It’s that month again, and when the New York skies are clear, as they have been and were then, you gaze at the proud prow of Manhattan and still feel the absence, and perhaps you see once more those papers from the crumpled towers fluttering out across the East River to strange landings in Brooklyn.
...
That was a breaking point, dividing our lives into before and after, and the world into pre- and post-, and we’ve all had to succumb to the awful 9/11 shorthand that compresses the loss of almost 3,000 lives into a couple of digits, and the wider loss of America-as-sanctuary into a date.
...
The United States was not previously a homeland, it was just our land, and that unhappy neologism with its Orwellian echoes, its sense of exclusion rather than inclusion, its faint fatherland-like echoes, seems to capture the closing and the menace and the terror-terror refrain with which we have all learned to live.
That refrain, for Americans, but not only them, has a pursed-lipped face called Bush-Cheney, and the braggadocio-smirk of the bring-it-on duo has come to form yet another shorthand for a certain grimness, one as relentless as the U.S. national debt clock.
