i was twelve when 9/11 happened, which puts me in a very specific millennial demographic: old enough to remember that day as an actual day, and young enough that basically the entire rest of my life happened inside the world it built.
twenty-five years later, the internet has commemorated this in the most emotionally healthy way available to us: an absolutely deranged posting cycle.
there is something very millennial about the speed with which a foundational trauma became a set of reusable cultural objects. the school television. the president getting whispered to. the airport. the flag graphics. the phrase “never forget.” the exact kind of cable-news lower third that can still make your nervous system briefly sit up straight.
and then, because we had to keep living for another quarter-century, all of that eventually became material.
the joke is not that 9/11 was funny
the joke is that we spent twenty-five years being told there was one correct emotional register for it while almost everything built around that grief became progressively stranger.
there was the genuine horror, and then there was the political mythology. there was mourning, and then there were wars, surveillance, airport security theater, commemorative merchandise, campaign speeches, corporate remembrance posts, and every public figure in america discovering that “9/11” could be inserted into a sentence whenever the sentence needed instant moral weight.
eventually the solemnity itself became part of the thing being processed.
The Onion understood this almost immediately. satire after 9/11 worked because the national mood was already surreal: normal life had stopped, everyone was scared, and at the same time people still had jobs, errands, television, bad relationships, and a powerful biological need to care about stupid bullshit again.
that tension never really went away. it just got old enough to develop back pain.
we also got twenty-five years of consequences
millennial 9/11 humor is dark because the history after 9/11 was dark. we watched a catastrophe become a permission slip for things that were supposed to be temporary and then simply became the furniture: the Patriot Act, the forever-war mentality, suspicion as public policy, and the idea that taking your shoes off for a flight was somehow a civic sacrament.
so yes, a lot of the jokes are tasteless. some are aggressively stupid. several require the kind of background knowledge that makes you realize your youth is now a historical period with archival footage.
but i do not think the existence of the jokes means people forgot what happened. for millennials, it can mean almost the opposite. you do not build this much elaborate nonsense around something that left no mark.
history becomes folklore faster than anybody wants
there are adults now who were born after 9/11. there are younger adults who know it primarily through documentaries, politics, memes, old news clips, and the fact that every millennial can suddenly become somebody’s grandfather and tell you exactly where the classroom television was positioned.
that is maybe the strangest part of the 25th anniversary. this thing that still feels like the dividing line between “before” and “after” in my own memory is becoming history in the normal way history does: flattened, remixed, misremembered, made into jokes, rediscovered by people who were not there, and occasionally explained very badly by those of us who were.
none of that makes the dead less dead, or the grief less real. it just means the living kept being alive afterward, which is unfortunately a very messy condition.
anyway, happy 25th anniversary to the event that permanently changed airport shoes, american politics, and millennial brain chemistry.