CHARLES HOMANS2026年9月11日 Illustration by Chantal JahchanOne of the best firsthand accounts of the Sept. 11 attacks I’ve read is a short essay titled “Diary of Disaster” by Nicholas Spangler, at the time a 25-year-old journalism-school student and today a reporter for Newsday on Long Island. Spangler happened to be downtown that morning, close enough to the World Trade Center to arrive on the scene between the first and second planes. Like many early recollections of the first hours at ground zero, written before memories had been corrected to fit the dimensions of history, his is as strange as it is horrifying.我读过的最好的9·11亲历记述之一是尼古拉斯·斯潘格勒写的一篇短文《灾难日记》。当时他25岁，还在新闻学院读书，如今是长岛《新闻日报》的记者。那天早上，他恰好在曼哈顿下城，离世贸中心很近，在第一架飞机撞击后、第二架飞机撞击前就赶到了现场。和许多关于世贸中心灾难现场最初几个小时的早期回忆一样——那些文字写于记忆尚未被修正以契合历史维度之前——他的文字读起来既诡异，又令人毛骨悚然。He hears the bodies of the north tower’s jumpers hitting the pavement, and also the easy-listening music still drifting out of the building’s outdoor speakers. Under a tree newly stripped of its leaves lies a severed leg wrapped in burlap. Barely an hour after the second tower’s collapse, onlookers enlist Spangler to take a souvenir photo of them posing in front of the wreckage with a disposable camera. It’s the end of the world, or at least of a world, and people have not yet figured out how they are supposed to act.他听见北楼跳楼者的身体砸在人行道上的声音，同时还能听见大楼室外扬声器里飘出的轻音乐。一棵刚被震得叶片尽落的树下是一条裹在粗麻布里的断腿。第二座塔楼倒塌后不到一小时，就有围观者请斯潘格勒用一次性相机为他们在废墟前拍照留念。这是世界末日，或者说，至少是一个世界的终结，而人们还没来得及弄清楚自己究竟应该作何反应。Days later, trying to make sense of what he has seen, Spangler writes: “I believe that our present way of life ended in those minutes or hours. The American ethos — the way we see the world and our place in it — fractured and will perhaps have to be discarded.”几天后，斯潘格勒试图理解自己所看到的一切，他写道：“我相信，我们现有的生活方式就在那几分钟或几个小时里终结了。美国精神——我们看待世界以及看待自己在这个世界中的位置的方式——已经破碎,，也许将不得不被抛弃。”When he revisits that passage three months later, however, it feels wrong to him. “Our way of life did not end so much as it was interrupted,” he writes, “and if there is such a thing as an American ethos, it has not been significantly altered. There are those relative few whose lives bear the permanent bloody brand of that day but most of us continue to be shaped by much more banal events.”然而三个月后，当他重读这段话时，却觉得不对劲。“我们的生活方式与其说是终结了，不如说是被打断了，”他写道，“如果说真有什么美国精神，它也没有被显著改变。确实有那少数人，他们的生活被那一天打上了永久的血腥烙印，而我们大多数人继续被远为平庸的事件所塑造。”Did 9/11 change everything? For years, people who agreed on nothing else about the attacks’ aftermath would have agreed that the answer was yes. Arguing otherwise would have been an affront to the victims, to the war on terror’s civilian and military casualties and to the common sense of anyone who has had to take off their shoes at airport security. But question and answer alike have always been colored by the assumption that 9/11 was supposed to change everything: that in being attacked as it was, the United States was being presented with a test that it could pass or fail.9·11改变了一切吗？多年来，即使人们在这场袭击的后续影响上几乎毫无共识，但唯独在这一点上达成一致：答案是肯定的。持相反论点会被视为对受害者、对反恐战争中军民伤亡者的冒犯，也是对每一个在机场安检时不得不脱鞋的人的常识的冒犯。但无论是这个问题本身还是对它的回答始终都带有这样一种假设：9·11本就应该改变一切——美国以那样的方式遭到袭击，相当于接受了一场它要么通过、要么失败的考试。。