Poll about 9/11

[Cooper]

Okay, I'm writing the most cheerful book on the planet:

An Exploration of the Western Apocalypse.

I have a section where I discuss events, ideas, and literature that has shaped how we view the apocalypse.

I suspect 9/11 was a huge part of it, especially finding the boom of apocalyptic literature started in 2002. (Then just got bigger in 2007.)

However, I'm 18. I was in 2nd grade when 9/11 happened. I literally have no recollection of the pre-9/11 world.

And nobody really talks about this facet of it.

My theory is that terrorism boomed as a fictional and potential threat, like bioterrorism, for example. However, I really can't know for sure.

So I'm polling people that might have been old enough to notice:

How do you think 9/11 changed how we view the apocalypse?

[crazylegs]

From an American perspective, potentially.

Over the pond we've lived under the shadow of terrorism for decades so while we've never had an incident with such a substantial loss of life in a single incident it wasn't the turning point that it was for US society.

[KiaKat]

Oof. As someone who was living in Manhattan at the time, I could probably expound upon this at length. But, to summarize:

9/11 was truly a loss of innocence (cliche!) for America, at least in terms of our perception regarding safety on a grand scale. Terrorism was always something that happened "out there," never HERE. Suddenly it was something that happened HERE, and we were no longer special, in that sense.

However, from a fictional perspective, there's always been a market for terrorism fiction. Plum Island, for example, or even books like Andromeda Strain. The idea of being attacked as a society (as opposed to a military/war-based) is a powerful one, with many opportunities for heroism and good stories to emerge. I'd be curious to know how many of those books published in 2002-2005 were actually SOLD to publishers in 2000-early 2001 (generally, books are sold before they are written, based on a great concept and a few chapters). Hit up Publisher's Weekly and Publisher's Lunch to see if you can get those details.

[Aethian]

I'm in Michigan, was 19, and worked overnights when 9/11 happened. Here life didn't seem to change much until you looked into personalities. All of a sudden anyone who wasn't white or dark black was followed a little more closely. Returns at my job were put on stricter policy, and a few of our cashiers that customers loved lost their jobs due to complaints.

I'm one of the more unracist people, not realizing I said something bad till it was pointed out to me. So I saw this kinda sitting at the sidelines and it hurt when suddenly their were fights between those who had been friends. Hell i lost friends cause i was just going to turn on them later...left me very confused at times. So when people say its a loss of innocence...it really was for this generation.

[mikoyan29]

I grew up in the waning days of the Cold War (born in 1969), so I grew up with the threat of nuclear war at any given minute. So when I growing up, the Soviets were the bad guys. Although as I read more about the people, I didn't think the were the bad guys as much. As I read more about the Soviet military, I became less scared of them. As I went to college and learned aobut nuclear power, nuclear weapons scared me less because I figured a nuclear attack would be pretty obvious.

We also had the spectre of Arab (and other forms of terrorism) but for the most part that was a worry if I ever travelled overseas. Even 9/11 didn't really shatter that image as we haven't had a major attack on US soil since then (quite a few minor attacks) but I'm not going to let that shape my day to day habits. But then again, I grew up under the spectre of nuclear war....once you've come to grips with The Bomb people who have to steal planes or whatever to strike you aren't quite as scary.

[Cooper]

Looks like the holes are being poked. Thank you, guys. As I said, I was in elementry school the day that happened. My memory of it is watching my teacher try and stay calm, trying to figure out how to explain to a bunch of children what had happened. I went home and I watched it a few times, until my mother turned it off. I never really understood until later what had happened, how many people had died.

Yeah, the cold war is one I have a much stronger case for having an impact on apocalyptic fiction, especially with the fallout series.

I think the stuff I'm exploring the impact on our view of the apocalypse will be then:

Science (global warming, cosmic threats, bioterrorism and plagues)
Technology (our vulnerability on it and fear of losing it)
The Cold War (introduced the idea that /we/ could cause our own demise, nuclear weapons)
And of course... zombies.
Mother Nature (of course.)

The zombies section is the one I have finished, since it involved the least amount of research.

