The troubles we've seen

9/11 thoughts from Mark Crispin Miller, David Thomson, Richard Stallman and more.

By Salon staff

Sep 11, 2002 | 9/11 changed everything? Or 9/11 changed nothing? Everyone has an opinion. Here are a few assembled by Salon's staff.

David Thomson, film critic and author of "A Biographical Dictionary of Film," "Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles" and "In Nevada":

Twenty-five very bad things that have happened to us:

1. The institution known as slavery.
2. The excessive use of social engineering in the first 50 years of the USSR.
3. The career of Adolf Hitler.
4. The more or less continual state of famine in many parts of Africa.
5. HIV.
6. The ministrations of the Roman Catholic Church.
7. Disneyfication.
8. Being in Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Dresden on the wrong mornings so that an example might be made.
9. The first day on the Somme, 1916.
10. The other days there.
11. The prolonged events in Indo-China that served to delay the formation of a single, independent Vietnamese state.
12. The Black Death.
13. Photography in all its forms.
14. The Spanish Inquisition.
15. The Spanish Civil War.
16. The Spanish Flu.
17. The Dark Ages.
18. Global warming.
19. Oct. 31 1971: Tidal wave at Orissa, east India, kills 15,000.
20. Other events like those of No. 19 that we have forgotten or never heard of.
21. The various attempts to preserve order in China before 1949.
22. And after 1949.
23. The collective failure of U.S. intelligence before Sept. 11, 2001.
24. The events of Sept. 11, 2001.
25. The ball going through Billy Buckner's legs.

So, get a grip, New York, and make up your mind whether you're one tough city, or just the center of attention.

Janice Crouse, executive director, Beverly LaHaye Institute in Washington, and Bush administration delegate to the U.N. Children's Summit:

9/11 profoundly changed people's attitudes toward America and made us much more patriotic, much more willing to look foolish in terms of getting teary-eyed when we hear "God Bless America" and in doing the kinds of things that patriotic Americans typically do. On the other hand, I think in a strange kind of way it made us more blasi. We looked terror in the face and said, yes, it was a tragic event, but tragic events happen and there's nothing we can do and life goes on. We've continued on in our self-centeredness and we have not really altered our basic priorities and values in any kind of significant way.

We are superficially spiritual, but Barna Research reports that church attendance and other religious observances are not significantly changed. The bottom line is that while we say that we are more spiritual and we say it has affected us very deeply, it does not work itself out in our lifestyle choices and our values.

I expected us to be much more outraged and to overwhelmingly say this will not stand, and I see us backing away from a willingness to endure personal discomfort or inconveniences in terms of airport searches, being willing to say, "Yes, we must profile," and in terms of a commitment to military action.

Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media ecology, New York University Department of Culture and Communication:

Just after 9/11, I was one of those who thought, and said out loud, that the catastrophe might knock some sense into the gibbering "culture" of the U.S. media. Now there would be no more prime-time seminars about the likely cruising style of Gary Condit, no more shark watches, and quite a lot more coverage of, and talk about, the wider world. (The term "Afghanistan" had long been used inside the TV news biz as a handy term for all those faraway and overcomplicated stories that the advertisers didn't want to see.) And I believed that there would be a lot less dumbbell irony, a lot less potty comedy, and a lot less homicidal stand-up from the right. In short, I thought that Adam Sandler was all through, and that Ann Coulter would soon be forgotten, if not gone, and that the news would finally try to tell us some things that a free and democratic people needs to know.

Boy, was I wrong. Everwhere you look, Ann Coulter's up there on her broomstick, cracking manic jokes about mass murder, and Adam Sandler's said to be involved in seven movies soon to flood the multiplexes. Now I am old and wise enough to know that such bad acts are always with us, so I'm only disappointed -- and, on cool reflection, not surprised -- that there isn't more stuff out there like "The Simpsons," "The Sopranos," "Lovely & Amazing" or Wilco. On the other hand, I find that I am absolutely flabbergasted at the many jumbo helpings of outright crapola that our "free press" has been laying out for us day after day since 9/11. While foreign journalists routinely tell their readers and/or viewers what's going on -- inside Afghanistan, Iraq, D.C. and all throughout this land of our -- our journalists don't tell us anything.

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