Amerika

The funny thing about 9/11 is that over two decades since it happened, we really have no understanding of what it meant.

Bill Clinton getting elected defined the 1990s. The Soviets fell, diversity became our strength because no one knew what else to say about it, and America became a type of sales economy. We no longer made things; we produced ideas and the internet, and everybody got rich while buying cheap Chinese gear.

Pundits lauded Clinton for his “fast money” economy, but by the second Clinton term, demand-side economics had failed as hard as it did under Carter. The economy hit moribund status somewhere around 1997, having peaked in 1996 with the whole world wanting American dollars, and by 1998 was looking rather grim indeed.

No matter what Clinton did, the economy was not coming back. He had made America look weak in foreign lands, scandals like TWA 800 shook domestic confidence, and once you have built the value of your currency on demand, you cannot outrun the collapse of trading after the speculators have made their fortunes.

To his credit, Clinton did manage a massive transfer of wealth to his generation. They bought internet stocks and converted their dollars to real estate while the currency still had an aura of its 1987 peak, and made out like bandits as they went into retirement and could sell off their homes for ten times what they paid for them.

Panicked, the voters did what they always do, which is run to the other side of the aisle. No matter how many political parties you have, there end up being two extremes: the naturalist party that like organic methods like culture and capitalism, and the social engineering party which wants to make everyone equal through socialism and near-anarchy.

Enter the Bush years. He did one solid thing right which was an early tax cut. This immediately had effects as people paid off losses and invested in the future. Things were coming back, but America still did not feel like its pre-Clinton version when WASPs were still in charge.

Only a short while into his term, the World Trade Center attacks happened, and America experienced a loss of innocence. First, our diversity fixation allowed a fifth column to arise and train among us; second, half of the country would rather eat its own shorts than admit this.

We have never really had a national conversation about the end of the innocence, but from that point on, no one really felt that good forces were in control. It seemed that decisions had been made which had transformed America, the old ways could never come back, and we were spiraling out of control like falling Rome centuries ago.

Hope for a decent future left the building and got replaced by a desire to accumulate as much wealth as possible in order to someday escape to Costa Rica or some other place where our dollars could keep us happy in retirement. No one had any belief in America, even as the patriotism surged.

What followed was a war that was disastrous mostly in how little it seemed to change. Every week, al-Qaida’s number one butcher got captured or killed, and every week a new number one took power. Soldiers died, were maimed, and went insane, but life went on.

In the meantime, jobs became totally oppressive. The regulations and affirmative action took over, and as a result, the average career became like elementary school: show up, go through the activities, and do whatever the official texts said was necessary. Quality flew out the window but who cared because everything was made in China anyway.

Only diversity got promoted, after a certain point, and white men realized that they were going to be perpetual entry-level workers while women and minorities ruled the hierarchy. Lots of them went hikkikomori and retreated into bedrooms or careers selling junk on eBay. Resentment between the sexes hit an all-time high.

Still, if you went to Washington, you heard that everything was great. Contractors were making huge money off the government. New diversity students swelled college rolls. The power of the dollar was controlling the world economy even if those dollars seemed to mostly end up in foreign pockets.

The political system hit its real rot because it had found a kind of equilibrium. Government took in money, spent it on minority contractors, bureaucrats, and welfare, and then the GDP went up — based on what, exactly? — and the next season, there was more money and more tax money.

No one wanted to rock the boat in Washington by changing anything about this inertia. Leftists ran their 1960s program while Republicans stuck with their platform from the 1980s, but the system always compromised, and the compromises always leaned inches or feet to the Left.

After a couple decades of that, America would be far-Left without knowing it.

In the meantime, back in 2001, we sort of reinvented our purpose. We combined the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and WW2 to come up with a dogma of America saving the world for democracy and civil rights; Clinton minted a great deal of that with his ill-advised interventions in Bosnia. The others just kept rolling with it.

Government jobs became highly desired. It was hard to get fired, the benefits were good, and so little was required of you that you could have a second career or side hustle. There were those who were vested in the system, and they owned stocks and expensive homes, and everyone else just lumped it as best they could.

The innocence we lost was an honest belief that what we were doing was good and that we had a future. Sure, following Political Correctness, no one could oppose our jihad without being labeled Nazis. But no one believed in that; it was a job, like everything else, and if you said the right things, you got promoted and became wealthy.

After all, Costa Rica awaited.

Twenty-some-odd years on, 9/11 looms large in our consciousness because it is forgotten. It did not unite us like Pearl Harbor; it made our disease (civilization decline) worse. Most students now barely know what it was, much less what it might have meant. Half of our citizens think our own government did it to us.

The only way out of this loop is to admit that mistakes were made and we have to un-do them. Diversity is not sustainable, nor is Keynesian socialist demand-based currency. America World Police is not sustainable. A life based on red tape and jobs is not making anyone better, nicer, or saner.

9/11 revealed us. It showed a nation which could not unite pretending to care while it went through the motions. It sacrificed our past for a promised diversity Utopia, and when that failed, we all settled into accumulating wealth so that we could escape the coming Fall.

Tags: america, jihad