Shanksville, U.S.A.
11th September 2023
Instead of attending the commemorative observances at any of the three sites where the 9/11 terror attacks took place, President Joe Biden will be in Alaska on September 11 this year. It is the first time an American president will not appear at the locations of the largest terrorist assault in American history.
This is of a piece with the forgetting of 9/11, about which I have written previously. Ultimately, the retreat of the attacks into the mists of history is inevitable, and it will certainly mean that future generations will think differently, or not at all, about that day.
But as I noted a year ago, it’s not the forgetting per se that is of interest. It’s the rapidity and the completeness of that forgetting, and the fact that a large portion of the country never forgot. They still see the day as yet another marker of the U.S.’s moral depravity, which has never been the case previously with any foreign attack.