A quarter-century on, it is possible to consider the question with at least some critical distance. Far too much of our current reality stems directly from 9/11 for anyone to argue credibly that it was not a hinge point in our recent history: the ubiquity of surveillance technology, the vague open-endedness that all American military operations now acquire, the general up-armoring of everyday life. At the same time, considering the most dystopian facets of this reality, 9/11’s influence is not as singular as it might have once seemed. It is a middle chapter in the story of American fracture rather than the pyrotechnic beginning.四分之一个世纪过去，我们至少可以带着一些批判性的距离来重新审视这个问题。我们当下的现实中，有太多东西直接源于9·11，以至于没有人能够有说服力地否认“9·11是我们近代史上的一个转折点”：监控技术无处不在，美国军事行动如今普遍具有一种模糊而没有终点的性质，日常生活也越来越被各种防护措施包围。但与此同时，如果仔细审视这种现实中最具反乌托邦色彩的部分，9·11的影响也并不像人们过去所认为的那样独一无二。它是美国社会分裂史中的一个中间章节，而非惊天动地的开场。Nearly every account of 9/11 mentions the weather. It was a perfect morning in New York, we are invariably told, the sky an almost unnaturally pure blue, unmarked by a single cloud, unless you count the thunderhead of dramatic irony that sits over everything.几乎每一篇关于9·11的记录都会提到那天的天气。人们总是说，那是纽约一个完美的早晨，天空呈现出近乎不自然的纯蓝，没有一丝云彩——除非你把那弥漫在一切之上的残酷反讽也算作一片云。In his 2024 book “Homeland,” Richard Beck notes that minutes before American Airlines Flight 11 hit the north tower, “Good Morning America” was airing an investigative segment on faulty G.E. appliances, interviewing a man identified in the chyron as a “dishwasher fire victim.” This is the cartoon of the world before 9/11: a place of sunlight and tranquillity, where nobody knows how good they have it and how bad it is about to get.理查德·贝克在其2024年出版的《国土》(Homeland)一书中指出，在美国航空11号航班撞击北塔前几分钟，“早安美国”节目正在播出一条关于通用电气电器缺陷的调查报道，采访了一位在字幕中被标为“洗碗机火灾受害者”的男子。这正是9·11之前那个世界的漫画式写照：一个阳光明媚、岁月静好的地方，没有人没有人意识到自己拥有的一切有多么美好,也没有人料到接下来的一切会有多么糟糕。9·11袭击发生一周多后，曼哈顿下城的国民警卫队队员。But the pre-9/11 era was a nervier time in America than the popular imagination remembers it to be. Both the left and the right were itchy amid the comforts of the end of history. Our retrospective understanding of the nation’s immediate reaction to the attacks is influenced by footage of stunned TV news anchors narrating them in real time, but shock is not quite the same thing as surprise: The United States was only eight years removed from the first World Trade Center attack and only six from the Oklahoma City bombing, and the new tragedy was almost immediately slotted into old arguments.但9·11之前的美国其实比人们如今凭印象所记得的要更为焦躁。在“历史终结”带来的舒适安逸中，无论是左派还是右派都隐隐感到不安。我们如今对这个国家在袭击发生后最初反应的回顾性理解很大程度上受到了那些镜头的影响——画面里，一脸惊愕的电视新闻主播正实时播报着这一切；但震惊并不完全等同于意外：当时距离第一次世贸中心袭击案仅仅过去八年，距离俄克拉荷马城爆炸案也不过六年，这场新的悲剧几乎是立刻被纳入了旧有的争论框架之中。In the left-liberal intellectual class, to consider the attacks unthinkable was to admit an unacceptable ignorance: of the resentment that American hegemony had stirred throughout the world, of the conflicts that had persisted in much of that world even as the United States enjoyed its post-Cold War peace dividend. “A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen,” Susan Sontag wrote in The New Yorker.对于左翼自由派知识阶层而言，如果认为这场袭击不可想象，便等于是承认了一种不可接受的无知：对美国霸权在世界范围内激起的怨恨一无所知，对世界大部分地区仍然存在的冲突——即使美国享受着冷战后的和平红利——也一无所知。苏珊·桑塔格在《纽约客》上写道：“只要有一点点历史意识，也许就能帮助我们理解刚刚发生的事情，以及接下来可能还会发生什么。”