HOMELAND

The war on terror comes home to roost.

Beck was 14 when the Twin Towers collapsed in 2001, an event that his Philadelphia school’s administrators overlooked in the interest of pursuing a regular learning day of quizzes and lectures. Once home, he was bombarded, like everyone else, with images of “the most visually spectacular attack in the history of armed conflict.” Soon enough, the country mostly united in its resolve to hunt down the terrorists, the images would grow more obscure, and “the war grew difficult to see.” By Beck’s account, the global war on terror has proven at every point an unwinnable boondoggle with numerous ill effects, not least the rise of the security state in the U.S. A case in point, Beck writes, is the new World Trade Center, built atop the ashes of the old one, “a dead zone” of “bollards, surveillance booths, and sally ports” that, while impeding the heavy foot traffic of the old WTC, does nothing to protect the place against a committed suicide bomber. The post-9/11 militarism that swept America, Beck conjectures, “did nothing to make people safer, and it didn’t make people feel safer, either.” Indeed, the gloomy pallor of paranoia was perfectly in keeping with an ever more unequal economy and the renewal of the 1960s-era culture wars, with anyone who dared question American policy canceled, from Susan Sontag to Bill Maher to the Dixie Chicks. Beck makes some long reaches that turn out to be quite reasonable, upon further reflection. For one, is it any surprise that social media corporations should join the security state in furthering technologies meant to aid in “knowing as much as possible about as many people as possible following September 11”?

A well-reasoned, evenhanded account of the cost we’ve paid at home for chasing terrorists abroad.