Despite the scandal that “rocked the nation” in 1998—Bill Clinton’s lechery fully coming to light thanks to his “relations” with a certain White House intern—for the most part, as the U.S. entered the twenty-first century, the population seemed optimistic. Hopeful that a “brighter” future was certain to lie ahead, even politically. And then, the instant 2000 arrived, anyone paying attention could see that a dropkick to the gut in the form of George W. Bush “winning” the election was a harbinger of more doom. Though perhaps they couldn’t have seen it in the way that someone seeing, say, a President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US” could have. And should have.
But, since Bush II was the first unabashed village idiot running the “greatest country in the world,” he shrugged off most of the warnings and alarm bells that came in the months leading up to 9/11 and continued to play golf. In fact, when he received that brief in early August of 2001, he was “vacationing” at his ranch (true to the “tough-talkin’ cowboy” persona) in Texas. The same summer that Bret Easton Ellis was still living in New York and having something of an existential crisis, as documented in his 2019 essay collection, White. That crisis manifested in the physical at one point while working out at a Crunch gym, when Ellis had a seizure. Just part and parcel of what he would refer to as a summer that was characterized, for him, by a “low-humming dread.” Of course, not everyone living in New York City that year seemed to feel the same way, with Kristin Davis, for example, constantly talking on her podcast about how that summer felt like all the colors were turned up to a hundred, a Technicolor dream before the fall. A fall that so many Americans still appear ignore ever happened as they guzzle the Orange Creature’s “America First” policies (though what he means by that is, “Me First”) and continued promises of somehow making America “great again.” This referring to its Empire heyday right after World War II and the decades that followed. A time when the Orange Creature and his family were further securing their wealth and untouchability.
And also a time when Ellis himself was growing up in Sherman Oaks and experiencing, in contrast to the millennial generation, a total lack of coddling and overprotectiveness on his parents’ part. Something he points out as one of the key reasons why millennials were (and are) so unequipped to handle disappointment, tragedy. Such as what was arguably the defining catastrophe/political event of their generation (before the 2008 financial crisis). For, after 9/11, the “Empire” version of America that millennials had grown up with was effectively bulldozed like the Twin Towers themselves. Whether they could fully fathom it or not, the halcyon days were officially over for them, in the way that AIDS did the same for a certain generation of gay men living it up in the late 70s and early 80s until they were suddenly dropping dead.
But, in the aftermath of what amounted to an apocalypse (for it did mark the end of a certain kind of world), no one seemed keen to ask too many questions of their government. Instead, free rein was given to the Bush administration to “act accordingly.” To do “whatever necessary” to “rid the world of the evil-doers,” as Bush ambitiously and black-and-whitely phrased it. What he got rid of, instead, were a lot of freedoms that many people, because they were so young when it happened, would forget they ever even had. However, so long as those freedoms were stripped away gradually, then suddenly (e.g., the implementation of more overzealous TSA checks gives way to something like the Patriot Act), it was no big deal. Or, as Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) puts it in a season six episode of Gilmore Girls, “He’s totally fine having his personal freedom slowly stripped away, as long as he’s completely unaware that it’s happening. Just like a true American.”
The stripping away of freedom hasn’t just bled into the everyday personal freedoms that Americans once had, but also into the creative sphere. Which is to say, creativity is now monitored, policed and, most of all, rated for likeability. As Ellis also highlights in his book, this—post-Empire thinking—is what, in its way, opened a gateway for the kind of “repress-the-people-out-of-necessity” philosophy that social media/“self-curation” would make all the more tangible in the years shortly after 9/11. And with the internet becoming an increasing part of everyone’s day-to-day lives as the 2000s progressed, that repression was fortified by “the democratization of everything.” Including art. Because everyone could be an “artist” now. Or, more accurately, a “curator” of art. Which is how the rise of cancel culture began as well, another key aspect of post-Empire America.
Putting it in blunt terms, Ellis states that, for example, “…there can never be another Sinatra because neither pop culture nor society works like that anymore—in a way that allows someone to fail repeatedly and to get back up, to act brashly, and sometimes badly, without apology. Pop culture now would be hesitant to invite anyone like Sinatra (or Miles Davis or James Brown) back in, and while watching [the All or Nothing at All documentary] it chilled me to realize that maybe democratization hadn’t been all that great for pop culture itself. How would any of those artists have fared in a self-censorious society in which everyone tiptoes around trying to appease every group that might take offense at any opposing view, in essence shutting down creative excellence thanks to the fears and insecurities and ignorance of others?”
Although it might not seem like it on the surface, 9/11 was the knell that signaled the end of Empire in this way too. It wasn’t just about personal freedoms being stripped away. Indeed, it’s the latter that ultimately led to freedom of thought being stripped away as well. Gen Z, for instance, who views 9/11 as nothing more but a meme opportunity, has been directly affected by post-9/11 society in that they were never even allowed to know a world in which their “thoughts” weren’t curated and censored for them (conditioned early on in the art of self-censoring, to boot). A world when their algorithm wasn’t doing all the “thinking” for them, anticipating their every “need”: first and foremost, to fritter away the hours watching shitty (but oh so digestible) “content.”
And while Ellis notes that after 9/11, “…anything was permissible, that what happened this morning opened up a new door altogether, and that everything was out of control,” in many ways, this is the event that made nothing permissible at all ever again. Which extends to the notion of art that creates discourse because it’s not being put out there solely to be “liked.” This playing a significant role in the post-Empire requisite of pop culture: be likeable, don’t rock the boat (lest ye risk being cancelled). Taylor Swift is a perfect embodiment of that, despite many believing that she is the last vestige of Empire-like pop culture. But no, in truth, her melba toast, middling “art” is a byproduct of the “softening of the edges” that arrived after 9/11. That is, after Britney Spears had to be “snuffed out” and sacrificed on the TMZ-branded altar for one last hurrah on the part of the media (not so coincidentally, around 2006-2008, when Swift first rose to prominence).
In conjunction with this “softening of the edges” that took place after 9/11 so as to make sure everyone believed it was all still fine, nothing to see here, etc., so, too, did New York become a former shell of itself. Its “hard, unforgiving, merciless” self. That is to say, it embraced becoming fully “Disney-fied.” This, no doubt, stemmed from a collective fear among the city’s government officials that 1) no one would want to move to NYC anymore and 2) the current residents would leave in droves as a response to their fear. But no, strangely, it was also after 2001 that New York grew to be a more sought-after place to live, at least from those glory days of 2003 (“The Strokes and Interpol era”) to roughly 2015 (the “Lady Gaga and Lana Del Rey era”). Even though, as Ellis describes in White, Manhattan became “the moated gated community it is now, filled with what seems like only rich people and tourists.”
But that’s all in accordance with the dulling of everything and anything that could be perceived as “offensive.” Or, worse still, invoke a visceral reaction of any kind. Because that’s the last thing post-Empire wants from or requires of those living in it. Which is why, when Bin Laden’s henchmen knocked down those towers on September 11, 2001, they unwittingly knocked down something else entirely: the American public’s ability to discern between what was “good” and “bad” anymore. Politically and pop culturally.
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