Ernst Junger, fuck yes. Heavyweight champion of the 20th Century.
"I do think it's pretty fucking disrespectful for the sitting President to fuck off to Alaska for the occasion"
You know Biden would have fallen asleep halfway through a story about how he fought Osama Bin Laden from the top of the WTC. Which would have been good tragicomedy, but I can't blame the Dems for getting him as far away from the microphone as possible.
Oh, c'mon, that sounds like it would have been more entertaining and slightly less depressing than what we actually got, which, at least from what I saw, was basically Kamala Harris saying "A lot of people died. People die when they are killed."
As the zoomie in the room, I'd ask 'shieeeee fam did it really hit different tho fr?' but for one thing - the oldest portion of my generation (myself included) saw the last remnants of that old, pre-9/11 world. Visiting the forgotten, rotting towns (usually Olympia, WA for me) that our grandparents or aunts and uncles lived in, we'd see the old malls that were still the social center of a town, the fast food joints and now-vanished chains and mom-and-pop shops that had vanished in the more forward, cosmopolitan centres of empire we normally inhabited.
You mentioned how your perception of all this was heavily coloured by your nostalgia for the lost world of yesteryear. I think it's that, but on a completely different level for us. Even for those of us who saw the old, better America, it was as a thing glimpsed dimly. Many zoomers have only been told stories around the campfire by their creaking, ancient millennial elders, or have uncovered the existence of these better times by searching through the ancient archives of Goo'gle and Yew-qtoob. The mists of legends lie much more heavily over pre-9/11 times, to the point that some even see it as the mythical turning point in the past we must RETVRN to
To try and speak your parlance - "Yes, bro - on god, it was fire, for real, no cap, let's gooooooooo." I got heartburn typing that.
I've begun to see rather unreal 90's nostalgia posts from Zoomers on TikTok (not that I'm on TikTok, but content from there people send me), where, apparently, there's this idea that everyone in the 90's wore suits and dresses and mom stayed home and made candy from scratch while the kids frolicked unsupervised in the front yard and it's like... I have no idea how you missed the mark that bad but please watch any piece of media from the 90's. Then again, this is TikTok, which increasingly seems to be either for the functionally retarded or actively draining the IQ of users.
That being said, I think you can feel that since of lost glory disproportionately in other places. I'm a late-comer to Washington, but... well, growing up in Texas, I only saw everything get bigger, better, newer, over time. In the Dallas/Fort Worth area, even the worst neighborhoods in town were getting new fast food joints, corner stores, so on and so forth. Now, they went to seed fast, but they were still getting stuff. You could really feel the prosperity and rising economic tide in the state - at least if you stayed within the rough triangle of Houston-Dallas-Fort Worth-San Antonio-Austin, which, for the most part, you did. Leaving that, yeah, you'd find some absolutely blasted hellscapes scattered across the countryside, but they'd been moldering away on the high plains or slowly being reclaimed by the swamps and bayous in the east. In the middle of the state, though, where all the big cities and big business was happening, you never really got to see. It isn't until recent years where things that were new when I was a child are beginning to show their age and you can tell the economic slow-down has finally hit, but, even still, there are still areas in which areas are sprawling like virulent fungal infections. I don't get a similar feeling in Washington. Not even in the Seattle/Puget Sound area, which I always figured would be very similar to the way I described the Texas cities. But Tacoma? Bremerton? Olympia? All those little towns dotted around the Sound? Yeah, I definitely get what you mean. The only place I feel as if I don't have the sense that I can literally feel the decay in the air is, like, Bellevue and Redmond and certain neighborhoods of Seattle. It's even worse outside of the Sound area, too. I've written before about how driving through the Cascades and the Olympics provides some of the most stunning, breath-taking scenery in the contiguous 48 states, interspersed with some of the most destitute human habitations I've ever seen in my life. It's not as bad as the absolute grinding poverty you see along the roads in rural Louisiana, but... it can get pretty rough the further away from the main roads. I'm sure you know most of this, but I almost had to type that to get it out of my system. I love Washington, partially because of the natural scenery, partially because it's so different from what I'm used to in so many ways, but I absolutely feel as if I'm living in a place that outlived its prime.
You know the song “Steal My Sunshine” by Len? If not, you should look it up. On YouTube I once saw a comment on the video that said “The 90s felt like one long summer Sunday that would never end.” That sums it up perfectly.
