Twenty five years ago the world veered away from a good place.
Ms. Ace and I saw the second attack on the World Trade Center live on TV, half a world away.
An acquaintance rang our phone in the middle of a winter night and screamed to the top of her lungs;
Turn the T.V. on now!
You will not believe this!
Our eyes were captured by the drama unfolding in front of us: a magnificent New York skyscraper was billowing a thick cloud of smoke.
A few minutes later, another passenger jet came on screen and slammed against the South Tower.
And we saw this in real-time.
The day after the attacks, Ms. Ace, who is very prescient and observant, said to me:
“Bush has got his war now, and America will never be the same again.”
And these twenty five years have proven her right. Oh, so right indeed. I wish I could say otherwise, but as usual, Ms. Ace is right.
The 11th of September of 2001 became the Reichstag fire of the progressive, liberal democracy of the late 1990’s. It was the funeral of the world I grew up in.
The chads
If there’s any single point of inflection in this drama it would be the US Presidential Election of 2000: an outgoing Clinton administration was being attacked from all flanks by a Republican machinery that was trying every single trick in the book of dirty politics.
The winner of the popular vote, Al Gore, lost the election. And the controversies and disputes about the result had all the trademarks of obstruction, gerrymandering, collusion and interference by political operators.
One of those controversies happened in Florida -the state that eventually sealed the result of the election. The media circus had started to question the validity of the results and recounts based on the “chads” stuck to the paper voting cards.
It has a surreal quality to think that our future has been determined by humble bits of paper. Just like in one of my favourite science-fiction stories, a single fleeting moment changed our future for the worse.
The worse
The world we have now is much, much worse than it was in 2001. It’s a dystopia.
Al-Qaida and the Taliban are stronger and regained what they lost back then.
The United States has presented itself to be a lamentable husk of its former glory, ruled by corrupt psychopaths.
Israel is in a perpetual war against its neighbours and itself.
The European Union has been damaged beyond repair by populism, illegal immigration and Brexit.
Liberal democracy has vanished and authoritarianism is stronger now than ever.
Russia is no friend of anyone except Russia. China is no friend of anyone except China.
Unjust invasions, land grabs and genocide are in the news every single day.
Climate change is now unstoppable.
The enshittification of online services and the glorification of capital, short-term hubris and monetisation.
Artificial Intelligence, now almost out of control and could turn on us.
Corruption and crime at every level of society.
The moral bankruptcy of the ruling classes. From secret party islands, to trafficking and abusing of children, the rulers are much worse than we thought they were.