It's hard to remember the national mood right after 9/11. The pall that fell upon American life the moment the planes shattered the towers. Irony was declared dead. The late night comics went dark. Bush ceased to be a figure of fun. The world was dangerous, and existence was a heavy burden. It needed to be taken seriously. September 10th, 2008. Two ongoing wars, an economic crisis so deep as to spur government takeovers of huge banks, and a presidential election pitting two sharply different governance philosophies against each other. And the lead story on the news is lipstick on a pig. The country is full of bumper stickers that say "9/11: Never Forget." We have forgotten. And we have forgotten gleefully, aggressively. It's not that we don't remember the day, or have lost our appetite to cynically deploy it in service of our political agendas. But we certainly forgot the new and unsettling sense that the world was a dangerous place populated by serious threats. Problems that had once seemed abstract were all too real. But now the dangers are abstract again. A presidential election grinds on, and one side merrily chants "drill baby drill!" Every time I hear it, I wonder how we'll be judged in 60 years. When the planet has burnt, and the foretold consequences have unleashed untold devastation. This election is the first to occur when you could definitively say that America was warned. That we were aware. That global warming was on our lips, and on our screens, and in our minds. When they look back at us, when they show the "drill baby drill!" posters in museums, when they see the clips playing the wall-to-wall coverage of a bad-faith misinterpretation, what will that look like? Like the witch trials? Like simple irresponsibility? Will they laugh sadly, and assure themselves that such madness could never grip hold of their society? What will they say?
