TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Twenty-five years ago this week, we were left trying to understand what September 11 would mean for our lives. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial planes, flew two into the World Trade Center in New York and one into the Pentagon, while the fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The attack brought down the Twin Towers and killed almost 3,000 people. In the weeks that followed, President George W. Bush urged us to go back to work, get on planes, go shopping, take our families to Disney World. The message was that even as the nation went to war, life at home would go on as normal. It did not.
My guest today, writer Richard Beck, traces how the country we live in now was shaped by the nation's response to that morning. Cameras scan our faces at the airport. Flock cameras log our license plates. Many of the top-grossing films of the last 20 years are about armored men saving cities from terror. And ICE, an agency that did not exist before the attacks, built to find terrorists, now sends agents into courthouses, workplaces and homes to carry out immigration arrests, with more people in detention than at any point in the agency's history. This week, a petition signed by nearly 100,000 people want Zohran Mamdani, New York's first Muslim mayor to be excluded from the Ground Zero ceremony on the anniversary.
Richard Beck was 14 on September 11 and came of age in the America built afterward. He's a senior writer at n+1 and the author of "Homeland: The War On Terror In American Life." And, Richard Beck, welcome to FRESH AIR.
RICHARD BECK: Thank you so much for having me.
MOSLEY: So Zohran Mamdani makes September 11 an official day of remembrance, and almost immediately, there's a fight over whether New York's first Muslim mayor should even be at Ground Zero. What does that tell you about where we are 25 years later?
BECK: I think the first thing it tells you is that since September 11, Islamophobia has become the most tolerated, most accepted form of bigotry in the United States, because nothing else could explain people's objections to Mamdani being at this ceremony. He's the mayor of the city. He's an extremely popular mayor of the city. You know, it's outrageous, the suggestion that he should be excluded for no reason other than the fact that he is a Muslim. I think that there have been periods since September 11 where the depth and the intensity of the Islamophobia that pervade the country have receded somewhat, or people have just tried to ignore it. But it has been there steadily for the last 25 years, and it has not yet been confronted with sufficient force to root it out.
MOSLEY: You know, I actually can still see the image of former President Bush standing at a mosque - it was several days after the attacks - and telling the country that Islam is peace. And then we fast-forward to today. And there was this Pew Research study just released that shows in March of 2002 - that was six months after 9/11 - 25% of Americans believed Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence. And today that number is 51%. Why do you think that it got worse?
BECK: I think that the generalized bigotry of the Trump administration and the MAGA movement has played a major role. You know, of course, you remember that one of the first things Trump did when he became president for the first time was to announce his Muslim ban, the travel ban on people from several majority Muslim countries.
I think that when you talk about George W. Bush and the Islamist peace speech that he gave, it gets at one of the real contradictions of the war on terror as a whole, which is that, on the one hand, the war on terror clearly had elements of a revenge mission, you know, and Islam was portrayed as an inherently violent religion. And the hijackers who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks had to be understood as motivated solely by their religious fanaticism and by nothing else.
So there was this effort to portray Islam and Muslims as this group of sort of unthinking savages who you couldn't reason with, you couldn't persuade. You couldn't bring them around to, you know, seeing things in the American way. And so they just had to be dealt with using force.
At the same time, because we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a contradictory, simultaneous effort to portray Muslims as helpless victims of their fanatical governments who were yearning to be liberated by the Americans and then live just as Americans did. I think that those two impulses - these simultaneous ideas that Muslims are incorrigible savages, while also being victims in need of American rescue - that has never really been resolved. And to some extent, you can still see both elements working in the country's politics.
MOSLEY: You know, going back to Mayor Mamdani this petition that is out there, his answer to all of this has really been reassurance. I think he said during his last speech in the days before this upcoming ceremony that - I will proudly honor the families, and we will never forget. And that's actually the only message a Muslim, as you write can make publicly since 9/11, to reassure, not to argue, not to be critical of the war on terror. You describe Muslim student groups who wanted to debate the war on terror and found that they couldn't. What happens to a Muslim in this country if they argue?
BECK: Yeah. One of the immediate effects of the way the country reacted to September 11 was there was this broad-based political and social effort to essentially make it impossible for Muslims to act as citizens, by which I mean, as you point out, participate fully in political debate, discuss and criticize the country's law enforcement practices, discuss and criticize its foreign policy. You mentioned Muslim student associations at universities. Many of them found the kinds of events they could put on we're sort of anodyne, you know, here's the holidays we celebrate. Look how nonthreatening we are. Here's why Muslims are just as American as anybody else.
