Celebrity worship was over. Gossip was over. And irony was, without a doubt, dead.
Uh-huh, yeah right.
If you've been to an airport lately, you know 9/11 changed things. But if you've been awake lately, you know how much it didn't change what we like to watch, or talk about Lindsay Lohan.
Here are the five biggest things that, for good or bad, still feel the same:
1. Irony! Some thinkers remain convinced our inner David Letterman was permanently altered, if not stifled, on that awful day 10 years ago. They even believe a sincere, post-ironic time is upon us. And maybe it is. Excluding the hours when Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and, you know, Letterman are busy being ironic.
2. Stupidity! If you'd told 9/11 pundits that Johnny Knoxville and the "Jackass" boys would not be long for TV, they'd have said, "Of course." If you told them they'd wind up instead as movie stars (in 3-D!), and encourage the debauched spirit that fueled the blockbuster "The Hangover" franchise, they'd have thought you'd gone on a bender.
3. Lindsanity! Yes, we could care less about the ups and mostly downs of reality-TV housewives, parents possessed of large quantities of children and the once-upon-a-time star of "Mean Girls." We would never, ever break the Internet to tweet about Beyonc's pregnancy. And if Britney Spears chopped off all her hair—why, we wouldn't even notice. (Oops. We were just being ironic?)
4. Inhumanity! Strangely, 9/11 did nothing to quench our collective desire to see American metropolises destroyed for our supposed entertainment pleasure. Just have a look at the box-office prowess of movies such as Transformers: Dark of the Moon (tough luck, Chicago!) and 2012 (see ya, Los Angeles!). Why that is, we have no idea.
5. Inanity! You want to know the moment when it was clear everything hadn't changed? Sept. 13, 2001, yes, just two days after the World Trade Center towers toppled, and the Pentagon partly demolished. That's when Whitney Houston's record label was moved to publicly deny reports the singer had died. See, real news, and lots of it, wasn't enough; somebody had to cook up fake news. If the hoax was a test to see if we still cared about pop culture and its personalities, we passed. (Or was it failed?)