On the right, the attacks stirred a hope that the softness of post-Cold War America, and the liberal ambivalence toward out-and-proud patriotism that had lingered since Vietnam, might have come to a welcome end; to call it a new Pearl Harbor was both a description and an aspiration. In a recent podcast conversation, Darryl Worley, the singer-songwriter whose bullying Iraq-invasion anthem “Have You Forgotten?” is one of the essential cultural documents of the early 2000s, recalled his wonder on 9/11 at seeing American flags flying along a side road outside of Nashville. “It had already turned into, like, a parade route,” he said. He recalled thinking to himself: “It had to come to this for us to fly the red, white and blue?”而在右翼阵营看来，袭击激起了一种期望：冷战后美国的软弱，以及自越战以来始终挥之不去的、对张扬爱国主义的自由派式暧昧态度或许终于迎来了令人欣慰的终结。把它称作新珍珠港事件既是一种描述，也是一种期许。在最近的一次播客访谈中，歌手兼词曲作者达里尔·沃利回忆道，9·11当天，他在纳什维尔郊外一条小路上看到沿途飘扬的美国国旗时深感震撼。“那阵仗已经像是……像是变成了游行路线，”他说道。他记得自己当时心想：“难道非得走到这一步，我们才愿意升起星条旗?”沃利那首咄咄逼人的伊拉克战争主题曲《你忘了吗?》是21世纪初最具代表性的文化文本之一。Of course, in the end, the United States got neither self-awareness nor self-actualization. What it got, a decade and a half later, was Donald Trump, whose election in 2016 has often been cast as a culmination of what the journalist Spencer Ackerman, in his 2021 book “Reign of Terror,” describes as the “decadent phase of the war on terror.”当然，到头来，美国既没有获得自我认识，也没有实现自我完善。15年后，它得到的是唐纳德·特朗普。特朗普于2016年当选总统，常被视为“反恐战争衰败阶段”（记者斯宾塞·阿克曼在其2021年出版的《恐怖统治》[Reign of Terror]一书中就是这样描述这一阶段的）最终发展到顶点的结果。Trump’s path from reality-TV celebrity to the presidency ran through the Islamophobic fever swamps of the post-9/11 right — the ground zero mosque panic, Obama birth-certificate conspiracism — but also through an increasingly bipartisan discontent with the war on terror that had, by 2016, curdled into cynicism. Trump was the first Republican presidential nominee to break the formidable taboo against affirming what most Americans by then believed, that the country’s post-9/11 military adventurism had been a mistake. He also did little to seriously curtail it in his first presidency and has enthusiastically expanded it in his second.特朗普从真人秀明星走向总统宝座的道路穿过了后9·11时代右翼阵营中那片伊斯兰恐惧症滋生的泥潭——从归零地清真寺恐慌,到奥巴马出生证明阴谋论—，也经历了日益超越党派的对反恐战争的不满情绪，这种不满情绪在2016年已演变为一种犬儒主义。特朗普是第一位打破这一强大禁忌的共和党总统候选人，公开承认当时大多数美国人已经相信的一点：美国在9·11之后的军事冒险是一场错误。他在自己的第一个总统任期内也没有真正大幅削减这些军事行动，在第二个任期中更是积极扩大了这些行动。It has long been tempting to view Trump’s presidencies as the logical conclusion of the folly of the post-9/11 era, and as support for the liberal contention that the right’s calls for patriotism in that era were always really about seizing domestic power. But Trump has also enabled a re-examination of history, and even recent history, that complicates the tale of 9/11’s primacy.长期以来，人们很容易将特朗普的两届总统任期视为9·11后时代种种荒谬行径的必然结果，并以此佐证自由派的一种观点：当时右翼的爱国主义呼吁其实始终是为了夺取国内权力。但特朗普同时也促使人们重新审视历史，甚至包括近代史，这种审视使得9·11事件首要地位的叙事变得复杂。1995年俄克拉荷马城爆炸案发生一个月后，该市的一辆警车。与人们今天记忆中的情况相比，20世纪90年代的美国是一个更令人提心吊胆的时代。The right-wing extremism unleashed in the last act of his first presidency borrowed aesthetically from the special-operations chic of the post-9/11 militarized state, but it owed a more substantive debt to the 1990s: to Ruby Ridge, Waco and the decade’s sundry militias. Trump’s second-term reinvention of the Department of Homeland Security as an unaccountable interior ministry realizes the direst predictions of civil libertarians in the first days of the war on terror. But it is working in the service of an anti-immigration vision that draws less obviously from post-9/11 terrorism panics than from the nativist paleoconservatism of the preceding decades, figures like Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis.