(Image: EPA/Beth A. Keiser)

There is no dirt in heaven!

A Shaker saying

There were probably more striking views of the second plane going into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, but Australians of a political bent got the most spectacular, and simulacral: the report of the first plane hit interrupted Channel Nine’s screening of The West Wing. Fantasy president Jed Bartlet had probably just won some political stoush by being more liberal than anyone expected him to be, when the lush colours of TV yielded to the flat affect of video, and the black smoke pluming from the North Tower.

Everyone knew what the World Trade Center was, more or less: the boxy buildings in the scene-dividing still shots in Friends, the intro to David Letterman. They were a symbol not of glamorous New York, like the Empire State Building, centre of a world power, but of total New York, centre of a world system, a world culture, eveyone’s otherplace, global markets and modern art, Seinfeld and I ♥ NY T-shirts, brought back as souvenirs.

Dunno about you, but I thought it was a terrorist act as soon as I saw that first tower burning. Apparently that wasn’t the case near Ground Zero. A lot of Americans thought it must be some sort of accident — a degree of protective delusion, no doubt. The WTC had been targeted before, had actually had a bomb go off under it. Passenger jets were terrorists’ go-to, the equivalent of a biro to write an angry letter to the paper. Seemed obvious. The West Wing ended, Nine switched to the news, and then the second plane made that long, languorous turn before bearing down on the South Tower, and we watched all night as it happened, an event manufactured for global news television. 

The footage, watched now, reminds one that we didn’t need the later film Cloverfield to see the full, bizarre horror, the tops of the falling towers like waving tentacles, the shafts of grey black smoke and dust reaching like hands down the streets towards those running frantically from it.

Unless you had no idea what had been going on in the world, you could see that this was exactly had been intended by Mohamed Atta, the event’s meticulous planner: Americans running in fear from “death from above”, such as they had delivered to Muslims and others for decades. Though it was part of global jihad, and the hijackers were drawn from Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden had also spoken of Vietnam and Latin America in his speeches, and saw, inconveniently for everyone, his struggle to Islamise the world as part of global anti-imperialism.

Many millions mourned with America on 9/11. But many millions also saw it as a smack in the eye they had coming. Some people did both. 

The moment was made for the great age of 24-hour news, of course: the buildings like a steel and glass pyre, burning modernity, black smoke unwinding long enough for a thousand cameras to be trained on them, at which point they fell. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen got into trouble for some awkward (and truncated) comments about it being a performance art piece, but he wasn’t far wrong.

One reason to know immediately that it was a terrorist attack was the memory of the Black September hijackings of 1970, when three passenger jets were hijacked, flown to a desert airfield in Jordan and three days later, with passengers and crew deplaned, blown up, with the same spectacular effect, the black smoke rising. The Palestinians and others had unquestionably understood that the world of the ’60s, TV and performance art could be incorporated into their acts to create a multi-levelled “event”, and 9/11 was planned in that tradition. 

Indeed, the “spectacle” status was enhanced by the failure of the hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93 to complete their mission and hit either the White House or Congress, actual seats of power. Try to imagine the memory of 9/11 if footage of a plane smashing into either competed with the Twin Towers. Not only would it be transformed in the memory, the effect on actual governance would have been far beyond anything that actually happened that day. At the place in Manhattan where finance and the avant-garde meet — the lower east side was where conceptual art pretty much began — the American century was brought to some sort of end by a single attack. 

The Black September attackers had been Marxists, at least ostensibly, as had much of the Arab liberation movements at the time. The US and Israel helped kings and dictators finish all the Marxists off, revolutionaries and reformists alike, and into the vacuum came violent Islamism, incubated in Afghanistan, which US funding of the mujahedin turned into a sort of Woodstock for jihad. 

The US was steered in this by the Reagan-era doctrine of first generation neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had argued that the US should support authoritarian regimes — nasty juntas — against communist totalitarian ones, which established permanent structures. In lumping these new religious movements in with the former, the US got it exactly wrong. It was the Marxist movements which shared some common view of modernity and ideal goals, but which were cursed with the Marxist problem of lacking a sense of fully transcendent purpose. It was the Islamists which had the goods.

Revolutionary Marxist outfits had been able to convince a very few utterly committed people to act as suicide bombers; Hezbollah had so many applicants it formed an agency, with a waiting list. At the time, the right made much of the fact that many hijackers and bombers weren’t from poor backgrounds, not fighting oppression or personally experienced despair (though many were). But that was precisely the point. Bin Laden, Atta and others were turning jihad against McWorld, before the latter consumed them entirely. Atta had done his urban planning thesis on the destructive effects of skyscraper architecture on the traditional city of Aleppo. How’s Aleppo looking now?

Thus it unfolded. George W Bush’s advisers were all the Reagan-era neocons that his father, president George H W Bush, and president Bill Clinton had excluded from power, Americanist liberals in an uneasy alliance with out-and-out Christian triumphalists, and oil and other corporate interests wanting a payday. The liberal and Christian messages fused in the rhetoric, ahead of the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, a Western triumphalism arguing that liberalism was Christianity, and the only possible future for all humanity.

There was unmistakably in the American voices raised at the time — from main street to The Mall in Washington — the sound of pure trauma, something 9/11’s planners possibly counted on too. America was willing to conspire in the simulacrum foisted on it, and call an exceptionally violent political and criminal act an act of war — and then to reverse-engineer an abstract belligerent, “terror” to fight on all fronts. 

Rome itself could not have gone up against such an enemy, and the US was no Rome. Beyond The Mall, the imperial marble stopped, and it was all malls. The transcendent purpose that Islamists could call on — fused with a fight for home that grounded Islam’s transcendent call — was present in American Christianity only in a counterfeit form, the psychologised self-help religiosity of American evangelism.

Twenty years of bubbled, consumer prosperity had created a sort of heaven-on-earth for many. As David Brooks had noted in his, for him, uncharacteristically important book On Paradise Drive, Americans consumed in an inherently theological fashion; every Starbucks was a vision of heaven, every gleaming mall a cloud-set arcadia, performing in the worship of surplus what the Shakers had tried to do in their furniture of plain lines and bare wood: bring heaven down to earth.

This cultural moment had a dual effect. It gave the easy side of you something to live for — what, die in a foreign desert and never eat frozen yoghurt in a gold-class multiplex again? — and the other side, a desperation to find something to give life meaning. But the latter was not supported by the former, which is as neat an explanation of the Iraq invasion as one is likely to get. If your aim is not to dominate your enemies but to make the world safe for Bed, Bath and Beyond, collective resolve will fade fast. Bin Laden and Atta tempted the US into a war it not only couldn’t win, but couldn’t fight. China moved into that vacuum, and in a few months will take over the lease on Bagram air base. 

Bizarrely, after two decades of failure, loss and confusion, the US has got a president with at least a shade of Jed Bartlet about him, someone who wanted to end the whole era with final withdrawal on the 20th anniversary (before the Taliban ruined his plans) as if to thoroughly confront Americans with two decades of failure, and the hastening of the demise of their total hegemony.

How strange it was, that moment 20 years ago, tunnelled through to by the blast of memory, as if it had all occurred earlier this morning, reality and fantasy interpenetrating.

Here’s the haunting last thought, reaching out like the fast-running black smoke: was 9/11 the last “political” event, the final simulacral summary of a century or more, in which politics carried the force of religion and vice versa? Are we now in a world which may see wars and horrors, but is united in its simple orientation to the technical administration of a planet? And if so, despite appearances, are we entering heaven, or the other place?