In the wake of 9/11, there was a greater unity in the American government than has been seen since the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. All who were old enough to remember such things will, upon reflection, remember that black day -- the worst day for America since, again, the Second World War. Those not old enough to recall the last bizzare and horrific traumas in American history -- generally, Kennedy and Pearl Harbor -- will know it as the first, and God willing, the only time they have found themselves watching the worst befall complete strangers in stunned silence. On that day, America was a country which had the wind knocked out of it.
One looks back on the days after 9/11 and finds an almost suspicious level of patriotism, but it's only natural -- we wanted to show the world that we had not been weakened by the terrorist attack. The world stood with us. Almost every foreign head of state would, in the week following, chime in their most sincere condolences. Even the fundamentalist nations of the Middle East would, in their own way, offer comfort; they blamed Israel for the attacks, but regardless, there existed very little antipathy in the world for the shocked America in the wake of the great travesty, even among her conventional enemies.
The machinery of state would spring into action. Soon, a suspect was worked out for the attacks -- Osama bin Laden. The fortunate son of an oil magnate, bin Ladin became a religious fundamentalist in the late 80s, and since then has been a thorn in the side of the US. When we were certain the attack on the US was engineered by him and Al'Qaeda, we would lay into Afghanistan with urgent fury. We bombed the country to ashes, we burned what little infrastructure the Taliban had left, we dropped food and bombs at the same time, and we toppled the Taliban -- to replace them with a flimsy coalition of warlords. Osama bin Laden would remain at large.

And the world would be no safer than it was before the attack on Afghanistan began.

After the terrorist attack, there was an almost suspicious level of patriotism. With it came a feeling of compulsory unity. People were suspicious of anyone who disagreed. It's a basic human instinct when faced with an intangible threat neither inside nor outside, but all around; people want to be as secure as possible. Cynics become very rare indeed in the days following a terrorist attack. And I am nothing if not a cynic.
On the day of the attack, I listened to the stunned radio reporters talking about it continuously. I stumbled through school tired and apathetic. I listened to the official numbers. I read the initial reactions. Five thousand, they said. (The number has since fallen to, oh, about 1800.) Five thousand is a lot of deaths. More people died of malnutrition on September 11th, 2001 than terrorism. I recall having believed that and wisely electing to keep it a personal thought. They were, by and large, brown and yellow people, and they died off-camera, after all.
I was not changed by 9/11. I was shaken by the enormity of the attack -- taking so many innocent victims for such a nebulous cause -- but the numbers left me unimpressed. I saw the flag-waving after 9/11 with a mixture of suspicion and occasional disgust. My family had always flown a flag from the window as a gesture of respect -- now it was a gesture of political coherence. All of a sudden, in America, the country which made 'rebellion without a cause' what it is today, the country where a good majority of the population would both support the right of Neo-Nazis to put on a parade and try and shoot at them if they paraded by their house -- in this wonderful country, people wanted nothing more desperately than to belong. It seemed like the world had turned upside-down.
I was and am a cynic. When I heard about the Senate uniting arm-in-arm on the steps of Congress and singing God Bless America, I immediately saw it as someone's political windfall. And so it was. Not too long after the terrorist attacks, they pushed through the USA PATRIOT act.

USA PATRIOT is an act of legislation possessed of questionable aims and vile methods. It exists ostensibly to stop terrorism. If you assume that one major conniption is due to the United States about every eighty years, you get the Revolution, the Civil War, and WW2 falling into the same pattern. 9/11? Twenty years early, but we live in a smaller world anyway. It still means that, even if you call the twenty-year acceleration constant, you aren't going to get another 9/11 for another forty years. The chances of a major terrorist attack any time in the near-to-immediate future are slim to inextant. The resources it took to pull off three major hijackings, combined with the nature of the group that committed them, summon up a sort of inconcievably massive super-crime. Even three out of four attacks being successful would have been, without the best resources a terroist group could have, impossible.
In passing legislation like USA PATRIOT, we gave Bin Laden what he wanted. He knew that the 9/11 attack would have a tremendous impact. He is a terrorist; that is what terrorists do. It was a cold, calculated act of mass murder. And in response, we quivered for a couple of days and then set out, in the typical, bodybuilder-like wont of large nations when hit that hard, to kick ass and take names. We wanted to project a strong America to the world; we were almost desperate to prove our national vitality after 9/11. We waved flags, we sang songs, we said the Pledge extra slow, we wore T-shirts and listened to music and played little Internet games about killing Osama, we bombed Islamic fundamentalists, we voted unanimously for a bill that stripped us of our most basic human liberties at the general whim of the executive branch of government. The Islamic fundamentalists that attacked us in September predicted this. Osama bin Laden would have been a fool to believe anything which didn't kill us wouldn't make us angry, and Osama bin Laden is clearly anything but a fool. We played right into his plans; we painted the United States bright red in the short sight of the people of the Middle East, and we cracked down on the democratic decadence for which he attacked us.

One of the most common rhetorical devices used by historians to decry what seems to be the onset of creeping fascism is that of the Reichstag fire -- Adolf Hitler destroyed one of Germany's proudest edifices mostly to prove a political point. How typical of a dictator, we think; how ruthless and conniving. Something we could never be capable of; something that separates these evil people from us.

Serious historical studies show that Marinus van der Lubbe, the Dutch communist who took credit for the Reichstag fire, was at least in part responsible for it. Allegations that he had the Nazis' help with it are based on good character evidence but little physical evidence. It's the sort of thing Hitler might have done, but we have no proof he did it. In the wake of the attack, Hitler would invoke the power of German law to become a dictator due to a 'state of emergency'. The rule of law would subsequently devolve into rule by whim, and history tells the rest of the story.

Thankfully, the American democratic tradition is much stronger than that of the Germans, and the measures in place to balance out any kind of power would be mercifully returned. The check of a partisan system would resume when Bush began making aggressive gestures towards Iraq, the check of the judiciary system is restoring itself day by day against USA PATRIOT. Some day, we will realize how unnecessary and undemocratic it truly is. But it teaches us an important lesson: all an ambitious man needs to gain absolute power is a little existing power and a little existing opportunity. In 2001, we gave the Bush Administration such an opportunity -- and thank God that, by 2002, the chance to take it back had not yet withered away. We must be always wary of letting our basic instincts get away with us. It's happened before and generally, it doesn't end well.