The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 34 of 125
9/11 and the end of middle-class society
Looking back on it today, the answer doesn’t seem to make that much difference. Either way, what 9/11 did was trash the last vestiges of middle-class society. For decades—for most of the twentieth century, in fact—the broad-based economic power of the middle classes had been steadily undermined, and by the end of the century it was a thing of the past. What became horribly clear as the U.S. military/corporate juggernaut rumbled into action was that even the pretense of democracy was gone too. Five hundred years of middle-class society, with its complex system of checks and balances, was over, and all that remained was to rescind civil liberties that had taken hundreds of years to win. Henceforward the West was controlled by a few vast multinational corporations—a government not only unelected but also composed of individuals whose very identity was unknown. All that was clear was their agenda: the introduction of a kind of urbanized neofeudal order, and the creation of a single World State. And almost immediately anticorporate, anti-imperial sentiment hitherto restricted to a politically educated minority began to spread. The pitched battles at Seattle (1999) or Prague (2000) or the still wilder surreal riots at Genoa (July 2001) began to seem more than vehement but localized outbursts against the powers that be. They began to look like the first stirrings of a New Left. And, despite the horror of the carnage in Manhattan, it felt like a breath of fresh air was blowing through the world. The mighty U.S. imperium was no longer the unchallenged colossus straddling the planet. At least the truth, however awful, was out in the open—and it was exhilarating.