"I did feel like they were telling me that something like that was going to happen. Not specifically - not that planes were going to be flown into the World Trade Center or anything like that - but in the general sense"
About this Quote
Ronson’s sentence performs a careful balancing act: it captures the eerie seduction of hindsight without surrendering to the cheap certainty of prophecy. The opening, “I did feel,” is doing quiet legal work. It frames the claim as sensation rather than fact, a self-audit that signals both vulnerability and restraint. Then comes the crucial hedge-and-correction sequence: “they were telling me” (externalizes agency, hints at a milieu of insinuation) followed by “Not specifically” (a brake slam), and then the almost comically explicit clarification about planes and the World Trade Center. That specificity isn’t just ethical; it’s rhetorical. By naming the unimaginable detail, he demonstrates he’s not trying to retroactively win the lottery of prediction.
The subtext is about how conspiracy culture, fringe security talk, and general apocalyptic buzz can prime someone to feel pre-warned after catastrophe. “In the general sense” is the tell: it’s the kind of phrase that lets a vague premonition survive contact with reality. Ronson, as a journalist who’s spent a career among eccentrics, paranoiacs, and true believers, understands the emotional payoff of being adjacent to secret knowledge. He also understands the reputational danger of claiming it too cleanly.
Contextually, the line sits in the long post-9/11 shadow where everyone is tempted to locate “signals” in the noise: the missed memos, the ominous chatter, the half-remembered warnings. Ronson’s intent is to show how easily narrative snaps into place after the fact, and how responsible storytelling requires showing your own mind doing the snapping.
The subtext is about how conspiracy culture, fringe security talk, and general apocalyptic buzz can prime someone to feel pre-warned after catastrophe. “In the general sense” is the tell: it’s the kind of phrase that lets a vague premonition survive contact with reality. Ronson, as a journalist who’s spent a career among eccentrics, paranoiacs, and true believers, understands the emotional payoff of being adjacent to secret knowledge. He also understands the reputational danger of claiming it too cleanly.
Contextually, the line sits in the long post-9/11 shadow where everyone is tempted to locate “signals” in the noise: the missed memos, the ominous chatter, the half-remembered warnings. Ronson’s intent is to show how easily narrative snaps into place after the fact, and how responsible storytelling requires showing your own mind doing the snapping.
Quote Details
| Topic | Anxiety |
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