I covered: the origin of the Romero (modern) zombie. Apparently, it was H.P. Lovecraft. Who knew?
Why we're afraid of them (death, losing humanity, what it reveals about ourselves, losing our place on the food chain)
Why we love them (it's the only apocalypse that's not indiscriminate. Your chance of survival largely depends on skill, rather than location. And America-specific is how it supports our gun-culture.*)
Then I talked a bit about the evolution of the zombie in recent fiction, from Romero to Left4Dead.

Of course, now that I finish that outline, I realize I didn't do the 'evolution of the zombie' properly, and that I should probably talk about the likelihood of a zombie apocalypse. (The consensus is pretty much zero. Rabies is the closet virus, but it takes 3 months to take over the body. Though the documentary I watched horrifyingly suggested someone might try and design the zombie virus.)

*Note, not going to argue anything about gun culture, to avoid fratching. Another day, another time, another book. XP

[mikoyan29]

Apocalyptic fiction goes back a long time. You consider that Revelations in the Bible is probably about 1900 (or so) years old and that's a fairly young story about the destruction of the world. Each of the major religions have some story about the destruction of the world and those predate Revelations by a long shot.

I think there was the notion that we could bring out about own destruction prior to the Cold War. I seem to remember reading about an H.G. Wells story that described something very similar to a nuclear war. It just wasn't until the nuclear age that this was a reality.

Of late, the more interesting story for me would be an event that caused all electricity to cease. I don't think Revolution did this story justice because I think there would be way more widespread panic and people dying than portrayed in the TV show.

[wagegoth]

Zombies of the Insect World: http://listverse.com/2013/03/30/10-z...-insect-world/

The game "The Last of Us" hypothesizes a fungal infection that crosses to humans and turns them into really horrifying fungal zombies. (Really horrifying. Don't search for images unless you want nightmare fuel.)

Personally, I think the similarity between the Cold War and 9/11 are that they were both used by politicians and the military-industrial complex to promote their agendae, and to encourage people to give up rights and liberties in exchange for freedom safety. During both periods, their has been a rise in entertainment related to military/scientific accidents resulting in widespread death and destruction, and various types of zombification of society.

[MoonCat]

Main difference: before 9/11, Americans thought of apocalypse as fiction (except for a minority of people who believed so literally in the Bible that they were always expecting it to happen "next week" or "next year").

Now? Now we know these things can happen to us, here. It's no longer fiction. It's no longer fantasy or escapism. It's a potential reality.

[Cooper]

Yeah, for all electricity going out, I think of the Twilight Zone: Monsters on Mulberry Street. Revolution was kind of a crap show. >_<

Yeah, I have seen the last of us, and I forgot to add that into the evolution. (I can't play it because I'm exclusively a pc gamer. I spend my money on games, not systems.)

Reportedly, the first apocalyptic writing we can find was an Assyrian tablet dated to 28 BCE.

I can't remember when I dated Revelations to in my New Testament essay, but it was old. XD

I think the religious apocalypses section is going to be the largest. I can already tell. At least I had pre-written the Jewish and Christian apocalypses, so that's a load off my plate. I still have to do Muslim and some of the Christian off-shoots like Jehovah's Witnesses and Westboro Baptist Church. (>_<)

[Pixilated]

From a Canadian point of view, 9/11 didn't change my view of the apocalypse nearly so much as some of the terrifying nuclear holocaust movies of the 1980s did. And I'm definitely old enough to remember what I was doing on 9/11 as well as remembering the pre-9/11 world.

I agree with KiaKat, though, the market for apocalyptic end-of-the-world fiction has always been around. James Blish's book Cities in Flight closes with the end not only of the world but of the universe.

I was born even earlier than mikoyan29, when the Cold War in full bloom, and I have vague memories of hearing the attack warning sirens howling in Detroit as they were routinely tested.

[Seshat]

From here (Australia), there was a kind of "Well, that was expected" reaction to 9/11.

We'd been watching Britian be attacked by terrorists for years. I was also born in 1969, and the 1970s airplane hijackings were a part of my childhood.

Terrorism was a thing that happened. And if you happened to be a big country and poked a small country often enough and hard enough, you could expect to be attacked.

And here was the US, poking all SORTS of small countries. What did they THINK was going to happen? Poke an anthill and you'll get stung. Sheesh.