MOSLEY: You know, I'm just thinking, also, maybe how two things can be true at once, because at the same time, Muslims have also never been more visible in American politics. So we have Zohran Mamdani, who runs New York. We have Abdul El-Sayed, who won a Senate primary. There are Muslims in Congress who are critical of Israel on the House floor. And yet Americans have never been more likely to say Islam encourages violence. What do you make of this? I mean, is it basically that the second thing is a reaction to the first, as well, in addition to what you were saying about the rhetoric from MAGA?
BECK: Yeah. I think that's probably fair to say. Certainly, back in the 2000s, you did not have nearly as many prominent Muslim Americans holding elected office. And I think that the emergence of these prominent figures - like Mamdani, like Abdul El-Sayed, Ilhan Omar - I think that part of the recent re-intensification of Islamophobia is a reaction to those people. And, you know, the idea that Mamdani should be criticized because he hasn't said enough, spoken out enough against Islamist terrorism, it almost feels like a throwback. You know, that's the accusation that used to be thrown at anyone who criticized the Bush administration's policy in the early years of the war on terror. More recently, the accusation that you see getting thrown around constantly is this kind of cynical deployment of antisemitism accusations. You know, the really intense effort to make Abdul El-Sayed look bad because, you know, the streamer Hasan Piker, who is also not antisemitic, has supported his campaign. The antisemitism allegations today are what is primarily being used as the cudgel to say, keep your mouth shut. Don't talk about this stuff.
MOSLEY: Abdul El-Sayed called Israel's war in Gaza a genocide. And so then after a synagogue attack in Detroit, he said, hurt people hurt people. And now he has basically spent the last two weekends apologizing to Jewish Democrats, some of whom say that they'll now vote Republican. And the vice president is calling him very, very evil.
BECK: Yeah. I mean, again, you notice that it's a tricky line he has to walk. If he feels that he wants to apologize for those remarks, that's fine. But I don't think he should expect that that will satisfy the people who have been coming after him. I also think that it's really telling - the intensity of the Islamophobia, the demonization, not just criticism or, we have political differences, but Vice President Vance's use of the word evil, right?
Like, that's moved beyond the discourse of, we disagree about America's policies with respect to Israel. We have different views on whether the U.S. should support Israel. We have different views about whether Israel's actions in Gaza have been legitimate war crimes, etc. Calling him evil is something else entirely, and I think it's something that has roots - deep roots - that go back to the immediate post-9/11 period.
MOSLEY: My guest today is writer Richard Beck. We're talking about the 25th anniversary of 9/11. He's the author of "Homeland: The War On Terror In American Life." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I am talking with writer Richard Beck. His book is "Homeland: The War On Terror In American Life."
I want to ask you the question we've all asked each other for the last 25 years. Where were you on September 11?
BECK: I was a freshman in high school in suburban Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia. It was the end of my first-period class, which had a very lazy teacher who would usually get tired of teaching about 10 to 15 minutes before the bell rang and so would put on SportsCenter so that he could watch sports highlights from the previous evening.
So on September 11, he did that, like normal. But instead of SportsCenter, it was a live feed from ABC News. And it was surreal because we had no context. We didn't know what was happening, and it was just this helicopter shot of the Twin Towers with smoke coming out of one of them. And just a couple minutes before the bell rang, we watched the second plane smash into the second tower live.
Then the bell rang. We were sent off to the rest of the school day. And my high school's administrators made the kind of crazy decision, I think, not only to have the rest of the school day as normal, but they told teachers that they were not to discuss what was happening with students, not to have the TV on. And so all of us spent the day trading rumors in the hallways between classes, trying to find out what was going on.
And I remember quite vividly that, by the time I finally got home, which would have been - I don't know - maybe 3 in the afternoon, my understanding was that the Twin Towers, the White House, the Capitol building and the Pentagon had all been completely destroyed. And then, of course, you know, my parents had come home from work. We put the TV on and just watched the news for the rest of the day until...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
BECK: ...11 or midnight or so.
MOSLEY: You understood the war on terror to be a Bush thing, basically a Republican project. And then you graduated from college into Barack Obama's first year in office. What did that time period reveal to you?
