Getting Ready for 9/11 Speech I Dread

Dr. Joe Hendryx introduces the first event in this year's Fall Faculty Series at MMU. On Sept. 29, Dr. Jim Jacobs, a computer science professor, reviewed events in history that led to 9/11. Jacobs served in the Marines in the decade before, and interspersed his experience with research.

In the Mount Mercy Times, the excellent student editor-in-chief wrote a recent book review of “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” and one point Jada Veasey made in her review is that she finally understands why there is so little fiction about the flu pandemic following World War I.

“As it turns out, living in the time of a plague is terrible, like, absolutely the worst,” she writes, which tends to discourage authors.

Jada and I share high regard for John Green’s nonfiction book.

But the pandemic isn’t all that makes these times so troubling. Besides battling a new virus that is killing far too many, we’re also facing a rising tide of BS.

Which is not a coincidence. It helps explain the lameness of our pandemic response. And that rising tide of disinformation got a boost just as the internet was becoming a huge factor in our lives two decades ago.

MMU Fall Faculty Series 2021 log.

A handful of hijackers, armed with nothing more sophisticated than box cutters, brought down three airplanes on prime targets on Sept. 11, 2001. They struck the Pentagon and caused the collapse of the World Trade Center twin towers in New York.

Speculation is that the Capitol, stormed by our own delusional right-wing mobs on Jan. 6 of this year, was also a target, but passengers fought back and the fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania.

Conspiracy is not new to the human condition. John Wilkes Booth didn’t entirely act alone when he gunned down Abraham Lincoln. The shot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and brought on both World War I and it’s sequel, World War II, was fired by a young man who was part of a shadowy nationalist group.

We humans conspire all the time. But we also imagine, enlarged and embellish false conspiracy narrratives. All kinds of wild tales grow up around fantastic, unexpected events—and 9/11 was the Mother of all Conspiracy hotbeds.

It spawned an early viral internet video, even before YouTube was a thing, that fed the conspiracy narratives.

And today, we live in a communication environment rife with speculations that seem farfetched to most rational people, but still move millions to believe.

For example, many believe:

• The Chinese government developed the virus for COVID-19. In China, the corresponding lie is that the Americans did it. We don’t in truth know the origins of this virus, and the lack of transparency by an authoritarian government isn’t being helpful. I don’t know that China did it. I don’t know that they did not. Nobody, except those potentially involved, yet does, and in the unknowing is fertile ground for uninformed certainty.

• Donald Trump had the election stolen. He didn’t. He lost in 2020 by about the margin he won the race by in 2016. The persistence of this particular false narrative, and its fervent backing by too many Republicans, is an existential threat to our democracy based on a fake conspiracy theory.

• Insert X false narrative about the current pandemic. Masks don’t matter. Vaccines aren’t safe. Microchips from Bill Gates. Whatever. This pandemic seems to breed false claims faster than a flexible respiratory virus morphs into new variants. Both the infection and the lies surrounding it are proving hard to fight.

So, I’m going to tackle this big topic next Wednesday night as part of the Mount Mercy University fall faculty series called “9/11 Twenty Years Later.”

I don’t exactly know what to expect. I thought Dr. Jim Jacobs gave interesting context to the whole 9/11 event, and I feel like I’m sort of looking at it from the other side—how that event has reverberated in our information and disinformation cyberspace.

Dr. Jim Jaobs speaks Sept. 29.

The towers weren’t the only thing that seemed to fall on 9/11. Our very trust in ourselves and in reality seems a bit more fragile, two decades later.

Sadly, I’m mostly going to describe the problem. I don’t have a solution, but then again, I don’t know how to end the pandemic, either. Plagues and pandemics can linger for years, but don’t last forever. Maybe there’s some hope that the public may tire of the nonsense, that “doing your own research” may come to mean actually using some discretion on which sources you’ll believe rather than tuning into the alt-universe of lies.

I hope the presentation, called "Conspiracy, Myth and Misinformation," goes well. But I’m writing, not about the pandemic, but about something that does not make me happy, and that I don’t really want to be writing about.

Jada, I feel your pain. But I hope to see many people next Wednesday at 6 p.m. in Flaherty. If the pandemic makes you worry, make sure to join in via MMU’s YouTube live-stream.

Not every internet video feeds the disinformation monster.