Since September 11, 2001, America has employed a single narrative to explain the historical significance of the attacks: September 11th was the new Pearl Harbor. We heard it from politicians, anchors and pundits. We read it in headlines, news tickers, and blogs. Perhaps we noticed the similarities ourselves. It is usually stated along these lines: The Deadliest Attack on American Soil Since Pearl Harbor. The fact that this association seemed to have come simultaneously from our leaders, the media, and our own heads — from everywhere and nowhere in particular — made it all the more powerful and all the more real. In our thoughts it passed from comparison to metaphor, and from metaphor to fact. The fact united us. 9-11 was Pearl Harbor.

It was obvious, even though it shouldn’t have been. Quietly, and long after the events themselves, we realized that Pearl Harbor did not have to become the dominant narrative for 9-11. Terrorists had attacked America in the past — the first World Trade Center Bombing, the African Embassy Bombings, the USS Cole, not to mention Oklahoma City. Even if it dwarfed them in scope, 9-11 was like those events. Terrorists, unaligned with any nation state and lacking any geographic presence, had once again attacked and killed Americans. 9-11, though more spectacular and more devastating, was, like previous terrorist attacks, a criminal act.

But the circumstances of 9-11 made the false analogy to Pearl Harbor too tempting to resist. For the second time in less than a century, the Asiatic races, angry over something or other, had mounted a cowardly surprise attack from the sky. The tactics they employed were Kamikaze attacks, just like the Japanese had employed in the later days of World War II. And just as the Pacific Fleet had been the symbol of American power in 1941, the World Trade Center and Pentagon were symbols of American economic and military hegemony. After this, the comparison breaks down, but so what?

And so, 9-11 entered our collective consciousness as Pearl Harbor, which was a very different event from Oklahoma City or the Embassy Bombings: Pearl Harbor meant war. Therefore, we thought, 9-11 had to mean war as well. But for 9-11 to mean war we had to avoid certain theoretical and definitional barriers that had prevented us from going to war in response to previous terrorist attacks. We had to ignore the fact that nations do not, generally speaking, go to war to capture or kill criminals. We had to excuse the fact that, since the terrorists had no army, no territory, and no territorial ambitions, we could not, strictly speaking, “attack” them. In short, we had to forget that the term “war” is generally reserved for conflicts between two or more nations. The fact that this was Pearl Harbor, rather than simply another in a string of terrorist attacks, allowed us to avoid all those conceptual barriers to war. So what if there were no opposing nations or armies? We would declare war on criminals and tactics. When that failed to make us feel whole, we would simply redefine the problem and invade countries that had nothing to do with the attacks.

The pundit class helped by discovering and naming certain previously unknown historical trends and social forces. As Samuel Huntington pointed out, 9-11 was actually just one more event in an ongoing Clash of Civilizations. It had been going on for a while, and we had spent so much time anticipating new Initial Public Offerings and building bulletproof tech-stock portfolios that we had overlooked it: the West (whatever that is) had to be saved from Islam. This was a threat equal to or worse than the combined threat of Nazism and Japanese Imperialism. Our way of life was imperiled not just by the terrorists, but by Turkish workers in Germany and Algerian girls wearing the Hijab in French schools. The demographics were terrifying: so many of them, so few of us. Nobody remembered how or why the old colonialism had failed, but it was generally agreed that a new colonialism would have to be invented or discovered to do the job right.

But even the thought of 1.6 billion Mahometans and their inscrutable devotion to a god that wasn’t the market wasn’t enough to unite us. The faces on the television screen seemed too real and too poor and too much like National Geographic pictorials to incite fear. Besides, the whole conflict of civilizations thing was a bit abstract. The crisis had to be put into terms that were simultaneously more concrete and more faceless. Here, the erstwhile leftist Christopher Hitchens abandoned his dialectics and came to our rescue. The threat wasn’t so much Islam as a particular sort of Islam: Islamofascism. It was a rhetorical masterstroke and it mattered little that the term was meaningless. Hitler and Tojo — the Arch-fiends — had returned, this time in turbans and vestbombs.

Tora! Tora! ... Bora?: Pearl Harbor and 9-11 twin towering myths.

It was what we needed when we needed it. Islamofascism transformed the incomprehensible face of worldwide Islam into mere incoherence: they hated freedom in general and our freedom in particular. Even better, Islamofascism tied in perfectly with our own growing belief that 9-11 was the new Pearl Harbor. Unable to accept that the events of 9-11 had been masterminded by a very tall Saudi billionaire criminal who now lived in a cave or by the disheveled and obese Khalid Sheikh Mohamed we knew that hidden eastern hordes lay in wait, ready to make the trains run on time and destroy our way of life. So what if nobody had actually seen Islamofascists goose-stepping to midday prayers, we had found our enemy and our war.

It certainly helped that we no longer had any idea what war was. We had long since ceased to call our wars wars, preferring since time out of mind such terms as “police action,” “crisis,” “emergency,” or “peace-keeping operation.” When we did use the term it was not to describe armed conflict, but, much like the term “fascism,” as a sort of metaphor to convey our extreme distaste for something. By 2001, though few Americans had served in armed combat, all Americans were proud veterans of, among others conflicts, the war on crime, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the Cola wars, the culture wars, and the never-ending war on high prices. Here was a victory in which all could take pride: in the span of fifty years we had liberated war from its semantic chains.

So, we were a little bit goofy about war, but we knew what a real war was: it was World War II. The American consciousness, busy with tracking the mating habits of J-Lo and Britney and bored by the tedium of history, had cranial capacity and attention span to consider only two actual wars: World War II and Vietnam. World War II, narrated by Tom Brokaw and Ronald Reagan, stands as our greatest triumph, and Vietnam, brought to you by Oliver Stone and Robert MacNamara, as our greatest failure. This Manichean view, fostered by the wish-fulfillment industry and the demands of political expediency has gradually manifested itself in an atavistic duality whose effects are too broad and profound to catalog. Suffice it to say, we love to talk about World War II, while we bring up Vietnam only when we wish to excoriate hippies, attack Dick Cheney as a draft-dodger, or bemoan our betrayal by politicians who “wouldn’t let us win.”

By 9-10, World War II existed in our minds as a golden age inhabited by a heroic race known as the greatest generation. The veneration of the greatest generation had largely supplanted America’s founding as our central myth. Everything we had, we owed to them. In our neutered and denatured state, these men stood as the representation of everything that we were not. We worshiped their glory vicariously through books, movie screens, and television documentaries.

The more devout among us participated in yearly religious pageants or processions known as “reenactments” or “living history events” at places like Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania and Queen Creek, Arizona. There, dressed in painstakingly realistic battle dress, our priest caste commanded tanks, tossed grenades and launched bayonet charges to honor the ghosts. For several weekends every year, they separated themselves from the worldy weekend rites of yardwork and NFL triplecasts to propitiate the penates. Afterwards, having pleased the absent gods with their sacrifices, they drove home in SUVs to await and prepare for next year’s rites. Despite such heroic efforts, our separation from the heroes of Guadalcanal and Omaha beach grew more profound with each passing year.

The new Pearl Harbor promised to change all that. The new and terrible enemy revealed, 9-11 would, at long last, allow us to demonstrate our own honor and virtue as we ushered in a new age. With Pearl Harbor as a sort of protective totem, we commenced to herald the dawning Satya Yuga and celebrate our strange rites by “re-living” history on a much grander scale.

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