BECK: That was a very destabilizing period to live through in terms of my own political development. And I think this is not just true for me. I think that's true for lots of people around my age because as Bush's second term was coming to an end, the standard way of interpreting the war on terror was that, you know, Bush was this idiot commander in chief. He had all of these Machiavellian people working for him - Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, John Ashcroft, etc. - who were trying to implement, you know, this insane regime change in Iraq, trying to remake the entire Middle East, you know, driven by hubris and this neoconservative nationalist paranoia.
And Obama very much ran as someone who was going to put an end to that madness. He had been critical of the Iraq War from the beginning. He touted that fact over and over again. It's a big part of why I think he was able to defeat Hillary Clinton in the primary, because Hillary was constantly having to explain why she had voted for the authorization for use of force in Iraq. But Obama - it's not that he said he was anti-war. He had a quote that I think - I'm not going to get it exactly right. But he said something like, I'm not against all wars. I'm against dumb wars. Right? So he was basing his stances on the idea that he was smarter, better informed, more thoughtful than, you know, the swaggering gang he was hoping to replace.
But when he became president, my expectation - I think a lot of my peers' expectation - was that we were going to get out of Iraq. We were going to wind the war on terror down. We were going to have some accountability for the people who had developed and implemented the torture program and the CIA's rendition program, you know, at black sites around the country. And it became clear pretty quickly that, in fact, almost none of that was going to happen, you know? He did reduce the troop numbers in Iraq to an extent, but he surged more troops into Afghanistan. You know, he gave the war in Afghanistan a new lease on life. And it wound up running for another - I mean, goodness - a decade-plus.
MOSLEY: You write about how he swapped shock and awe for drone strikes and targeted killings, tripled ICE's budget, deported some 3 million people. And when asked whether he'd prosecute Bush officials over torture, he said he wanted to look forward. This moment was a very pivotal moment in your politics. And did you feel Obama's war on terror maybe was in a way more dangerous because it was quieter?
BECK: I don't know if it was more dangerous than Bush's version, but it certainly wasn't less dangerous. And it became clear over time that he was not seeking to end the war so much as he was seeking to no longer allow it to be a spectacle. Bush had made 9/11 and the war on terror the centerpiece of his entire administration. That was supposed to be the meaning of his presidency, was the war he was waging against global terrorism.
Obama came into office, and his calculus became well, this war is going to continue, but I don't want everyone to be talking about it all the time. I don't want it to be visible all the time. I don't want it to be on the nightly news all the time. So something like the huge increase in the use of drones, that helped Obama's project because it reduces the number of American casualties that are happening. You're still killing plenty of non-Americans abroad in Pakistan and elsewhere, but those people don't make the news in the same way, you know, the flag-draped coffins rolling off a plane do. It was this impulse that Obama had to rationalize the war, to institutionalize it, to bureaucratize it, when I think what was needed was for it to end.
MOSLEY: There are all sorts of ways that we have changed, our communities have changed, that it's happened at such a pace over 25 years, we may not even notice it. I mean, you bring up how towns wrote ordinances against things like teenagers gathering, and there are now cameras in public spaces. It makes it harder for us to get to know each other spontaneously. That's just one. And then there is how Congress handed war to the president under Bush and then Obama.
The government has made itself harder to reach. We see the ways that ICE has morphed itself under the direction of the president to be an immigration enforcement arm. But many Americans might look at this list and see four separate stories, and some of them are about our safety. Make the case that all of this that we're talking about is one story about the ways that 9/11 has actually changed our world.
BECK: I think that one way to start to see those things as part of a single story would be to think about this idea of public space, and there has been a real serious degradation of public space. And I don't only mean that in the literal sense of, like, parks and plazas. In Lower Manhattan, I talk about a study that two academics carried out in 2009 or 2010, I think, where they looked at two neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan, the Financial District and Civic Center, and they said, how have the public spaces in these places changed since September 11?
And they found that in the Civic Center, something like 15, 20% of public space had just been closed off. It no longer existed. And if you expanded your definition of public space to include areas that were just much more heavily surveilled or where access had been restricted rather than completely done away with, it's more than a third. In the Financial District, where there are very, very few government buildings, there'd been this huge expansion of spaces that had been converted into what urbanists call security zones.
If you walk around the new World Trade Center complex, it's sort of an eerie experience. It becomes clear quite quickly that it's not a real public space. There are cameras everywhere. There are police everywhere at all times. And at the same time, the huge increase in executive power that has happened since September 11, and all of the presidents we have had since September 11, have participated in this and amplified it. The power of the executive has increased at the expense of the power of Congress, right?
