Hard Facts and Millennial Fictions

In the United States the new millennium began not on January 1, 2000, but on September 11, 2001. On that clear autumn morning, 19 Muslim terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed three of them into two major symbols of American power: the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon just outside of Washington, DC. In a matter of minutes, the American sense of reality was abruptly changed. As Richard Bernstein writes in the reconstruction of these events compiled by the staff of

The New York Times

:

Out of a clear blue sky using our own engines against us, armed with nothing but knives, terrorists had struck simultaneously at the chief symbols of American commercial and military might. The inconceivable had happened, and it had happened even though we were supposedly protected by the world’s biggest defense budget, by the greatest military power in world history, and by an at least creditable intelligence establishment that was supposed to find out about things like terrorist attacks before they happened. The phrases that were heard over and over again were ‘Everything has changed’ and ‘Nothing will be the same again.’