The Siege

25 Years Since

Today is the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, which was the moment when my childhood ended. I in my sophomore year of high school. My school was directly on the other side of the East River as the towers, and I was in class as the first plane struck. I was not on the side of the building facing Manhattan, but heard a crash and a loud cry. I thought there had been a car accident outside but I didn’t understand the uproar of voices. I think I wondered aloud if it was a riot. A little bit afterwards, the head of the high school came into our classroom and we were ushered down into the basement. It was impossible to reach my parents for a few hours because the cellphones towers were overwhelmed, but I was given permission to go to my friend Chris’s house in Brooklyn Heights with a few other boys. You usually could see Manhattan down Chris’s street, but at this point the towers had fallen and the city was totally obscured by ash and smoke. Rather than watch the footage of the towers coming down over and over, we walked over to the local video store and rented The Siege, a 1998 movie about Islamist terrorist attacks in New York that result in the Army being sent in and civil liberties being suspended. Arab-Americans are rounded up and put in detention camps. In the end, FBI officer (Denzel Washington) saves the day; he faces down the authoritarian colonel (Bruce Willis) and the Constitution is restored.

I guess we were trying to prepare ourselves for what might happen. This seemed like the movies becoming real—there had been a spate of late 90s and early 2000s films showing the destruction of New York, even of the towers themselves—so it made sense to return to the movies. The image of America and its place in the world was created by Hollywood. When my parents finally picked me up, and we made our way back to our apartment in Manhattan, I assured them that Osama bin Laden would be assassinated that very night. I was thinking of movies like Patriot Games or Air Force One that depict fantastically competent covert commando raids to capture or kill terrorists. I wonder if the decision to eventually carry out one of these raids rather than use a bomb or a drone strike to kill bin Laden was at least in part to conform to this cinematic convention.

Of course, that didn’t happen that night. But George W. Bush seemed like a movie president, like Bill Pullman in Independence Day or Harrison Ford. He was playing the role perfectly and it was comforting. Gradually, it dawned on us that there wasn’t much there and he was out of depth, controlled by insane and evil advisors. He also wasn’t prepared for a vulnerable country: He was a baby boomer from the most secure and privileged caste in American society. People say that World War II ended the WASP ascendancy, but perhaps it was really 9/11. The big institutions of the Second World War and Cold War, like the CIA, failed. The old diplomatic consensus fell apart. Bush was already a patrician aping a cowboy, but after that different forms of right wing populism prevailed. People like to forget that the wars were very popular at first. Even the neocons were a kind of crude attempt to reassert the Pax Americana through force alone. The War on Terror was supposed to be WWII 2.0 rather than WWIII. A lot has been made of their Jewishness, but the neocons really were trying to provide the successor ideology for WASP hegemony—the Ralph Lauren (né Ralph Lifschitz) of the ruling class. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, the whole gang were shrewd political operators underwritten by a naive and sentimental patriotism, which is what made them so dangerous.

Once the plans for the Iraq War became clear, whatever illusions I had about the Bush administration were over. I think it helped I was still so young, so I was impervious to the “sensible” liberal voices that were joining in. It was obviously idiotic and a lie: Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. The WMDs were a pretext if they even existed. They did not in the end. But it was disconcerting that the country at large was so ignorant that it could be convinced otherwise. After that, I never had much faith in institutions. And neither did anybody else. The second blow was the financial crisis in 2008. Everyone in charge seemed either corrupt or incompetent. Then the door was wide open. A brief promise of American restoration with Obama. One cannot entirely discount the possibility that somewhere in the white liberal unconscious he benefited from a character type Denzel Washington had spent the previous decade perfecting: the decent, commanding, preternaturally competent Black man who turns out to be the stoutest defender of American institutions—like in Crimson Tide (1995) and, yes, The Siege. Then Trump, always on the alert for deals, knows a depressed property when he sees one.

You have to give Bush credit for one thing: when the attacks happened, he went on TV and said not to blame Muslims in general. That seemed like commonsense civics at the time, the sort of thing the president is supposed to say, but now hatred is openly preached by American politicians. They don’t even pay lip service to unity. Polls say the level of Islamophobia is higher now than it was directly after 9/11. The scenario in The Siege, with martial law and people being grabbed off the streets by heavily armed men, seems less farfetched today. Obviously the towers were an iconic representation of American power, which made them a target. But they specifically were the World Trade Center, a symbol of openness to (and domination of) the rest of the world. Since then, we seem to be falling in ourselves. We have been gradually closing ourselves off from the world as if under siege. But like in the movie its a siege we have imposed on ourselves. Who knows if we will ever see it lifted.