And of the three branches of the federal government, Congress is the one that is supposed to be most open to democratic input. So when Bush decided to launch the war on terror basically on his own initiative, and there was kind of a - you know, at the time, a kind of show of congressional debate. And, yes, Congress did pass an authorization for use of military force. But people in the Bush administration were making it very, very clear - both to Congress and to the American people - that this was going to happen, whether Congress signed on or not.
Since then, Congress has often been far too willing to abdicate its role supervising how the foreign policy of the United States is conducted. And if Congress is absenting itself, if Congress isn't bringing its full institutional weight to bear on these policy questions, well, then by definition, American citizens have less of a say in the country's foreign policy.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is writer Richard Beck. We'll be right back after a break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is writer Richard Beck. This Friday marks 25 years since the September 11 attacks, and Beck traces how the country's response to that day - the wars on terror and the politics at home - reshaped nearly every part of American life in ways most of us no longer notice. Beck is a senior writer at the literature, politics and culture magazine n+1. His first book, "We Believe The Children," examined the daycare sex-abuse panics of the 1980s. His second, "Homeland: The War On Terror In American Life," argues that without 9/11, Donald Trump could never have become president.
All right. Let's get to your big argument, Richard. You write that if September 11 had not occurred, Donald Trump would never have become president. Make the case.
BECK: For me, the central fact of the war on terror - or the most important development politically that happened as a result of the war on terror - was the rise of what I call impunity culture in American politics, which is this idea that political figures don't get held accountable in a material way for wrongdoing anymore. I think that you could see the beginnings of this impunity culture with the Bush administration, with the torture program and Abu Ghraib and Obama's decision not to prosecute any of the people who were involved with that program. And I think it can be easy to forget. If you didn't live through it at the time, it can be hard to understand the release of the photographs out of Abu Ghraib was really shocking.
MOSLEY: And if we can just slow down, just to remind people what happened with Abu Ghraib.
BECK: Abu Ghraib was a prison in Iraq where the U.S. military was holding people it detained after invading. People working inside Abu Ghraib were abusing and torturing their detainees in really quite sadistic ways - you know, things they were doing seemingly for their own amusement as well as for other reasons. But in 2004, "60 Minutes" got ahold of photographs that had been taken of the abuses, including a very famous photograph of a hooded man standing on a box with electrical wires trailing down from his hands. You know, his hands were outstretched. It's sort of a crucifixion pose.
But it became clear very quickly that these abuses were widespread, that the Bush administration had carried out a complicated and sustained legal effort to make mistreatment and abuse of detainees legal using the kind of horrifying euphemism, enhanced interrogation techniques - things like waterboarding.
So when this became public, it was an enormous scandal. It sort of, at a single stroke, destroyed the idea that we had invaded Iraq out of a genuine desire to liberate the Iraqi people. You know, it revealed the invasion of Iraq as part of a larger revenge mission. You could not have a more open-and-shut case of, some people need to go to jail for this.
And when Obama - shortly after he'd been elected, he did an interview with George Stephanopoulos and was asked, are you going to investigate or prosecute people who were involved in it? And he started out by saying, well, I don't believe that anyone is above the law. However, I also think we need to move forward. And I can just remember hearing that - however - and feeling my heart sink.
MOSLEY: Well, I mean, the Pentagon called it a few bad apples, and a handful of those soldiers did go to prison. Why wasn't that, from your view, accountability?
BECK: Because the abuses didn't happen because a few bad apples decided they wanted to abuse people. I mean, individual anger or sadism did play a role, but it was a conscious project undertaken at the highest levels of the Bush administration to put this in place. You know, the CIA's rendition program, the black sites where people would be held indefinitely without being able to contact a lawyer. And it's people who are still held at Guantanamo, who we can't release - they say - and who can't be prosecuted because they were abused or tortured as part of their interrogation process, which means there's no chance of a successful prosecution.
MOSLEY: Going back to President Donald Trump, though, give me the straightest line you can draw - like, one thing that happened in 2001 and one thing that President Trump would go on to do with it.
BECK: Well, I would say the huge expansion of the country's immigration surveillance and enforcement apparatus that happened after September 11. That is the basis for what ICE has been doing around the country since Donald Trump became president again. And I note early on in the book, there's a line that people talk about with respect to wars the U.S. fights that's always irked me a little bit, which is this idea about how wars come home. You know, how the violence that a country like the U.S. carries out overseas will eventually work its way back into the country's domestic social and political life.