在特朗普第一任总统任期的最后阶段，右翼极端主义的兴起在美学上借鉴了9·11后军事化国家的特种作战风格，但在实质上更多源于20世纪90年代：红宝石岭事件、韦科惨案，以及那个年代形形色色的民兵组织。特朗普第二任期内将国土安全部重塑为不受问责的内政部，印证了民权自由主义者们在反恐战争最初几天的可怕预言。然而，这种做法服务于一种反移民理念，这种理念与其说是源于9·11后的恐怖主义恐慌，不如说是源于此前几十年本土主义的保守主义，例如帕特·布坎南和萨姆·弗朗西斯等人的思想。Trump’s 2016 election “represented the crystallization of elements that were still inchoate” in the early 1990s, John Ganz writes in “When the Clock Broke,” his recent history of the period’s underappreciated malaise. In retrospect, 9/11 was paradoxically both a respite from and accelerant of polarizations and pathologies that were already well underway by then. It allowed Americans to ignore them for a moment, until they came roaring back with redoubled force.约翰·甘茨在其新著《当时钟停摆》(When the Clock Broke)中写道，特朗普2016年的当选“代表了20世纪90年代初那些尚处于萌芽状态的因素的结晶”。这本书讲述了那个时期被低估的社会颓势。回头来看，9·11事件矛既为当时已然愈演愈烈的两极分化和社会病态提供了暂时的喘息之机，又悖论般地加速了这些现象的发展。它让美国人暂时忽略了这些，直到它们以加倍的势头卷土重来。To claim 9/11’s singularity is also to assume that demarcations of eras in public life are most naturally drawn around geopolitics. This was an understandable assumption for Americans who lived through the end of the Cold War, or Vietnam, or World War II. It holds less true for anyone born after the 1980s.主张9·11事件的独特性也意味着假设公共生活中的时代划分最自然地围绕地缘政治来划定。对于经历过冷战结束、越战或二战的美国人来说，这是一个可以理解的假设。但对20世纪80年代后出生的人来说，这种假设就不再那么成立。If you do not remember the Berlin Wall but had an adolescence shaped by social media and cellphones, the brightest dividing lines in recent history are technological — and, with the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence, are becoming more so. This is clear in the borrowed nostalgias of Gen Z, the bits of the past that 20-somethings have recently pressed into service as emblems of a lost golden era: “Friends,” John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, ’90s high-school-class home videos, music videos and concert footage from bands like Alien Ant Farm and Puddle of Mudd.如果你不记得柏林墙，但你的青春期是被社交媒体和手机塑造的，那么近代史上最明亮的分界线就是技术层面的。而且，随着人工智能的迅猛发展，这种趋势正愈发明显。这一点在Z世代的怀旧情结中体现得淋漓尽致，20多岁的年轻人将过去零碎的记忆当作逝去黄金时代的象征：《老友记》、小约翰·F·肯尼迪和卡罗琳·贝塞特·肯尼迪、90年代高中课堂的家庭录像、“外星蚂蚁养殖场”(Alien Ant Farm)和“烂泥巴”(Puddle of Mudd)等乐队的音乐录影带和演唱会片段。These artifacts span the pre- and post-9/11 years, and the lost innocence they represent has nothing to do with the attacks. Their interest comes from their evocation of a period when people hung out with friends in person and sweated alongside strangers at clubs and music festivals; teenagers goofed un-self-consciously for cameras rather than posing for them like jaded celebrities; and popular culture could be loud and dumb and not picked apart in the digital panopticon for its social politics. The shape that looms ominously over them isn’t the Twin Towers. It’s the iPhone.这些物件跨越9·11事件前后的岁月，而它们所代表的失落纯真与那场袭击无关。它们的魅力来自它们所唤起的那个时期：那时人们会与朋友面对面相聚，在夜店和音乐节与陌生人一起流汗；青少年对着镜头毫不扭捏地嬉闹，而不是像世故的明星那样摆拍；流行文化可以喧闹而肤浅，而不会在数字全景监狱中因其社会政治内涵而遭到细究。笼罩在它们之上那道不祥的阴影不是世贸双子塔，而是iPhone。