Special Dispatch #84 - 9/11, Twenty Years Later (A Pod of Laughter and Forgetting)

Moynihan texts Welch and Foster. "I feel like talking about 9/11," he says. But Foster is MIA in Atlanta. Welch is enjoying a beautiful Brooklyn day, but thankfully submits. So here's a freewheeling afternoon conversation about that fateful day and how it did (and didn't) screw up world. Recorded...an hour ago.

- Not mentioned but...Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which sounds like it was written about 9/11, originally had a 9/11 release date. Hence the intro and outro...
- A rare collective experience
- How it changed us--and boy did it
- Matt's 2002 piece for Reason (his first!) on the politics of Iraq sanctions
- The two big bangs: Tiananmen Square and 9/11
- Moynihan's regret about attacking a (rather brave) anti-war activist
- A Welch regret for a "foolish" attack on foolish people
- Moving to New York City on September 10, 2001
- Memories of that day (and NetZero)
- The shitty Irishman who changed Moynihan's life
- Using 9/11 for sex
- The myth of "squandering good will" (and that Le Monde editorial)
- On "blowback" and moral responsibility
- Lunatic conspiracy theories then and now
- On the necessity of forgetting
- How to apply shitty au courant politics to 9/11

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