And that just doesn't apply to the war on terror because before we had anyone in Afghanistan, before there was a campaign to drum up support to invade Iraq, the federal government was rounding up Muslim immigrants around the country, like, immediately after September 11. It's something like 1,200 arrests for sure, maybe as many as 5,000, almost all of these for minor immigration violations. Certainly, no terrorists were captured as part of this. But that apparatus, the way it got built up - you know, including with things like the PATRIOT Act, which was passed soon after September 11 - Trump has certainly put his hands on that machinery and put it to use.
MOSLEY: You write that what was done to Muslims - this degradation of citizenship - has really become the template that got expanded to other people. So somewhere along the way, the enemy out there really became the enemy within.
BECK: Yeah. And if I could just go back for one second to impunity culture, the reason I brought that up first when you mentioned Trump is because part of Trump's appeal to the people who voted for him the first time was that he didn't pretend to be a good guy, right? There's that famous line he has about, I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and nothing would happen to me. You know, George W. Bush was kind of notorious for misspeaking, you know, and would get caricatured as stupid or - you know? But the Bush campaign could never, in a million years, have survived something like the Donald Trump "Access Hollywood" tape where he bragged about sexually assaulting women. Trump is getting away with stuff on a weekly or even daily basis that, when I was a teenager, would have ended someone's political life in an instant. So that's why I do focus on impunity culture.
MOSLEY: You know, I'm also just - to drill down 'cause, you know, this - these ICE roundups are now a part of our daily lives, a texture of many communities. And, you know, Trump did not run on terrorism. By the time he was running for president, we were far from that early 2000s period - 2015, 2016. He ran on deportation. Would ICE be arresting 50,000 people a month if 9/11 never happened? I know that could be a crude question, but it also is drawing this line - trying to draw this line to your argument.
BECK: Yeah. You know, like you say, you can't prove a counterfactual. But I certainly think that the immediate post-9/11 period laid the groundwork for what ICE is doing. And I also think the broader emotional frame of the war on terror has encouraged this idea that there are enemies within who need to be rooted out.
And this is not unique to the United States. It's not unique to this moment in history. But the war on terror had two ideas about where the enemy was, right? There are these terrorists living abroad around the world who need to be pursued and hunted down and brought to justice, meaning killed. And there are also enemies within. There are sleeper cells. There are people plotting more domestic attacks.
And that idea that there is a generalized enemy within against which we must always be on guard - you know, that has been reinforced in all kinds of ways in American life over the past 25 years. Literally just the way it feels to be in public spaces today - you're just constantly receiving this messaging that, like, there could be a threat here. Something bad could be happening here.
So certainly the war on terror laid the foundation for Trump and the MAGA movement to be able to say, yeah. America's problems are being caused by all these people living inside the country who hate the country and want to bring it down and want to leech off of its benefits. You know, his line about Mexican migrants being rapists - that has a - yeah. I would draw a fairly straight line from Trump back to the cultural and social and political climate after September 11.
MOSLEY: My guest is writer Richard Beck, author of "Homeland: The War On Terror In American Life." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, back with writer Richard Beck. His book "Homeland" traces the country's response to September 11 and how that response reshaped American life.
Something else is happening in our country right now as it relates to surveillance. There are these Flock cameras. They are the license plate readers that police departments have put up on light poles in thousands of towns, and people are now pushing back. Some people - there are news reports that people are sawing them down, splashing them with paint. Over a hundred cities have now canceled their contracts this year, and it seems to be not a left or right thing. I mean, Tucker Carlson and Hasan Piker are both now against them. What do you think is going on?
BECK: I think occasionally over the last 25 years, you have had these moments where it just all starts to feel too invasive, the ways in which we get watched as we go about our daily lives. There was a moment of that, you know, when the whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the NSA's mass electronic communication...
MOSLEY: The amount of data. Yeah.
BECK: ...Surveillance program.
MOSLEY: Of nearly 5 billion phone calls. Yep.
BECK: Yeah. I think part of the reason that that's become such a flashpoint is that, you know, we're on our computers and our phones. And I think everyone - when you go onto an internet browser or if you text somebody or if you call somebody - everyone's got that little voice in the back of their heads that, like, well, for all I know, someone's watching.
But most of the time, you don't get any signal that someone is actually watching, right? It's something that's in the back of your mind, but you can ignore it once you get used to it, which is not to say I support mass electronic surveillance. But it is just something that can kind of recede into the background of your daily life.
