"There is no post-9/11. Everything from now until the end of time is post-9/11"
About this Quote
Briggs frames 9/11 not as a historical event with an after, but as a permanent switch flipped in the cultural circuit breaker. The line’s power comes from its deliberately blunt refusal of the comfort baked into our timeline language. “Post-” usually implies digestion: the crisis happened, we processed it, we moved into a new era with new habits. Briggs yanks that narrative away. If everything is “post-9/11,” then nothing ever gets to be safely past it.
The intent is partly diagnostic, partly accusatory. He’s calling out how the event metastasized beyond mourning into infrastructure: airport rituals, surveillance logic, foreign policy assumptions, the entertainment industry’s recalibration of fear, even the way news cycles learned to monetize dread. His phrasing makes “post-9/11” sound less like a date stamp and more like a brand that never stops selling.
As a critic, Briggs is also poking at our dependence on tidy cultural epochs. Critics (and audiences) love labels because they make chaos legible: postwar, postmodern, post-recession. Briggs suggests that 9/11 broke that system by becoming an organizing myth, a forever-justification. The cynicism is in the implication that institutions found the tragedy useful, a renewable resource for policy and posture.
The subtext lands hardest as a warning: if we accept “post-9/11” as the air we breathe, then emergency becomes normal, and the temporary measures quietly turn into the rules of the house.
The intent is partly diagnostic, partly accusatory. He’s calling out how the event metastasized beyond mourning into infrastructure: airport rituals, surveillance logic, foreign policy assumptions, the entertainment industry’s recalibration of fear, even the way news cycles learned to monetize dread. His phrasing makes “post-9/11” sound less like a date stamp and more like a brand that never stops selling.
As a critic, Briggs is also poking at our dependence on tidy cultural epochs. Critics (and audiences) love labels because they make chaos legible: postwar, postmodern, post-recession. Briggs suggests that 9/11 broke that system by becoming an organizing myth, a forever-justification. The cynicism is in the implication that institutions found the tragedy useful, a renewable resource for policy and posture.
The subtext lands hardest as a warning: if we accept “post-9/11” as the air we breathe, then emergency becomes normal, and the temporary measures quietly turn into the rules of the house.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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