Education Quote by Paul Gillmor

Gillmor opens by yoking national trauma to a familiar cultural shorthand: Hollywood spectacle. The move is calculated. By framing catastrophe as something that used to belong to a “make-believe world,” he’s not just describing surprise; he’s staging a before-and-after for the country’s imagination. “More than seven months ago” adds a legislative timestamp, reminding listeners that this isn’t raw grief anymore. It’s processed grief, the kind that must now justify policy, budgets, surveillance, war, security theater.

The line works because it borrows Hollywood’s credibility as a factory of vivid images. Everyone knows what a disaster movie looks like; Gillmor exploits that shared visual language to make the unspeakable instantly legible. But the subtext is sharper: if the attack resembled film, then film is implicated. “Hollywood” becomes a proxy for modern media culture itself, hinting that Americans were lulled by entertainment into mistaking vulnerability for fiction. That subtle scold can easily pivot into a demand for vigilance, discipline, and expanded authority.

Calling it “before our very eyes” is doing double duty. It signals shock and eyewitness authenticity, while also nodding to how mediated the experience was - watched live, replayed, and absorbed through screens. The horrors “come to life” suggests a monster escaping containment: fantasy crossing into reality. It’s a rhetorical bridge from mourning to mandate, turning a cultural reference into a moral argument that the nation must reorganize itself around the premise that the unthinkable is now thinkable.