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America’s post-9/11 Cassandras are still ignored
by Meriadoc

    From mid-September 2001 onward — while U.S. media echo chambers kept reverberating with rationales for endless war — even a renowned American writer would get scant amplification if challenging the core of “war on terrorism” orthodoxy. So there was little media interest in Joan Didion’s assessment of what developed during the first year after 9/11 — “an entrenched preference for ignoring the meaning of the event in favor of an impenetrably flattening celebration of its victims and a troublingly belligerent idealization of historical ignorance.”

    Anyone who raised objections to constant warfare as the imperative response to 9/11 was likely to be trashed as, at best, a 21st century pointy-headed intellectual, if not someone with enmity toward the United States.

    At the end of 2002, in an essay for The New York Review of Books that turned into a book, “Fixed Ideas: America Since 9/11,” Didion wrote, “We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of Sept. 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.” Dissenters from that role, she noted, were often being denounced by such epithets as “the Blame America Firsters” or “the Blame America First crowd.”