3,200 on Thursday. 2,400 yesterday. On average, Covid is killing around as many Americans as died on 9/11 every single day.
The very same people who were willing to send American children to war, spend trillions of dollars nation-building, commit war crimes, torture prisoners, & build a massive domestic-surveillance regime in response to 9/11 ... are unwilling to wear masks to stop a daily 9/11.
What's uncomfortable to talk about is that, especially for the loudest post-9/11 voices, it wasn't really about the lives lost. It was about ego injury, about being hurt by a group of brown people we'd been socialized to think of as primitive & weak.
The whole ensuing cascade of horrors was mostly about repairing the injury to the large & tender egos of America's self-style Manly Men. The official elite discourse somewhat obscured this, but it was very, very clear when you read the war bloggers or watched Fox.
Why does this 9/11 20th anniversary feel weird & muted? Because the real historical significance of 9/11 is that it marked the beginning of a downward spiral for the US, as a democracy & as the dominant global superpower. We're too close to that, to *in it*, to reckon with it.
And, just to bring it full circle, this explains the utterly hysterical reaction of US political elites & media to Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal. It wasn't about lives, it was about *humiliation*, the "Big Dog" running home with its tail between its legs, in failure.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