The cameras are a little different because they're visible. You can see them looking at you. And I think this is also tied to the growing movement we're seeing against data center construction. And I think many people have an intuition that, you know, oh, well, they say these data centers are just going to be used for - to build a better ChatGPT so that AI can help us even more than it's already helping us.
But if you look around your town and you see Flock cameras going up everywhere, and you also see a huge data center going up, it's not unreasonable to worry that, actually, I think these data centers are going to be used to further intensify the degree to which my community is surveilled by who knows who. It could be the government. It could be private corporations. And I think right now we're in a moment where the frustration kind of boils over, and people find themselves wanting to say, like, enough. And I think it's far too early to say what impact, if any, it will have. But certainly, it's something that people are really starting to worry about again.
MOSLEY: Well, correct me if I'm wrong in this interpretation. But you told my producer Monique that the reason mass surveillance never really worked in the past was that there was just too much of it, and the government was collecting more than really basically any human could sift through. That was the problem for 20 years, but now we have AI. Does this mean, in some way, potentially, that the surveillance state is about to get a lot better at its job.
BECK: I think the people who run the AI companies certainly hope that that's the case. I'm not an AI expert, so I couldn't tell you. The only, you know, sphere in which I'm encountering AI from a position of expertise is as a writer, and, you know, I will say that AI's ability to write well or coherently has not improved at anything like the rates that we were promised when the technology emerged. I think there is a lot of hype about AI's capabilities coming from people who stand to benefit financially from that hype, and I think it's hard to know what's going to happen going forward. But when you say, does this mean the surveillance state is about to get a lot better at its job, you know, what do you understand its job to be?
MOSLEY: Right. That's the question.
BECK: What - like, what...
MOSLEY: Yes, what is...
BECK: What is that job? You know, if you say that its job is to find out who committed crimes, that's one thing. But if you say that its job is to prevent people from organizing activism or groups or projects, you know, critical of the government or that might oppose the government in some way, that might be a more realistic understanding of what the surveillance state understands its own job to be. And I'm not sure that most people in the U.S. want the surveillance state to get better at that job.
I think that one thing that's hard to understand if you didn't live through it or if you haven't, you know, spent a lot of time reading about it, is just how politically repressive the climate immediately after 9/11 was. It just became impossible to say anything mildly critical of the U.S. government and its policy without being portrayed as a terrorist sympathizer. You know, there's an episode I recount in my book where less than a week after the attacks, The New Yorker published an issue containing a series of reflections on them from its contributors. And Susan Sontag, in, you know, a short paragraph wrote - and I'll just cherry pick a few sentences.
She wrote, the disconnects between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a, quote, "cowardly" attack on, quote, "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity," but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, etc., etc.
And she ended by saying, let's by all means grieve together, but let's not be stupid together.
Sontag at no point in there said that America deserved the attacks. She didn't do anything to excuse what al-Qaida had done, but she was critical of the way that the media had been discussing it. And it's kind of instant jump into self-consolation, as opposed to trying to think through what this meant. And as a result, she became one of the most hated people in the country basically overnight. You couldn't say anything other than, this is the most cowardly, most horrible attack that's ever happened. America must do everything it can to hunt down those responsible, and we must all support the government in its attempts to do so.
MOSLEY: What do you think that that lack of discourse or allowance of dissent create in us?
BECK: I think the message that's sent to ordinary people in that kind of climate, again, has to do with this degradation of citizenship because if, you know, the only things you're allowed to say about an event are that what the government does is right, well, then there's no discussion to be had, and you shouldn't participate. And so it's telling people, don't bother debating what's going on because you can't do anything about it. And if you say anything we don't like, we'll turn you into a public figure of ridicule and mockery and anger.
But I also think that there are consequences within government to this kind of repressive atmosphere because the people in government who are forming foreign policy are supposed to be able to actually talk about what the root causes of things are 'cause they're trying to solve real problems. And if all they're allowing themselves to say is, this was a dastardly attack, you know, and we have to pursue the people who carried it out to the ends of the earth, you're not likely to come up with a foreign policy that's going to do a good job of addressing the root causes of something like September 11.
MOSLEY: Richard Beck, I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation with me and your book. Thank you.
BECK: Thank you so much.
MOSLEY: Richard Beck is a senior writer at n+1, and author of "Homeland: The War On Terror In American Life." Coming up, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Exit Party" by Emily St. John Mandel. This is FRESH AIR.
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