THE CONSPIRASPHERE

TRAGEDY AND ILLUSION “It feels like fifty years ago, and then it feels like yesterday” – FDNY Assistant Chief Salvatore Cassano

The events of 9/11, 20 years ago, are vividly fresh in my mind; for many people of my generation, this was our JFK moment, the event that separated before and after. I recall a whole raft of feelings, but three stand out now.

First, of course, was the visceral horror of it all; television and the Internet had brought all sorts of terrible events into our living rooms – the US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, the worst atrocities of the war in the former Yugoslavia, natural disasters – but this was different. This was New York. This was somehow in our own backyard, even if we lived in Europe. There was a real sense that people we knew, or people who knew people we knew, could be in those towers. This was in some sense us. And it was coming to us live on TV.

Second was the eerie sensation that I was witnessing a spectacle of terrible