As I often do when there’s a Story of the Week, I worked fairly hard to avoid seeing much of the coverage leading up to the 9/11 anniversary.

One had to work hard to avoid it. You couldn’t look anywhere without seeing what journalists call a “thumb sucker,” a ponderous think-piece, about How 9/11 Changed Us All. I didn’t see the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, but I’m betting the latest issue featured an article on how 911 changed the sexual practices of 20-somethings. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that some of the actual journalism done was sillier than that.

About the only thing I did was listen to the commemorative ceremonies on the radio Sunday morning. As it happened, that morning I had to take a three-hour car ride to get to a place for a class project I’m doing, so I was more or less trapped in the car between 6:30 and 9:30 a.m. But aside from that, I tried to avoid all the pretentiousness and breast-beating that we were subjected to for two weeks or so.

Not that I read nothing on the subject. Slate.com ran a fascinating series of pieces on the rise and fall of the “9/11 Truther” movement. And Salon.com had an absolutely stupendous column by Patrick Smith, an airline pilot, about how the national response to 9/11 was pretty much all wrong. To sum up Smith’s comments that way does him a bit of a disservice; he actually makes some really good points.

Here’s one that I had never thought of: All of the airport security in the world would not really have stopped the 9/11 hijackers, because the reasons the attack succeeded had nothing to do with what went on at the airport gates. It was a failure of intelligence at a very high level. He makes the point that the hijackers could’ve succeeded had they been armed with ballpoint pens, rather than box-cutters, because what sealed the deal was the element of surprise.

But as far as the larger point – what it all means – I don’t think we know yet. We may never. We Americans are an unreflective people. Our impulse is to do, rather than think about what we’re doing. That’s why most of the wars we’ve fought since World War II have been disasters of varying degrees, because our answer has become, “send in the troops.” Never mind that the people we supposedly try to help often as not don’t want us to do that. Never mind that we do that when the connection to our national interest is tenuous at best. By God, we’re going to do something, consequences be damned.

It’s a kind of stupidity. And the fact is, more bad things happen in this world because of stupidity than because of evil.

The other piece I read, the Slate.com one about 9/11 Truthers, is evidence of just how wooden-headed some of our countrymen can be.

Depending on which flavor of truther you sample, you’ll be told that the U.S. government actually carried out the attacks as a pretext to going to war in Iraq, or that the Israelis did it, or that the U.S. government knew Al Qaida was going to do it but didn’t stop it, yadda, yadda, yadda. You’ll hear that what looked like airliners were actually holograms, that the World Trade Center was destroyed by controlled demolitions, that it was the work of Klingons. Okay, you won’t hear much of that last one, but some of the theories don’t make much more sense than that.

Just as the actual events of 9/11 are the modern world’s Pearl Harbor, the debates over how and why it happened is the 21st-Century equivalent of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. You see the same nitpicking over details, the same confusion of coincidence and causation, the same fruitless struggle to explain how bad things happen because of the machinations of a huge, evil superstructure of guys in black hats.

But you know what? They don’t. There’s a principle in logic called Occam’s Razor, which holds that the simplest explanation that fits all the facts is likely to be the right one. You don’t need a complicated conspiracy to cause 9/11. All you need are some bad people who are willing and able to exploit the weak-minded and convince them that the most obvious evil is really good. History is full of examples of that.

And here’s another thought: The Bush Administration couldn’t even respond to Hurricane Katrina, which came with at least some warning. Given their demonstrable ineptitude in that and other instances, do you really think it’s possible they could conspire to kill 3,000-plus Americans, carry it off successfully and have nobody know about it? If they were making Osama their fall guy, they couldn’t even find him; usually, if you’re going to blame an innocent party, it helps to have the person around. Hey, now there’s an upside to Bush and his minions being less than competent and lacking in a few brain cells.

So with any luck, this is the most we’ll hear about 9/11 for a year or so. We can let the victims’ families go back to their private, unrelievable grief. As for the rest of us, we can go back to bitching about how we have to show up an hour early for our flights. That, more than anything, is what 9/11 did to the daily lives of most of us.