Daily Inspiration Quote by Frank Rich

A little sanctimony, a little amnesia, and a very American urge to declare the argument over. Frank Rich is doing more than reminiscing about national unity; he’s capturing a familiar post-crisis script: catastrophe arrives, and suddenly yesterday’s fights are recast as trivial, even indecent. The phrase “silly culture wars” is the tell. It doesn’t just downgrade prior conflicts; it moralizes them, implying that attention itself was a kind of frivolity we should be ashamed of.

Rich’s intent is double-edged. On the surface, he’s praising a reset in priorities - a turn from symbolic skirmishes (“rock lyrics”) to material stakes (“real problems”). But the subtext is a media critique aimed at his own ecosystem: punditry and politics had been feeding on spectacle, and 9/11 briefly forced a different diet. That “for some reason” is doing real work, signaling skepticism about how durable or sincere this awakening was. People didn’t suddenly become wiser; they were shocked into a posture of seriousness.

Context matters: in the late 1990s and early 2000s, “culture wars” shorthand covered everything from impeachment-as-morality-play to censorship panics and the policing of popular culture. After 9/11, those debates didn’t vanish; they were temporarily subordinated to security, war, surveillance, and the manufacture of consensus. Rich’s line flatters the collective memory of unity while hinting at its fragility: we “remembered” our problems, as if the nation had known them all along and simply got distracted. That’s the critique - and the warning.