The 90s felt like a pleasant dream, even at the time.
The events of 9/11 felt like a brutal intrusion of reality.
This is going to sound weird, but in a way 9/11 felt *good.* Like, “oh, finally something is *happening.*” I guess too much peace and prosperity starts to seem a little boring.
As I get older and the past world gets increasingly threadbare, it becomes more and more apparent to me how much *money* used to be around. It’s expensive for those restaurants to have bespoke everything. A chain restaurant I frequent just gave up their printed logo napkins in favor of plain white ones. Anything to save money. We’re all getting poorer, and just trying to keep afloat.
The wonderful theme-park world of the 20th century is gone. How marvelous that we were able to experience it, to see it with our own eyes.
I think "optimism" is the key word here. Again, maybe it was a regional thing, coming from the suburban sprawl of the Southwest, where it felt like all boats were rising and, even during 2007/2008, we were relatively insulated from the crash that devastated much of the country, but there was this general sense in the culture that things were bad, but they'd get better again. I feel as if that notion was pretty much disabused after 2012 and the start of the second Obama term. Even with Trumps ascendancy, I never felt "optimistic" about the trajectory of things, but more a sense of relief - like we'd just pulled yanked the car out of the way of a swerving drunk driver and maybe we could get home in one piece, but no one involved was happy about it and just content not to be dead. There's a big difference between that and the kind of optimism I feel like I remember from even the very early 00's, which, to me, seems like optimism with an asterisk.
That being said, I came to the latter conclusion a long time ago. Even though it's still a nice, prosperous suburb in its own right, my own home town is unrecognizable demographically. It's not the same place and it doesn't feel like the same place and I expect one day it will feel totally alien to me. Watching the demographics shift in my own state is heartbreaking, and it isn't just from third world illegal immigration, either, but internal immigration within the country. It's all being watered down and diluted and turned into the same, amorphous gray slop you can find anywhere. I'd keep going but, honestly, you know it, I know it - I'm preaching to the choir and it's not a pleasant sermon.
Yes, even in 2001 the demographics were much better. Looking around and seeing listless Mayan peasants and Dahomey tribal warriors was less common then.
Ernst Junger, fuck yes. Heavyweight champion of the 20th Century.
"I do think it's pretty fucking disrespectful for the sitting President to fuck off to Alaska for the occasion"
You know Biden would have fallen asleep halfway through a story about how he fought Osama Bin Laden from the top of the WTC. Which would have been good tragicomedy, but I can't blame the Dems for getting him as far away from the microphone as possible.
Oh, c'mon, that sounds like it would have been more entertaining and slightly less depressing than what we actually got, which, at least from what I saw, was basically Kamala Harris saying "A lot of people died. People die when they are killed."
Well who else was going to tell us that airplanes are flying machines that go WOOOSH as they fly through the sky on their wings?
As the zoomie in the room, I'd ask 'shieeeee fam did it really hit different tho fr?' but for one thing - the oldest portion of my generation (myself included) saw the last remnants of that old, pre-9/11 world. Visiting the forgotten, rotting towns (usually Olympia, WA for me) that our grandparents or aunts and uncles lived in, we'd see the old malls that were still the social center of a town, the fast food joints and now-vanished chains and mom-and-pop shops that had vanished in the more forward, cosmopolitan centres of empire we normally inhabited.
You mentioned how your perception of all this was heavily coloured by your nostalgia for the lost world of yesteryear. I think it's that, but on a completely different level for us. Even for those of us who saw the old, better America, it was as a thing glimpsed dimly. Many zoomers have only been told stories around the campfire by their creaking, ancient millennial elders, or have uncovered the existence of these better times by searching through the ancient archives of Goo'gle and Yew-qtoob. The mists of legends lie much more heavily over pre-9/11 times, to the point that some even see it as the mythical turning point in the past we must RETVRN to
To try and speak your parlance - "Yes, bro - on god, it was fire, for real, no cap, let's gooooooooo." I got heartburn typing that.
I've begun to see rather unreal 90's nostalgia posts from Zoomers on TikTok (not that I'm on TikTok, but content from there people send me), where, apparently, there's this idea that everyone in the 90's wore suits and dresses and mom stayed home and made candy from scratch while the kids frolicked unsupervised in the front yard and it's like... I have no idea how you missed the mark that bad but please watch any piece of media from the 90's. Then again, this is TikTok, which increasingly seems to be either for the functionally retarded or actively draining the IQ of users.
