Wed 13 Sep 2006
The following is a short series of notes I made on 9/12/01:
*****
I.
Thousands of New Yorkers, mostly, I suspect, looking across a river or from uptown,were amazed yesterday morning to see the impervious Twin Towers of the World Trade Center burning. Within minutes, television, radio, & the internet were carrying the story, & millions of discrete viewers & listeners concurrently received the news. By late morning, first the southern & then the northern Tower had fallen.
Lower Manhattan looked, for all practical purposes, like 1969 on fire.
Thousands of New Yorkers, mostly, I suspect, looking across a river or from uptown,were amazed yesterday morning to see the impervious Twin Towers of the World Trade Center burning. Within minutes, television, radio, & the internet were carrying the story, & millions of discrete viewers & listeners concurrently received the news. By late morning, first the southern & then the northern Tower had fallen.
Lower Manhattan looked, for all practical purposes, like 1969 on fire.
II.
We have made the mistake of enforcing our greed beyond its practical limits.
We have made the mistake of enforcing our greed beyond its practical limits.
III.
The Towers had stood for three decades, a single, tandem, primary symbol of our rightness & might, the Castor & Pollux of our culture, a beacon of contemporary American capitalism. A living monument to our collective ambition, they were modern & clean, & above all else stood literally above all else. The Towers differed from New York’s other money-temples in that the latter were built as testaments to personal & private wealth & success. The Towers, on the other hand, were a testament to collective dominance & international, not individual, conceit.
The Towers had stood for three decades, a single, tandem, primary symbol of our rightness & might, the Castor & Pollux of our culture, a beacon of contemporary American capitalism. A living monument to our collective ambition, they were modern & clean, & above all else stood literally above all else. The Towers differed from New York’s other money-temples in that the latter were built as testaments to personal & private wealth & success. The Towers, on the other hand, were a testament to collective dominance & international, not individual, conceit.
(Assuming that the Towers are one pole of the spectrum & the Chrysler & Woolworth buildings the other, the middle ground is held by the Empire State Building. Erected during the Depression by a small group of private investors, it has always been something of an alcoholic uncle: tolerated, unable to realize its potential, loved, definitive. The Trump Tower is dismissed out of hand for its ugliness & air of desperation.)
IV.
The terrorist demolition of the Towers is both metaphor & actuality, message & carnage.
The terrorist demolition of the Towers is both metaphor & actuality, message & carnage.
*****
The ensuing 5 years have done little to reshape my initial response to the Event. To have sat in a top-floor office on Grand St. which had, until 9/11/01, afforded a clear view of the Towers, & watched the Event occur from my desk, is an experience that has created a permanent rupture in quotidian perception: blue skies have not since been the same; I’m still in furious disbelief that we have entrusted a coterie of short-sighted, maniacal bullies to restore a sense of security & order. We have, in terms of policy, learned nothing from the Event, causally connected it to none of our international behavior of the last 90 years, & consequently made matters only worse at breakneck speed. None of which is news; all of which should be said as frequently as possible.