Assignment 6 11/4

The social commentary about a post 9/11 world and the climate leading up to it is a theme that is laced throughout the book Pattern Recognition. Before September eleventh occurred, the main character, Cayce, is staying in a friend’s house when someone breaks in and has appeared to use her computer and phone. After the break in, Cayce has the lock changed. When she returns from her outings from then on, she checks “…that her single dark Cayce Pollard hair is still there, spit-pasted across the gap between the door and frame…” and checks “…that the powder she’d brushed across the underside of the doorknob is still there, undisturbed” (71). From the start of the book, there is a slightly paranoid atmosphere diffused throughout the world Cayce lives in. This appears to be a long hung-over side effect from the cold war, when people were afraid that communists were infiltrating their neighborhoods and government.

            It is impossible to talk about the social climate of a post 9/11 world without talking about spies, espionage, and the stealing of information. Cayce, secures her home with simple devices and tools that are used by James Bond, England’s greatest spy. James Bond fought the soviets and other communist and fascist powers of the worlds. There were many movies made with the same themes as James Bond, a noble man from a democratic nation battling the fascist powers of the world. Even though the cold war ended way before 2000, the security issues and concern about sensitive, top secret information spreading around the globe still exist. The 9/11 incident exasperated this underlying fear. It didn’t create more fear, it made it larger and put that fear back into the forefront of our minds.

            Another aspect of the social climate after 9/11 is the general mistrust of our government entities. While Cayce is in Tokyo, she gets picked up by Boone Chu, her partner working with her to find the maker of the footage, and taken back to the apartment he’s staying at. He asks for her computer and runs a program on it to check for any hacking devices, claiming, “I want to make sure this isn’t sending your every keystroke to a third party” (165). He goes on to explain, “Things have been different in computer security since last September. If the FBI were doing what they admit they can do, to your laptop, I might be able to spot it” (165). There have been many conspiracies about the government tapping our phone lines and watching our every mouse click on the internet. Some even claim that the US government knew about the 9/11 plan, but allowed it to happen so we could invade the Middle East.