Yes, I know this sounds all cold and uncaring. It isn't. But no matter who you talked to in the US, you either got people who also were expecting terrorist attacks on US soil but couldn't get their warnings heard; or people who expected to be safe for one reason or another.
Reasons included 'we're the good guys', 'we're too big for them to attack', '<insert security agency here> will protect us' ....


And afterwards: well, I'm still wary of typing something like this. If you DARED say anything at all that even hinted that US behaviour may have had anything to do with the attacks, oh, you were dogpiled on!

Just so you know: I'm not saying that individual civilians had anything to do with it. Or individual soldiers. But en masse, American culture is impinging on most other world cultures; and American military forces are often active in parts of the world where they're not always universally welcomed.
And for a number of reasons, the US is highly visible: whereas other troops (such as, say, Australian troops, or Swiss, or Phillipine) helping with the same project in the same reason are often less visible.

So the people who are angry about McDonalds and Starbucks taking over from street vendors, and military-trained peacekeeping forces in their nations, will blame the US (even if the peacekeepers happen to be Canadian or French or Spanish... not fair, I know). And the angry people get collected by terrorist organisations, trained, and deliberately targetted to whomever the terrorist leaders want to attack....


In part, the public 'face' of the US as the 'global policeman' is also an aspect of it. Pre 9/11, the US made a big thing of it. I'm Uncle Sam, I'm Captain America, I'm the Superman. Sadly, the US policy makers failed to take the lesson of the superhero into account: as soon as you're Superman, Lois Lane is in danger.

And for a nation, Lois Lane is the metaphor for the civilian population. And every terrorist organisation who wanted to take a potshot at the Global Policeman (whether that be the US or the UN) saw a lovely bullseye painted right on the faces of the US civilians.


Thankfully, the US seems to have learned.

[Cooper]

Yeah, I can't deny that we like to think of ourselves as the 'protector of democracy' in the world. I think it's because once we successfully revolted, it started a series of revolts in other places (the french revolution was the biggest.)

After that, we got a bit of a big ego. XP

[Jester]

Revolution was kind of a crap show.

I wouldn't say "kind of," considering it's one of the only shows I've ever started watching and, mid season, I just finally said "fuck it." And this despite thinking the female lead is hot as hell. It was still too lame for me to watch, even with her in it. That says a lot for a horny Pervect like myself.

I think the religious apocalypses section is going to be the largest.

I still have to do Muslim and some of the Christian off-shoots like Jehovah's Witnesses and Westboro Baptist Church.

You are including nutcase fundamentalist offshoots in your paper? Not just the major mainstream religions?

Terrorism was a thing that happened. And if you happened to be a big country and poked a small country often enough and hard enough, you could expect to be attacked.

And here was the US, poking all SORTS of small countries. What did they THINK was going to happen? Poke an anthill and you'll get stung. Sheesh.

As a history guy and a political science minor, I was frankly surprised it took so long for something like 9/11 to happen. And I am often surprised and bemused by how many Americans were, and still are, shocked that it did.

Yes, I know this sounds all cold and uncaring. It isn't. But no matter who you talked to in the US, you either got people who also were expecting terrorist attacks on US soil but couldn't get their warnings heard; or people who expected to be safe for one reason or another.

It sounds uncaring only in the sense that you are giving a cold, detached viewpoint of what may have been part of the cause of the attack. To this very day, many Americans just can't accept the fact that American foreign policy may a large cause of why other people hate us, and of why 9/11 happened. There are even a large number of people who find this very premise unpatriotic or even treasonous...ignoring such things as our foreign policy decisions that brought the Shah to power in Iran, or that toppled and help to get assassinated a democratically elected leader in Chile (Salvador Allende), bringing to power a despotic dictator (Augusto Pinochet).

Thankfully, the US seems to have learned.

Really? You think so? Because I don't see them making decisions all that different from the past.

[Cooper]

To be honest, I kind of like the Westboro Baptist Church.

HANG ON A MINUTE DON'T SHOOT ME

They're the only group I've seen where pretty much everyone has gathered together and went "yup, they're assholes."

I feel I would be amiss not to talk about apocalyptic cults, or even non-religious nuts like preppers.