9/11 Memory: When We Lost the Narrative

Long ago, a world ago really, I and an employee of Reynolds Aluminum refurbished old computers, mostly pre-iMac Apple product, and gave them to teachers, under-resourced schools, churches, other nonprofits, and individual families. What a perfect morning that Friday of 9/11 promised; the summer heat was gone, the sky a sublime French Blue. I was nearing Virginia Commonwealth University, driving to pick up a system with good performance, when I heard that an airliner struck the World Trade Center. It was deemed an awful accident.

My contact was weeping when she opened her apartment door. I said I could come later, figuring that some personal crisis had made her hysterical. She blurted out something about a second plane, and I knew the awful truth. We loaded the computer, and I arrived at work in time to watch both towers fall. I'd heard on NPR the developing story of the Pentagon attack and an airliner crashing in Pennsylvania. 

The world had gone sideways in 30 minutes. It never got back on track, as far as I am concerned. Briefly I was proud of how our nation came together to destroy the Taliban, who hosted the terrorists. Briefly I hoped that unity might last. Briefly I thought we might return to the narrative of consensus and compromise that I recall as marking my mid-1960s childhood.

In 2001 I was teaching first-year writing, and class met that day. One student's father was home sick; his business partner and all their employees died in one of the Towers. The man was wracked by grief and the belief that he might have saved lives had he been present. In another campus building, the bodyguards of Prince Sultan's son (one of his 32 children) rushed him off campus. He'd been a freshman for a couple of weeks. On September 12, I heard from a Kuwaiti that the Prince's plane was the only civilian airliner to fly, heading back to Saudi Arabia. While NBC news reported on some suspicious activities of another Saudi Prince who left the country that day, presumably on the same aircraft, the Richmond connection seems to have vanished from the Web. 

For a few hopeful years that followed, I taught some Afghan women who had come to the US for an education. I hoped we might rebuild that nation and keep our promises to its people. We had the world on our side for a short while. Needless to say, when the US shifted its attention to Iraq, my students' fates were sealed. They could never return home. I've lost touch with them, but I hope they got their families out.

For that reason and many more, I've never forgiven the Bush Administration for their ill-planned war in Iraq, all based upon the lies of Dick Cheney and others who wrongly connected Hussein's government to Al Qaeda. Yet the neocon right was not the only set of fools in a burning house. On 9/11, I upbraided a fellow UR employee who said, angrily, that I was "jumping to conclusions" when I said Al Qaeda had staged the attacks and we'd soon be at war in Afghanistan. His ignorance of geopolitics that I'd studied for more than a decade enraged me. In the late 80s I first read of Osama bin Laden and his apocalyptic dreams of a Caliphate. That era's Left and Right ignored this reality.

In the heat of the moment, just after the second tower fell, I told my co-worker, more or less, that he was a naive, unread fool. In 2003, I told a right-winger on campus the same about his beliefs that we'd just "clean out" the Middle East.

Yet there I was on 9/11, a Leftist giving one of my own hell. But the Left, so focused on identity politics and denouncing the United States instead of engaging in Realpolitik, lost its way. This wandering from old-school Democratic ideals helped alienate working-class voters who put a would-be tyrant into power in 2016 and 2024.

In retrospect, my moment of tongue-lashing a young liberal and all that followed changed us, including peace marches, wrapping oneself in the flag, abuse of prisoners of war, secret courts, TSA screening, and the chest-thumping patriotism by affluent families who would never let a child serve in the military. Consider the thousands of moments like those of my student who turned on the war after a best friend died in Iraq; before that, she was a naive supporter of all we did.

Such events hardened us and set us on the path to the disaster off Iran's shores now, led (if that is the word for from-the-gut decisions) by a President who makes George W. Bush look temperate, wise, and peace-loving. I'm pleased that Saddam Hussein met his fate, but that's about all that pleases me about the debacle of 2003. I suspect the current war will not have such moments of closure.

It all comes rushing back to me 25 years later. Maybe the course we took began with the contested 2000 election, but we are now living in a damaged nation, perhaps one in a steep decline. I don't know that we'll bounce back soon, as we did after Vietnam and Watergate, or even the 2008 Great Recession.

That said, our recoveries from those shocks may have included acts of willful forgetting. I'd like to forget the global events since 2001, though my personal life has been good. I'd like to return to that clear cool morning when I set out to get a computer to help a family connect to the still-novel Internet. I'd love to hear that an airliner had just missed the towers because of a navigation error. I'd like to have ended my morning right there.

Our new feeds today are full of existential dread about AI, climate change, fools who deny climate change, and a rotten President's foolish actions. Maybe we should instead reflect on how we got to this impasse and lost an earlier narrative of getting along, mostly? What sorts of short-term thinking and other priorities kept us from fixing the damage done after 9/11? 

 

Von Braun's Lost Ideas

At this time of a renewed Space Race with China, to get to the Moon's South Pole, we might want to look backward a bit. In the late 50s and early 60s, NASA's Wernher von Braun presented several ideas for long-term visits to the Moon. There's a good article that outlines the concepts from the US and USSR here. 

