Recent Watching: Frontline America After 9/11

The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 seems to be an event that every television network and service wants to have a program about. Last night I watched the PBS Frontline film on the topic. If you are looking for light entertainment, look elsewhere. But if you want a serious analysis of how the people of America went from deep solidarity the day after the event to a violent assault of the congress, then this is the film for you.

James Poniewozik has a good review of many of these programs in the Times. Here is what he had to say about the Frontline film.

The “Frontline” special “America After 9/11,” premiering Tuesday on PBS, is driven by a striking video juxtaposition. First, on the Capitol steps the day of the attacks, a chorus of members of Congress, Republican and Democratic, senators and representatives, join to sing “God Bless America.” Two decades later, on the same site, a mob besieges Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an election.

It’s a provocative connection, but the filmmaker Michael Kirk lays it out economically: The attacks set off a chain of action and changes — military quagmires, suspicion and racism at home, the loss of trust in institutions — that demagogues used to undermine democracy, and that fulfilled Osama bin Laden’s goal of dividing and weakening America.

From the beginning, the special argues, America’s response was driven by paradox: the moral rhetoric of President George W. Bush and the strategies of his vice president, Dick Cheney, who said that America would need to work with “the dark side” to survive.

The dark side won, “America After 9/11” argues. It won when specious claims of weapons of mass destruction rationalized war in Iraq; when images of torture emerged from Abu Ghraib prison; when illustrations of Barack Obama as bin Laden circulated; when the media fed hysteria about terror threats; and when the 2016 election was won by a candidate who said, “I think Islam hates us” and used similar rhetoric for people he labeled domestic enemies.

In this light, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — with its racist language and its fantasy of reclaiming America from a shadowy existential threat — was, says the former Obama aide Ben Rhodes, “the logical endpoint” of the 9/11 era.