That makes sense I guess, except for one thing. After 9-11 all the people I know, including quite a few who had previously been actually proud of their deliberate self-insulation from news about politics, were absolutely saturated with information about the WTC/Pentagon attack. They absorbed that information too; back in, say, November 2001, everyone you talked to knew that Al Qaida was responsible for the attack, that Osama bin Laden was the leader of Al Qaida, and that he and fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis. (Of course not one in twenty ever bothered, then or now, to think about how we ordinary citizens come to "know" these things, how tenuous that "knowledge" actually is.)
The weird thing is that by February 2003 a solid majority of my fellow citizens had somehow managed to forget all that. Forget it completely!
This is the "1984" effect, where you can change official enemies right in the middle of a public speech, and no one in the audience is even jolted by the discontinuity. When I read "1984" I assumed what had happened is that each individual in the audience of the "two-minutes hate" noticed that the official enemy had suddenly changed, but they were all too cowed by Minilove's police-state terror to do anything except mutely accept it. But no one held a gun to the average U.S. moron's head and told him "blame 9-11 on Saddam, not Osama, and do it now, or else!" No, the average moron did it either voluntarily or unconsciously.
This scares the shit out of me.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net