The German engineer's enormous lunar landers look dated, but far more stable and feasible than SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System. There were also plans for Project Horizon, with habitats buried under the lunar regolith. NASA moved away from these plans given the then-enormous expenses that lifting so much weight from Earth to orbit and beyond would incur.

Now launch costs are lower and we have several ideas for constructing building materials out of what we find on the Moon. I should be optimistic, Child of Apollo that I am. Yet I fear we are heading for disaster.

What von Braun proposed, but that got dropped then in order to beat the Russians and is not on the table now: build a reusable Moon or Mars exploration ship in orbit. The Russian space agency had such a plan, once, when their government was on friendly terms with the US. You can read about the Marsport plan here at Wikipedia. I've critiqued the idea of Starship and giantism before, but building a big ship that would go back and forth from Earth to the Moon or Mars makes great sense. The trick? Use small reusable rockets to build it from components in orbit, as we did with the ISS.

NASA currently plans a risky landing near the lunar South Pole, something Astronaut Victor Glover has critiqued, when he called instead for an equatorial landing where spots are safer and a quick return to Earth, in case of a medical emergency, more certain. The hastiness of the US/China race, as well as the political imperative to get American bootprints on the lunar before our current President leaves office, seems to be pushing the agenda. I'd have preferred an international mission led by the big space powers and a United Nations flag on the Moon this time.

Dr. von Braun's 1952 lander concept, and the real ones that followed two decades later, had broad legs for uncertain terrain. Allen B. Ury built a fabulous model of the idea.

I fear that the SpaceX's tall, narrow lander will simply topple over and kill its crew, ending the Artemis program and ceding space leadership to Beijing.

Images: Fantastic Plastic Models. They should build the real thing! 

 

Images 

TLDR: The Coming Age of Aliteracy

For many years, a good deal of digital ink has been spilled about the end of reading. Lately, however, I found compelling the statistics in Rose Horowitch's "The End of Reading is Here," at The Atlantic. I wish it were not behind a paywall. We all need to read it, even if we cannot focus long enough to finish it.

What I began noticing, incrementally, after the turn of the century is coming true: students (and adults) cannot abide focusing long enough to read anything. In 2001, I taught nine challenging texts in the university's Core class. In Spring of 2025, my most recent literature course, I taught four novel-length works. That was challenging enough, and still I caught students using AI to summarize a short story they couldn't finish, and getting an F for introducing AI hallucination into work submitted for a grade.

But the problem is hardly confined to young people, some of whom will claim that audio books serve as an adequate replacement. As Horowitch's sources note, those do not engage our brains neurologically in the same manner as printed books. Societally, we are losing the ability to retain facts in our heads, unpack difficult syntax, find connections between ideas when we farm those tasks out to machines.

So each year since the iPhone hit the scene in 2007, I've grown more and more certain that Sven Birkert's predictions in The Gutenberg Elegies have come true.

I've peers in their 60s who stopped reading. When they try now, they cannot finish the book. The addictive allure of screens is too great (an irony as I write this on a screen). A few of us who read (or write for) Hemmings Motor News have noted how the stories at the Web site grow shorter and shorter. When a long piece appears, such as the ones I write for them, at least one commenter will thank the author and editors for daring to take a "deep dive" into a topic.

How will this end? I probably will live to see a post-literate society as the norm, a world where serious reading of difficult material becomes a niche skill. Bookstores now doing well may need to stock shorter work to bring in new readers. College English Departments, as well as any teaching from books have not been in great shape for a while. They will morph or go out of business. 

All my life, I have had an eerie feeling of getting through a doorway to have it slam shut behind me. Now I feel the breeze on the back of my neck as Gutenberg's era ends. I fear a Dark Age; don't forget that in late-Roman times, students began reading synopses of classic Greek works instead of tackling the original. Then and now, long, challenging work provides depth that no synopsis or web site can. 

We have so much darkness in our own nation already from being led by an unread, unteachable man. What will come next?

And while YA lit and graphic novels, still thankfully popular, can convey great truths, what happens when they no longer serve as a stepping stone to Edith Wharton, Kazuo Ishiguro, or Toni Morrison? There's a straight line from the bombastic Marvel Comics of my pre-teens to the terrifying state advocated by Socrates in Plato's Republic, which I'm finally reading now in a lovely edition. Socrates, who mistrusted writing, would not have approved. I should have memorized the dialogue!

I plan to treasure the book and its lessons, even if no one I know can discuss it with me. So I went to ChatGPT. I have not touched an AI model since Fall 2025, when I last taught my adult-ed class "Writing With and About AI."

Me: Hello after a while. I've a specific question. Do you think that Socrates really hoped that the Greeks of his time would build a society like that in Plato's Republic? Keep your reply under 200 words. 

Chat: Good to see you again.

Probably not—at least not in a straightforward political sense. Socrates, as Plato presents him, insists that the Republic is an inquiry into justice in the soul as much as in the city. The ideal polis functions as a magnified image of the just individual.

