Here’s why I think (the Wingnuts) have completely forgotten what really happened on September 11, 2001, despite their cries of “Never Forget!”:
*It’s been more than 8 years. Children born after it happened are entering the second grade right now. Kids in college were in elementary school when it happened. Destiny’s Child was still together, and Creed was still a hit factory. This trial should have happened a long time ago, but the Bush administration deliberately delayed dealing with it. Over 8 years, it’s easy to forget a major American tragedy like this, especially if it hasn’t seemed real to you in a long time---or worse, it never seemed real to you. Which, I’m prepared to argue, is largely the case with the Wingnutteria.
*They kind of think it was a Michael Bay movie in the first place. It all happened on TV, giving it that hyper-real feel that made it hard, even for those of us whose minds aren’t bent by Fox News, really feel the reality of the situation. On the day of the attacks, the reality of it seeped through the hyper-reality, but in the days following, the media made sure that didn’t happen.
*In the years since, “9/11” has turned into a shorthand for patriotic kitsch for the Wingnutteria, and doesn’t describe a horrific mass murder. For the flag-waving wingnut set, 9/11 brings to mind commemorative plates and coins, paintings of crying bald eagles, and the background noise for torture porn like “24”. There are many layers of kitsch and meaning between the phrase and the memory of the World Trade Centers collapsing (much less a plane hitting the Pentagon).
*The Iraq War distorted the issue. Since Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but because it became the linchpin of the wingnut revenge response, it became easier for war supporters to simply forget about 9/11 as being a real criminal plot to mass murder, and think of it simply as a rallying cry. How do you convict a rallying cry? How do you even try it?
*They don’t really think New York City is real. Like Atrios noted when the teabaggers complained that the Metro in DC works like a subway and not like monorail at Disneyland, “This is also about people not from cities seeing cities - especially DC - as big urban theme parks.” And if DC is a big urban theme park, New York suffers from that image even more.
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