In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror, Loss, and Time in the Shadow of September
By: Don DeLillo

Summary In this eight section essay DeLillo gives an in depth analysis the events before, during, and the repercussions after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The essay skips around a bit but the main idea of the essay is somewhat clear. DeLillo describes the terrorist ideology of why they attacked us. Their target was not the global economy but, “It is America that drew their fury. It is the high gloss of our modernity ... our technology ... our foreign policy ... It is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life, and mind” (S1 P2). DeLillo also touches on the common belief that America …show more content…

Why do people make these false claims about the event? I mean no one is going to say they don’t believe you because they don’t know if you really were there at the time. “Others will claim to have lost friends or relatives, although they did not.” (S3 P8). So what happens when they people you tell find out you didn’t really lose your aunt Sue in the attack? I just don’t understand why people would lie about that because there are people out there who have lost their loved ones or were there on that tragic day. “The Internet is a counter-narrative, shaped in part by rumor, fantasy, and mystical reverberation.” (S3 P10). Online there are several hundred theories on what really happened that day and why it happened. People post some of these things because they have the safety of being anonymous behind a computer screen. Many conspiracy theorists I see online believe that the 9/11 attacks were a government operation, that the government had placed bombs in the towers to make them collapse after the planes hit. Simply put, there are many crazy people posting crap online. When DeLillo gives the details of Karen and Marc on 9/11 saying Karen was calling her dad to say, “goodbye-I-think-we-are-going-to-die” made me feel the fear the people that day were feeling. I was clueless to what was happening at the time because I was only five or six years old, but I do remember watching my teacher cry as we watched the two towers