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Page 2 of 2 Peering further into the future -- on page 8, under World Briefs, was a throwaway paragraph on the low-level air war even then being conducted against Saddam Hussein's Iraq ("Iraq said eight civilians were killed and three wounded when Western planes attacked farms 100 miles southeast of Baghdad. The Pentagon said American and British warplanes attacked three surface-to-air missile sites in the so-called no-fly zone…"); and another, "Iran: Denial on nuclear weapons," that began: "The government rejected charges by the United States that it was seeking nuclear weapons…"  And then, of course, there was nothing to do but oh-so-slowly turn the microfiche dial, knowing exactly what was around the corner of time and, after a pitch-black break between days, stumble into those mile-high headlines -- "U.S. Attacked, Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers and Hit Pentagon in Day of Terror" -- and, despite yourself, experience with a kind of gasp the sky in your brain filling with falling bodies. Here, by the way, is how that September 6th Times shark editorial ended. If it doesn't give you a little chill for what we've lost, I don't know what will. "Life is full of things that carry more risk than swimming in the ocean. Most of them are inevitably the byproducts of daily life, like falling televisions and car accidents, because daily life is where we spend most of our time. It may lack the visceral fears aroused by the unlikely threat of a shark attack, but it is also far more lethal." Only five days after that was written, almost three thousand New Yorkers, some adopted from countries around the globe, would face a danger far more shocking -- and, until that moment, far less imaginable to most of us, than any shark attack. Things would indeed fall from the sky -- and from a history so many Americans knew nothing about -- and visceral fears would be aroused that would drive us, like the Pearl Harbor-ish headlines that greeted the audacious act not of a major power but of 19 fanatics in four planes prepared to die, into a future even more unimaginable. Put another way, an afternoon spent in the lost world of September 5-10, 2001, reminds us that the savage attacks of the following day would, in fact, buy a faltering, confused, and weak administration as well as a dazed and disengaged President a new life, a "calling" as he would put it, and almost four years to do its damnedest. It would be 2004 before the President's polling figures settled into the levels of that long-lost September 10th. It would be the summer of 2005 –- and the administration's disastrous handling of hurricanes Sheehan, Katrina, and Iraq -- before the President would again be criticized for his "gone fishing" summer vacation; before the Democrats would again begin to attack; before newspapers would again be relatively uncowed; before the Republicans would again gather in those private (and then public) places and begin to complain; before Congress would again be up for grabs. Four long years to make it back to September 10th, 2001 in an American world now filled to the brim with horrors, a United States which is no longer a "country," but a "homeland" and a Homeland Security State. [Note for readers: This is the first of two pieces. The second, to appear sometime next week, will be on the world of Bushism after Bush and Cheneyism after Cheney, the American world our children will inherit.] ============== Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. Read other columns by Tom Engelhardt Recommend this article...
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