That said, Socrates does not dismiss political reform. He famously says that cities will have no respite until philosophers rule or rulers genuinely become philosophers. This sounds like a genuine, if remote, aspiration. Yet the proposal is framed as so demanding that many readers think Plato intended it as a regulative ideal rather than a practical blueprint for fourth-century Greece.

My view is that Socrates hoped less for Athens to become the Republic than for his interlocutors to rethink what political excellence requires. The ideal city exposes the defects of existing regimes and educates philosophical judgment. Whether anyone could actually found such a city is almost beside the point.

We get here an answer that sounds less canned than those of models a year ago. I like that "my view" moment, too. There's a hook at the end, too. We could (and I may) go on about why making an ideal city-state is "beside the point."

AIs may hallucinate, but at least they did have the Plato fed to them. They'd out-debate any of my students in a Socratic dialogue.

Image Source: Gutenberg Bible, Wikipedia 

 

Your New Car is Watching You: Two Weeks in a Rolling Computer

A while back at my Tractorpunk blog, I wrote about why we should choose, if we can, to buy an older vehicle and learn to make our own repairs. I'm more convinced of this now than ever.

We had two lovely weeks in Canada recently, touring Nova Scotia, taking hikes with Anna Hergert, who runs the walking firm Tide Rollers and Mudlarkers. Anna was available off-season for some extended quality time with us. It's our second vacation hiking with her.

When we were not exploring the ocean floor of the Bay of Fundy, we were driving a rented Hyundai Tucson we picked up at the airport in Bangor, Maine. The small SUV was spacious, tastefully minimalist but comfortably appointed inside (I cannot abide busy-looking interiors). The glass dash looked very impressive. But that is where the problems began. 

As we drove along one day, a little chime sounded. An icon of a steaming cup of coffee (or maybe King Cole tea...we were in Canada) appeared on the center screen that had been clocking me in kilometers per hour. It said "Consider taking a break."

Was I driving poorly? We were on back roads, as is our wont. They are curvy and sometimes potholed. We had to move over the center line sometimes, when we could on the relatively empty roads. Yet every 45 minutes or so, I'd get that annoying message. This is part of the what the firm calls a "Driver Attention Warning System." 

Once I had it light up just after leaving a Tim Horton's where, rest assured, I had taken a cappuccino-and-donut break. I never figured out how to turn off this feature, though I did bring the owner's manual into our B&B and read it carefully.

We got the lane-departure buzzer to stop, as well as an auto-steering feature that was more scary than helpful. We never could banish the "take a break" annoyance. After much searching, we reset our speedometer to metric units, but the dizzying array on of-screen choices in the SUV meant we never found out how to turn off the coffee-cup warning. I began to talk back to the car. "Perhaps Hyundai should take a long walk off a short pier" was one bit of advice I can type here. At the very first, I'd liked the new Tucson enough to consider it as a replacement for our 2006 Honda CRV, if it ever (God forbid) bites the dust.

No longer. I will have no car that scolds me. I will also have no car that makes mistakes of the sort the Hyundai made. 

The vehicle has multiple sensors for reading the road, including speed-limit signs. Sadly, the sensors did not know how to translate these properly on the dash. For a brief period we went on the Trans-Canada Highway (speed limit 110 kph) the dash told us we could go 180! It was reading the metric signs as mph and translating them into kilometers. We had a chuckle. Then I thought about the clueless drivers I see in the US daily. I'm certain some would have put the pedal down and then explain to a Mountie "but the car said I could go 180!"

I fear where this trend might go. New vehicles are already watching us. A piece from the BBC noted how carmakers collect data from us constantly in new vehicles. It can be sold to your insurance company without your permission in the United States. When you buy a new car, be sure you know how to disable this. That said, the window for saying "no" may close. The BBC notes that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in a February 2026 report, calls for biometric technology in all new vehicles to monitor eye and head movement for signs of distracted driving. You can read the text of the report here. I do not support this at all for adults, unless they are guilty of a DUI and subject to monitoring when behind the wheel. 

The rest of us should have the right to disable such devices. Besides, the very glass dashboard of the Tucson was designed as to distract drivers. We had to pull over to adjust the AC or heat, as the fan control was tiny and required a touch. My Honda has three large dials, like this. I can find them in the dark without looking down.

On an economic note, cars are now so wired with sensors for lane-departure, automatic braking, and other features that I fear they won't last as long as my old Honda. The HVAC controller? Under $100 to buy. The infotainment console in my wife's 2017 Mini S convertible? $10000. It works great, but we are selling that car soon. My wife's "new" 2008 Volvo XC70 AWD wagon has none of that business in the dash.

The Honda's predecessor, a 2004 model, died in 2020, when a kid rear-ended me. I'd had that 2004 CRV for 14 years. I went right out and bought a 2006, mainly because it had side airbags. I do a lot of the work myself. No advice provided by the car. No screen of any sort. Keeper.

Back to our monitored future. Want to turn this business off in a Hyundai? A simple Web search will tell you how. Or maybe if you have young, easily distracted drivers in your family, you want it on.

Your call. But do one thing: tell those who make cars and laws that you do not want them spying on you.