"We may yet work up to some serious shooting war, or maybe some acts of urban genocide committed with rogue nuclear weapons. But if that were the case, why would we call that "9/11"? If Washington disappeared in a mushroom cloud, we'd give that huge event a different name"
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Sterling is doing what good speculative writers do when they want to puncture a myth: he treats a sacred label like a clunky piece of technology and asks whether it would still function under stress. The line isn’t really about predicting the next catastrophe. It’s about how “9/11” became a kind of cultural operating system - a shorthand that loads a whole bundle of emotions, policies, and permissions with two digits and a slash.
The bite is in the escalation. He casually tosses off “serious shooting war” and “urban genocide” with the chilly, genre-honed voice of someone who’s spent decades imagining worst-case futures. That coldness is the point: it exposes how quickly public language normalizes horror once it’s packaged into a reusable term. If you can keep calling everything “9/11,” you can keep re-running the same script: the same fear reflex, the same moral clarity, the same open-ended emergency.
His rhetorical question - why would we call that “9/11”? - is a trapdoor. It forces you to notice that the name is doing more work than the facts. A mushroom cloud over Washington would demand a new label because it would break the story we’ve been telling ourselves since 2001. Sterling’s subtext is that events don’t just happen; they get branded, and the brand determines what’s thinkable afterward. He’s warning that clinging to “9/11” as the master metaphor isn’t remembrance. It’s inertia, a refusal to update our political imagination even as the threat landscape mutates.
The bite is in the escalation. He casually tosses off “serious shooting war” and “urban genocide” with the chilly, genre-honed voice of someone who’s spent decades imagining worst-case futures. That coldness is the point: it exposes how quickly public language normalizes horror once it’s packaged into a reusable term. If you can keep calling everything “9/11,” you can keep re-running the same script: the same fear reflex, the same moral clarity, the same open-ended emergency.
His rhetorical question - why would we call that “9/11”? - is a trapdoor. It forces you to notice that the name is doing more work than the facts. A mushroom cloud over Washington would demand a new label because it would break the story we’ve been telling ourselves since 2001. Sterling’s subtext is that events don’t just happen; they get branded, and the brand determines what’s thinkable afterward. He’s warning that clinging to “9/11” as the master metaphor isn’t remembrance. It’s inertia, a refusal to update our political imagination even as the threat landscape mutates.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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