September Again

 

What’s interesting about the diaries is that I get to revisit things I was thinking about before, like various ideas I had for music and a lot of those things I eventually finished. (Keeping a diary is a good thing because it’s a motivator and it lets things stand out and lays bare a lot of things that you had been thinking about and can revisit). 

At the time of the Clinton scandal in August 1998, I was talking about the movie that would be made about it, and that Oliver Stone would make it. (Apparently, there’s a series about it with Clive Owen that’s been recently released). [Impeachment: American Crime Story] 

I was pretty spot-on about how things eventually turned out, especially with Afghanistan. On the day of the invasion, I thought it was a terrible idea. They had been deliberating on it for weeks at that point and I just thought that there’s nothing that we can do to eliminate ancient ideologies. It’s etched in stone. It’s clearly evident at this point. 

In another five years, we’ll have the 25th anniversary so it’s a good time to think about these things. My predictions of what would have happened have come true: you can’t wage wars against millennia-old ideologies. Societies will modernize at different rates and in different directions. Modern societies are always mindlessly upgrading to the future when the older versions work just fine for certain purposes.

A common comment that was made on 9/11 was that it was something that we saw in a movie and people are still making that comment. Yesterday, I was watching a video about the flooding in the New York subway and someone made that exact comment. Perception is very influenced by visual inputs from photography and film and can become “pornographic”.

9/3/2021

[9/3/2024: The 25th anniversary of the attacks will happen in the 2026 mid-terms, so it will probably become a political wedge issue. It's also interesting how major historical events only become interesting to people in anniversary years (5, 10, 20, 25)]