The fact that the September 11 attacks were the stuff of popular fantasies long before they actually took place provides yet another case of the twisted logic of dreams: it is easy to account for the fact that poor people around the world dream about becoming Americas – so what do the well-to-do Americans, immobilized in their well-being, dream about? About a global catastrophe that would shatter their lives. This is what psychoanalysis is about: to explain why, in the midst of well-being, we are haunted by nightmarish visions of catastrophes.
– Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real
side note: Zizek once pointed out that the month/day the Berlin Wall fell was 11/9. Weird, right? I hope it becomes a cliché to book-end a period of American History – The End of History Days – as the 11/9 to 9/11 period. But I think palindromes are pretty, pretty cool.
Anyway, I always thought this line of inquiry was glib. “The world dreams of becoming Americans, Americans dream of 9/11.” But then I saw this:
“We weren’t told how to behave that day after 9/11, we just knew,” Beck says to describe the project. “It was right, it was the opposite of what we feel today. Are you ready to be the person you were that day after 9/11, on 9/12?”
Hmm….I’d pay good money to see Glenn Beck undergo psychoanalysis.