But it is hard to disentangle 9/11 from even the societal shifts that don’t obviously relate to it. When I visited the 9/11 Memorial and Museum for the first time recently, I spent the better part of an hour in the museum’s central exhibit, a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the events of the day of the attacks. In the videos and still images, the relics preserved under glass, I found myself less drawn to the terrible but familiar story they told of the attacks than I was to the more unremarkable evidence of life in New York a quarter-century ago that the exhibit preserved — a life that I had lived myself but that suddenly seemed very far away.但即使是一些看似与9·11事件并无直接关联的社会变迁，也很难将它们与9·11完全剥离开来。前不久，我第一次参观9·11事件纪念馆和博物馆时，在博物馆的中心展区前待了近一个小时，那里按分钟还原了袭击当天的事件经过。在视频和静态图像中，在玻璃罩下保存的遗物中，我发现自己并不是那么关注它们讲述的关于袭击事件的那些可怕却又熟悉的故事，更吸引我的反而是那些被展览保存的、四分之一世纪前纽约生活中更不起眼的证据——那是我自己经历过的生活，但突然显得非常遥远。I lingered in particular on a pile of floppy disks recovered from the World Trade Center rubble, caked in dust like the remnants of an ancient civilization. I tried to remember the last time I had used a floppy disk myself; it was probably not long after 9/11. It occurred to me that the world the disks represented, in which a digital life was present but not yet omnipresent, is at least as unimaginable for my children as a major terrorist attack on American soil.一堆从世贸中心废墟中回收的软盘尤其令我流连，它们像古代文明的遗存一样覆满灰尘。我努力回忆自己最后一次使用软盘是什么时候；大概是9·11事件之后不久。我想到这些软盘所代表的世界，那时数字生活已经存在，但尚未无所不在。对我的孩子们来说，它至少和对美国本土的重大恐怖袭击一样难以想象。I have been thinking since then about what, specifically, people my age know about the moment documented in the museum that my children will never know. It is most likely nothing particular to 9/11 itself, exhaustively chronicled as it has been. But it is visible in the record of that day, if you look closely: in the police officers not yet encased in Kevlar and equipped with drones and Palantir software, in the video footage taken by professionals and dedicated hobbyists rather than thousands of autonomous digital eyes, in the public spaces not yet studded with bollards, in the handwritten fliers of people trying to find loved ones at a time when disappearance is, for worse or for better, still a possibility.从那时起，我一直在思考，具体来说，对于我这个年纪的人所知道的、博物馆所记录下来的那个时刻，有什么是我的孩子们永远不会知道的。很可能不是9·11事件本身特有的东西——毕竟该事件已被详尽地记载下来。但如果你仔细观察，它在那天的记录中依然可见：在那些尚未身穿凯夫拉尔防弹衣、尚未配备无人机和Palantir软件的警察身上；在那些由专业人士和专注的爱好者拍摄、而非成千上万自主数字监控镜头拍下的视频素材里；在尚未布满防撞柱的公共空间里；在人们手写的寻亲传单里——那时失踪仍然是一种可能性，无论好坏。This is a picture of a country on the brink of enormous change — some of it a direct result of 9/11, some of it not, some of it hard to sort out at this distance, the echoes of the attacks blurring with the echoes’ own echoes. But if you were there then, you see it now: a world where so much we live with today was in motion but did not yet seem so inescapable. The many narrators of 9/11 aren’t wrong to talk about the sky that morning. It really was something. The air was so clear.这是一个处于巨大变革边缘的国家的图景，有些变革是9·11事件的直接结果，有些不是，还有一部分在时隔多年后已难以厘清，袭击的余波与余波的回声模糊在一起。但如果你当时身处其中，你现在就能看清：在那时，我们今天所经历的许多事物虽已初现端倪，却尚未显得如此不可避免。9·11事件的众多叙述者会谈及那天早上的天空，这并没有错。那确实是一幅令人难忘的景象。空气是那样澄澈。插图图片来源：Angel Franco/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Tim Robberts/Getty Images; Nathan Posner/Anadolu, via Getty ImagesCharles Homans是《纽约时报》和《纽约时报杂志》记者，报道美国国内政治。翻译：晋其角、杜然点击查看本文英文版。获取更多RSS：https://feedx.net https://feedx.site