That being said, I think you can feel that since of lost glory disproportionately in other places. I'm a late-comer to Washington, but... well, growing up in Texas, I only saw everything get bigger, better, newer, over time. In the Dallas/Fort Worth area, even the worst neighborhoods in town were getting new fast food joints, corner stores, so on and so forth. Now, they went to seed fast, but they were still getting stuff. You could really feel the prosperity and rising economic tide in the state - at least if you stayed within the rough triangle of Houston-Dallas-Fort Worth-San Antonio-Austin, which, for the most part, you did. Leaving that, yeah, you'd find some absolutely blasted hellscapes scattered across the countryside, but they'd been moldering away on the high plains or slowly being reclaimed by the swamps and bayous in the east. In the middle of the state, though, where all the big cities and big business was happening, you never really got to see. It isn't until recent years where things that were new when I was a child are beginning to show their age and you can tell the economic slow-down has finally hit, but, even still, there are still areas in which areas are sprawling like virulent fungal infections. I don't get a similar feeling in Washington. Not even in the Seattle/Puget Sound area, which I always figured would be very similar to the way I described the Texas cities. But Tacoma? Bremerton? Olympia? All those little towns dotted around the Sound? Yeah, I definitely get what you mean. The only place I feel as if I don't have the sense that I can literally feel the decay in the air is, like, Bellevue and Redmond and certain neighborhoods of Seattle. It's even worse outside of the Sound area, too. I've written before about how driving through the Cascades and the Olympics provides some of the most stunning, breath-taking scenery in the contiguous 48 states, interspersed with some of the most destitute human habitations I've ever seen in my life. It's not as bad as the absolute grinding poverty you see along the roads in rural Louisiana, but... it can get pretty rough the further away from the main roads. I'm sure you know most of this, but I almost had to type that to get it out of my system. I love Washington, partially because of the natural scenery, partially because it's so different from what I'm used to in so many ways, but I absolutely feel as if I'm living in a place that outlived its prime.
I was 26 on 9/11.
You know the song “Steal My Sunshine” by Len? If not, you should look it up. On YouTube I once saw a comment on the video that said “The 90s felt like one long summer Sunday that would never end.” That sums it up perfectly.
The 90s felt like a pleasant dream, even at the time.
The events of 9/11 felt like a brutal intrusion of reality.
This is going to sound weird, but in a way 9/11 felt *good.* Like, “oh, finally something is *happening.*” I guess too much peace and prosperity starts to seem a little boring.
As I get older and the past world gets increasingly threadbare, it becomes more and more apparent to me how much *money* used to be around. It’s expensive for those restaurants to have bespoke everything. A chain restaurant I frequent just gave up their printed logo napkins in favor of plain white ones. Anything to save money. We’re all getting poorer, and just trying to keep afloat.
The wonderful theme-park world of the 20th century is gone. How marvelous that we were able to experience it, to see it with our own eyes.
I think "optimism" is the key word here. Again, maybe it was a regional thing, coming from the suburban sprawl of the Southwest, where it felt like all boats were rising and, even during 2007/2008, we were relatively insulated from the crash that devastated much of the country, but there was this general sense in the culture that things were bad, but they'd get better again. I feel as if that notion was pretty much disabused after 2012 and the start of the second Obama term. Even with Trumps ascendancy, I never felt "optimistic" about the trajectory of things, but more a sense of relief - like we'd just pulled yanked the car out of the way of a swerving drunk driver and maybe we could get home in one piece, but no one involved was happy about it and just content not to be dead. There's a big difference between that and the kind of optimism I feel like I remember from even the very early 00's, which, to me, seems like optimism with an asterisk.
That being said, I came to the latter conclusion a long time ago. Even though it's still a nice, prosperous suburb in its own right, my own home town is unrecognizable demographically. It's not the same place and it doesn't feel like the same place and I expect one day it will feel totally alien to me. Watching the demographics shift in my own state is heartbreaking, and it isn't just from third world illegal immigration, either, but internal immigration within the country. It's all being watered down and diluted and turned into the same, amorphous gray slop you can find anywhere. I'd keep going but, honestly, you know it, I know it - I'm preaching to the choir and it's not a pleasant sermon.
Yes, even in 2001 the demographics were much better. Looking around and seeing listless Mayan peasants and Dahomey tribal warriors was less common then.