On September 11th 2001 I was 17 years old and was exposed - along with the rest of the world - to an act of televised, real-world atrocity. It is one of those moments that instantly transcended the experience of living through it. In the hours and days following, I thought I had witnessed a cultural paradigm-shift.
Murder like this, I thought, has never been witnessed in such a way.
Within that one day, the nineties seemed to become history. Embarrassing uncle Tony Blair became midlife sanctimonious nutter, Tony Blair. Perhaps because that was also my last year in secondary education, the before and after were so stark that I became intensely fascinated with the event and its repercussions. I read books about neo-imperialism, the Mujahiddeen, Arab cultural sentiment and Islamic beliefs. And Michael Moore (blush). Anyone slightly younger than myself would have no memory of the pre-2001 perception of Islam. Does anyone else remember the soft-focus, celebrity-led BBC documentaries about the rich tradition of faith and peace? I sometimes think I made it up.
In any case, the irony to me has always been that the actions of 12 men, funded and supported by a tiny proportion of the Islamic hard-right changed the world. It was the direct confirmation of Margaret Meade's (disputed) quote:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
It was at that age and in that time, that I started to suspect that life was not going to be as much fun as I thought. And so it was to prove. Having meticulously plotted out the course of my life up to my mid-thirties, the noughties saw each step of my road map besieged by disappointment, dullness and incomprehensible fatuity. In politics, in art and in life.
But most of all in the internet. If there is one thing that kills curiosity, it is keeping your newspapers in the same place as your porn. And not just porn - sitcoms, almanacs, horror movies, home movies. Do you remember how little of a life these things took up before they were all available in one place? As broadband followed dial-up and fibre followed DSL, we are getting ever closer to the point of critical videomalaise.
The larger point, which I'm failing to get to is that the War on Terror(TM)and the internet grew up together. Bin Laden was the internet's first big shot at propaganda and it performed admirably on every side. It spread the message at and from every angle. There was the White House youtube channel, the jihadist websites, people going to jail for sharing information and the proliferation of conspiracy theories.
Having been hungry for information, I took active interests in every opinion I could locate. Did I get wiser and gain a mature understanding of the situation? No. I got into a funk of hatred, doubt and self-aggrandising social networking.
In a way that my education is supposed to resist, the turn of the century is fixed in my mind as a genuine point of paradigm shift. Digital photography brought about an exponential boom in the presence of imagery. The advent of broadband then acted like the nuclear reaction at the centre of this boom. The majority of life (work, consumerism, socialisation, education, curiosity and correspondence) was absorbed by the new, digital platform. But the platform is abstract. Non-tactile. Insubstantial. Two dimensional. (Yes, I struggled to find the right synonym.) Ultimately, the digital platform is shallow.
And how were we to defend ourselves against the accusations of the Bin Ladenists (and incidentally the Russians and Chinese) that the European and American cultures had become decadent and superficial? The President of the United States should have been the one winning the argument on our behalf, but in the case of GWB his mere existence seemed to lose it. We began to feel guilty for the attacks ourselves.
The governments of the west had declared the end of history in 1989. Triumphalism had trumped relief in the zeitgeist and suddenly a liberal utopianism settled over us. The dotcom boom and the mapping of the human genome seemed to confirm that the end of overt hostilities had unbound us to view the future as a limitless canvas for our vindicated genius and virtue.
Meanwhile, back in the actual theatres of war where our proxies had been destroying their neighbours on our behalf... they were abandoned. Their wars were not over and the sores of conflict became infected with new bacteria. Iraq was being driven into the ground and (yes I'll say it) the Hussein mafia had allied itself publicly with the jihadist movement. Yugoslavia too, descended into atavistic barbarism.
It's one thing to say that they were necessary to resist the Stalino-fascism of the Soviet Union, but it's quite another to say that our governments are absolved of responsibility for these conflicts. On a sidenote, we intervened in Bosnia where the muslims were slavic, but the darker your skin, the less likely we were to consider your conflict worthy of attention.
Out of this chaotic disenfranchisment of the warrior caste, emerged the perfect enemy. Osama Bin Laden. I never hated Bin Laden. He was doing what he was asked to do. What he was feted as a hero for doing (not least by agents of our side) and what he believed to be right. The effect of what he did however, was to sicken me deeply inside. I'll never be the same person who spent the afternoon of September 11th 2001 (we weren't told anything at school) rehearsing for a doomed production of Return to the Forbidden Planet. I'll never again be honestly able to say that nothing can touch the heart as powerfully as art. I'll never be able to write a story about a child with an unexpressed crush on his friend (this project was abandoned around a week later).
As I began by saying, the attacks on the twin towers felt like a trigger. Like a beginning. But that was because I had no idea where this attack came from or who Bin Laden was. Now his death is being paired with the Arab Spring to imply that this narrative has come to an end, but it hasn't. The horror will go on and on until Niall Ferguson owns up about how much of a cock he is. This nightmare will not end.
I'm not a historical determinist. I believe in free will, but I'm also realistic about the hierarchy of wills. At the top of that particular pyramid lives a group of sociopathic olympians who actually enjoy the historic nightmare from which the rest of us are trying to awake. Bin Laden was a minor adept of this cult and has already been replaced by Ayman al Zawahiri, an equally grotesque harbinger of armageddon.
So we shot him in the face. Fine. I still saw it. Over and over again.
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