ABSTRACT
The essays in this book were begun during what I thought was a pivotal moment in American culture: the last decade of the millennium, ushered in at the beginning by the Los Angeles race riots and the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings and ushered out by the Clinton Impeachment and ‘Indecision 2000’ – the Supreme Court ‘election’ of George W. Bush. There were a great many questions about the last decade of the century that still needed addressing; but then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and suddenly many of these inquiries became ‘off-limits’. People spoke of 9-11 as if it represented an ‘epistemological break’ from the cultural traumas that had immediately preceded it: as if Osama Bin Laden, and not the Supreme Court, had made George W. Bush a ‘legitimate’ President and the entire sordid business of the election was now officially ‘behind us’, as if the terrorist attacks so entirely changed the fabric of the nation that anything we did could be contained within the elastic carapace of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, including a unilateral invasion two years later of a country that had nothing to do with those attacks.
