1999, meet 2004. 2004, 1999.
Reading Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? (published in 2004) in 2008 is a strange experience1. When I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 in the theatre I was caught by Moore's portrayal of how close the Bush family was with the Saudi royals - close enough to fly them out of the country just after the towers came down, when all other air traffic was grounded. That information had drifted from the foreground of my thoughts in the intervening years, but the book reminded me of the Bush-Saudi bond and the connection Moore drew between it and the blame-shift toward Iraq, the way Saudi Arabia was dropped from the national discussion when everyone was trying to make sense of the attacks.
The thoroughness with which the spotlight has been shifted from the Saudis was emphasized when I started reading The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman2 (published in 1999) over the weekend. What do I find on page 12?
"Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire with his own global network, declared war on the United States in the late 1990s, and the U.S. Air Force had to launch a cruise missile attack on him as though he were another nation-state."3
In 1999, the one thing Friedman thought described Osama the most is the one thing we never hear associated with him anymore.
When was the last time you heard Osama described as a "Saudi millionaire"? When was the last cartoon of him you saw in which he wasn't in a cave?
How did a connection strong enough to be the defining characteristic Friedman used to place Osama in context fade so fast, and so thoroughly, that reading it now is actually enough to startle?
1. And a sad one. It came out just before the election, and I can see now how much of it was geared toward trying to bring out voters, to get people invested in ousting Bush, to inspire them to take action. Knowing how that election came out, and everything that followed, makes the read less of an ire-rousing call to action and more a reminder of what everyone's had to keep dealing with since then.
2. Not sure why I'm on a dated nonfiction kick. But here I am.
3. It was a weird moment, reading a book that felt it needed to introduce the man, to provide context for him because he wasn't likely to be familiar to the reader.