006, Apple rolled out its first iPhone.

Osama Bin Laden was the arch-villain behind the 9/11 attacks. We Americans wanted him brought to justice. Our intelligence experts hunted him for 10 years, when finally we located him in Pakistan and Seal Team Six took him out. Most of us learned the news as it circulated through our social media accounts; few of us learned the news on TV. How times had changed in just ten years. Modernity was giving way to postmodernity.

Bin Laden himself represents another way that 9/11 points to a historical shift into postmodernity. He headed up the political organization that sponsored the 9/11 attacks, a network called al-Qaeda. Unlike our previous adversaries, al-Qaeda is not a modern nation-state. It is an altogether different kind of political animal—different than, say, the Kaiser’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. Just ten years prior to 9/11, we witnessed the downfall of our greatest international rival, the Soviet Union; and though the Soviet Union was different from us in important ways, at least it was a modern nation. We Americans could make political sense of the USSR, and we knew what we were dealing with. But as we reeled in the wake of 9/11, we had difficulty wrapping our minds (and our policies) around just what it was that had attacked us. We knew how to declare war upon other nations, as we did after Pearl Harbor. But now we found ourselves waging a “War on Terror,” whatever that means. Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network was a harbinger of things to come. It was a political power of a different kind, and its existence signaled the erosion of the modern nation-state.

Many people in today’s postmodern world order their political loyalties around likeminded networks rather than nation-states. We live in a global age that George H. W. Bush termed “a new world order,” a world transformed by global commerce, travel, and mass migration. In this new postmodern world, many of our next-door neighbors, and the folks who live down the street, may not share our history and customs. Indeed, we can still locate the borders of modern nation-states on an atlas, but these borders are far less useful for indicating a shared way of life than they once had been. Modern-style borders are definitely less reliable when it comes to identifying a person’s political sensibilities. Today’s political leaders exhibit a remarkable willingness to cast off the old rules that used to govern modern political life. Time will tell whether, or how long, the old nation-states can endure the pressures of these postmodern political impulses. If the nations do survive, I suspect they will look rather different from their modern-era predecessors.

History is the study of change, and so I have been highlighting the shift from modernity to postmodernity. It is a change I have witnessed. Any historical change makes sense only when we consider it against a backdrop of timeless truths. The events of 9/11 serve to underscore some of these truths that stretch across all ages. The men who hijacked those planes and flew them into buildings, and into that field in Pennsylvania, were mass murderers. The people they murdered were victims. They all were human beings who bear the image of God. Many of those victims were police officers, firefighters, and other good neighbors who entered those buildings. Others—those in Flight 93—fought back against the hijackers. They performed these actions in order to save precious human lives. They gave their lives to save others. They acted heroically, plain and simple, and such heroism is truly timeless. God is the judge, and his judgments are altogether right and true. He is the Lord of the modern age, the postmodern age, and all ages.

This is how I remember Dr. Atwood’s birthday on 9/11. Happy birthday, Roy!