Time & Perspective Quote by Joe Bob Briggs

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.