Empire of Light

uesday morning, 11 September 2001, at 08:48AM, a hijacked commercial jet airliner crashes into the upper part of the north tower of the 110 story New York City World Trade Center. At 09:07AM, another hijacked commercial airliner crashes into the south tower. At 09:58AM, the south tower collapses. At 10:28AM. the north tower collapses.

In Washington, D.C., at 09:45AM, a third hijacked commercial airliner crashes into the U.S. military headquarters building ("The Pentagon").

Passengers on a fourth hijacked jetliner appear to have fought their hijackers, forcing their plane to crash at 10:10AM in an unpopulated rural area 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, PA -- instead of hitting whatever was the hijackers' intended target.

How can we best fight terrorism?

Where do these terrorists "come from"?
Civilization and its discontents.

Read	Washington Post Editorial Opinion essay, 12Sep01: "When Innocents Are the Enemy".

"A foreseeable risk"?

Please:

Read admonitory interview between the chief "911" terrorist (Mohamed Atta), and a U.S. Dept of Agriculture official, May 2000!

[ How should we respond to Global Terorism? ]

Compare

"911" terrorist attack, to precision Israeli assassination rocket attack against Palestinian militant leader, Abu Ali Mustafa.

See World Trade Center towers, intact, rising into the sky.
Learn more about the World Trade Center buildings.
Learn much more about the World Trade Center buildings.

[ Proposal: What to rebuild on the WTC site (below)? ]

Not Mt. Etna (or Pompeii) -- a WTC survivor (Agence France-Presse).
Not Hamburg or Dresden.
See Rene Magritte's painting Empire of Light.

Go/Return to Russian nuclear submarine Kursk tragedy (12Aug00).
Go/Return to millennium year ("Y2k") page (+ Mt. Etna).
Go/Return to The duty of communicators.

http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/wtc.html
Copyright © 2001-2002 Brad McCormick, Ed.D.
bradmcc@cloud9.net

02 July 2006CE (2006-07-02 ISO 8601)
v02.38

One genuine substantive improvement the so-called "digital revolution" has made in our form of life, is the opportunity cell phones gave hostage passengers on hijacked airliners heading toward kamikaze strikes against the World Trade Center and other targets (11Sep01), to speak during their last minutes with loved ones who otherwise would have been absolutely inaccessible, and thus for them to at least in some measure be together.[fn.37

]

[ WTC towers, 11Sep01, struck but not yet collapsed ]

This page was initially uploaded (via ftp) onto my website at 19:37PM, 13Sep01. I was unable to access outside websites, so I could not validate the HTML at that time.

Telephone recording at my Internet Service Provider (ISP), Cloud9, White Plains, New York, 07:00AM Friday 14Sep01: "As of 10:30 on Thursday evening, Cloud9's primary internet connectivity is down. Our backup connectivity is operative, but running at reduced capacity. We are temporarily limiting the number of users that can dial in, to ease the bottleneck on our network. The primary connectivity is down as a result of the generator power at Telehouse, in lower Manhattan, having to be shut down. We do not have information available as to when the generator will be started again."

Starting at 17:30PM, Thursday evening (13Sep01), it took me 2 hours to get a dial-up connection, and then I was unable to access websites outside Cloud9. Email seemed to working, and my personal website on Cloud9 seemed to be available to outside users, since I had logged some hits during the day, including search engine crawlbots and at least one person from Sweden. At about 21:00PM, I dialed in on another account and was able to load The BBC homepage, start an Altavista search and get back the firstpage of matches, and load a couple other webpages. But then it seemed that any external website I accessed would send at most a few hundred characters -- enough to get it's title text --, and then send little or nothing more.

What should we rebuild on the World Trade Center site?

Why not build on this site where the gigantic impersonal "temple to mammon" used to stand, a branch of a "new Alexandrian Library". (A "branch", because, if someone blows it up, all will not be lost as it was when religious zealots destroyed the first Alexandrian Library, whose resources were apparently all concentrated in one place.)

This would be an institution devoted to open-ended study and discussion, one of the missions of which would be developing the Internet as a universally distributed facility to place all the world's learning and art, and the ability of each individual to engage with and contribute to it, on each person's kitchen table or laptop, especially in places remote from any city.

[ The Tower of Babel :: Babylonian Ziggurat ]

This would not, however, be a school in our ordinary sense, since it would be a place where persons would be straightforwardly welcomed to develop themselves culturally and collegially contribute to culture -- not yet another place where they would be subjected to secular persecution of testing and grading. Someone (ref. lost) described education in our society as: "The pleasurable pasttime of the privileged few has been replaced by the obligatory tedium of everyone." This new institution would endeavor to bring back the pleasure, but make it universally available.

In 1532, Dr. Francis Rabelais offered a name for such a place where it would be most desirable to spend our days engaged in creative study with good friends: Thélème.

Note: To see some more influential persons' ideas what to rebuild on the World Trade Center site (26Sep01), including a neo-Albert Speer light show, Click here. More architectural symbolism? The New York Times' proposal (08Sep02, "Don't Rebuild. Reimagine.") includes, as its centerpiece, two huge: twisted towers. In December 2003, they are down to one "torqued" tower that looks like siamese twins, which they have dubbed: "Freedom Tower" (David W. Dunlap, "More Revisions in Plans for New York's Tallest Tower", NYT, 10Dec03, p.B1). "The 1,776 foot tall Freedom Tower, designed to be the world's tallest and to stand where the World Trade Center did, will become a top target for Islamic terrorists as soon as it is occupied." (Daniel Benjamin, "The 1,776-Foot-Tall-Target", NYT OpEd piece, 23Mar04, p.A23)

In consideration of the Postal anthrax attack which shortly followed "911", I have a suggestion which, perhaps, "everybody" will find offensive -- like the British felt about using Princess Diana in public service advertisements to wear seat belts: Twin towers.

The final plans for reconstruction of 'ground zero' "will preserve not only the memory of those who died on Sept. 11, 2001, but the remnants - visible and even tangible - of the buildings that died that morning, too... [including] a 70-foot-tall, 250-foot-long section of the original slurry wall." (David W. Dunlap, "Memorial Will Preserve Twin Towers' Remnants", NYT on the Web, 17Dec04) America will at last have its own Wailing wall.

See police helicopter flying over Lower Manhattan looking lifeless and abandoned even without having been attacked (02Jul06).