The Day Something Happened
It is that day that has animated everything since
My mom answered the phone, groggy, not quite with it, wondering what exactly I was talking about.
Sitting in the parking lot of a community college about a dozen miles outside D.C., I called her that morning from the clunky flip phone my parents had given me after graduating high school four months earlier. Trying not to sound crazy and failing spectacularly, I told my mom that the radio – 99.1 WHFS, to be exact – was talking somberly about a column of smoke billowing from the Pentagon, located a couple miles from the WHFS studios. They were talking about some kind of evacuation of the World Trade Center too. They sounded frightened. Their usual boisterousness had been extinguished.
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My mom cleared her throat and assured me everything would be fine. She told me not to worry, to get to class and focus on school. It was a few minutes later that two military jets flew low over the campus and my phone rang. It was my mom. I could hear the TV in the background. Something, she said, was happening.
I wandered around campus for a while, unencumbered by real-time updates and microblogging and online misinformation, and asked people if they knew anything about what was happening. No one did, not really. One guy told me New York and LA and Chicago had been attacked. A nuke may have gone off in LA, he said as if reporting the weather. I passed one student yelling at another for saying the US deserved whatever was happening that day. They were both crying. A math professor, the color drained from his face, told a group of students – including me – that we were going to live in interesting times. Nothing had ever sounded so threatening. I didn't want to live in interesting times. I preferred the 90s.
A couple weeks later I got together with some old high school friends for a birthday party. We all tried to smile and be normal and talking about anything besides the Day Something Happened. That didn't last long.
Having armed ourselves with a thousand layers of millennial-flavored irony, we talked about how great it was to have the End Times kick off during our first week of college. We were coming of age during the apocalypse. I had a couple friends back then who had been psyched about the end of the world for a long time, especially after a Democrat had occupied the White House for eight years. We had gone to a fire-and-brimstone Baptist high school where school leadership and teachers and everyone down to the janitors spoke gleefully about the day they would be vacuumed up into heaven, away from the atheists and gays and liberals and feminists and Muslims and everyone else who scared them. Towers falling in the most evil city on earth, according to these folks, was the beginning of the glorious end. Soon they would be living in their heavenly McMansions driving Cadillac Escalades around the golf course community Jesus Christ had secured for them when he was tortured and executed.
Denny Carter
Someone at the birthday party brought up Nostradamus and I bought the whole story without question. That old fucker had predicted this whole thing. Unfuckingbelievable. Just read what he wrote: It was all there. It was over. Life would never be the same, as the WHFS deejay had said the Day Something Happened after playing Pearl Jam's Better Man: "This feels like a final loss of innocence."
Knowing nothing about politics beyond Rage Against The Machine telling me Al Gore and George W. Bush were exactly the same – something I think about sometimes as a 40-something shitlib today – I just assumed we would never stop electing people who promised revenge for that Day Something Happened. Whoever was willing to kill and torture the most people would gain power and probably never lose it. That wasn't exactly correct, I suppose, but it wasn't far off. About a year after the Day Something Happened, I started reading books written to justify the terror my country would visit upon the world, cynically using that day's dead as a permanent excuse to kill 'em all.
Denny Carter
The only solution for the slaughter of innocents, these respectable foreign policy wonks wrote in sober, technocratic language, was more innocent blood. Blood for blood, piles of corpses for piles of corpses, shattered lives for shattered lives: This was the math equation.
It was the only proven formula, they wrote. It was the only remaining choice. Iran, Iraq, it didn't matter. We'd put a boot up their ass, as the song said.
A hundred little wars. I recall that proposal in The Washington Post in the aftermath of the Day Something Happened. We were the victims now, and victims can do anything they want. Victimhood justifies everything. Each of these one hundred wars would be for Our Security, to topple elected leaders who would not run their governments exactly how we wanted them to. This, naturally, would require more money for the Death Machine, and in those days and the days to follow that was no problem because everyone was scared – so scared – and more than willing to feed the Death Machine whatever it wanted if it meant preventing another Day Something Happened.
There were a few people who said it wasn't a good idea to feed the Death Machine our constitutional rights because you usually don't get those back once they're eaten. But many, many more people told those constitution enjoyers to shut the entire fuck up and swore to God that the Death Machine would never do anything to harm us, that the Death Machine does not lie and has never lied. All it was requesting was sustenance for the mission ahead. How, they screamed, could we deny it proper sustenance? And basically everyone we had elected to represent us went along with the plan to feed the Death Machine until it was full and ready to do what needed to be done.
A quarter century later the Death Machine remains ravenous. Even the people who were once perfectly OK with satiating it are wondering why it's still asking for money and people and our rights.
There were a few voices in the wilderness in the months and years after the Day Something Happened that warned our leaders and the media charged with informing that one day, when the Death Machine was bloated and bored and controlled by a man who would not recognize limitations on his power, it would be turned upon us. All the photos and videos of civilians in faraway places running in terror and picking up pieces of their loved ones and wailing over dead children and wives and husbands – that would all come home one day.
And we said no, that can't happen. The Death Machine can only hurt people in other places. Not us. Not here. Sure, it promised to deliver justice and vengeance and the rivers of blood that come with it, but those rivers will always flow in deserts and villages elsewhere, on our TVs, on our phones. There will never be a blood river in the American suburbs. There will never be occupation here.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
