Get a grip on it. The Freedom Tower. A sacred subject. Right? No.
The Freedom Tower. Honors those who perished there and the whatever for which the new urban warriors fought daily. Right? Wrong.
The victims of 9/11 (here in America) were not urban warriors laboring for freedom, they were thousands of people from all walks of life who died terribly, tragically, and hate me for saying it but though everyone insists it’s the why of their dying that is a horror, the why is not at all what cuts 9/11 out from the rest of the mind-numbing numbers of victims who are a testament to humankind’s appetite for making grizzly entertainment of thinning the herd. No, instead it was the how of the spectacular, gut-disordering, mind-revamping nature of the man-made catastrophe that made 9/11. I’m not going to post a list of numbers of the people dying yearly in this war or conflict or that, or the masses of people starved by genocidal intent or caustic neglect, and I won’t be so crass as to bring up how childhood mortalities in Iraq in the early 90s had spiraled from 43.2 to 128.5 per thousand, due to the embargo, and that courtesy the war in Iraq those thinning-of-the-herd childhood mortalities are now reported to be twice what they were under Hussein. No, I won’t bring that up because it would be political and lord knows we have to give the Freedom Tower and its Memorial and Museum a good (say) fifty foot no-politics buffer zone. So I’ll just say that no the why of 9/11 is not what spasms the imagination, because if it was the why that was the horror then victims of the why in general are in abundant supply all over the globe and it’s tough to muster up a news agency that cares to fling a photo in anyone’s and our general direction. Instead it was the spectacular eruption of glass, concrete and steel, the cutting asunder then mind-boggling collapse of one of the biggest roadside attractions this side of the Atlantic. A symbolic double stab at the commercial money-sucking heart of the global corporate (not only Americans perished, it was an equal-opportunity double stab) made by one of the in-club for reasons we peons will never quite get because we’re not of the in-club and the in-club is kind of like the biblical leviathan that you can make all kinds of guesses about but not ever get a good picture of as you never see it directly. What we do know is that spectacle galvanized the desired response, the public rallying behind a call to war.
Do your duty and get back out to those malls and shop, Bush said.
Yes, sir!
A roadside attraction is ad copy translated into the three d world. The bigger, the wilder, the more spectacular the better.
The twin towers were a great big commercial roadside attraction before they were struck through and collapsed.
They were great big commercial attractions like great big concrete dinosaurs are roadside attractions.
A problem with the twin towers is they were lots of office space. On the Isle of Manhattan. An expensive little island where a little piece of property costs an incredible amount of money. And you know that one of the immediate concerns after 9/11, a concern that arose about the same time the towers went down, was how to afterward milk out of that property the kind of office space cash represented by those towers, because who wants to work in a graveyard.
The real estate agents in Wichita, Kansas don’t tell prospective buyers that the house they’re thinking of purchasing was visited by the Wichita killer. The real estate agents in Manhattan weren’t going to have that option.
Solution? Of course. Build another wow of a roadside attraction.
The icing on the cake was the Sacred Ground advantage. No longer just twin monuments to commerce, we now will have the Freedom Tower, a straightforward obelisk. Is it business or church? Calling it the Freedom Tower brings in politics but it’s office space. Supposed to honor the dead but it’s office space. What is it? Citizens approaching the fortified castle base of the Freedom Tower won’t know whether to genuflect or pull out their wallets.
Oh. OK. I get it. Church, indeed.
The Freedom Tower is wrongly named. It should instead be called the Freedom Cathedral. It’s going to be the sacred church of commerce with a great big steeple. For those who believe the construction again of an inhuman-sized building at that spot is an act of defiance, fine, for them it’s a monumental phallus. But it’s not defiance at all. It’s money, money, money, money, money. How to get as much real estate again out of that same spot as is possible.
I didn’t like the 2003 design for the Freedom Tower. I don’t like mile high skyscrapers. Then I saw the 2005 design for the Freedom Tower and I thought well if I had my druthers the 2003 had it over the “sleeker” 2005 design. Looking back at the 2003 design I see that the open-air structure atop the office building acknowledged the terrible vulnerability of the twin towers and the loss of life and in that way the design is humane. But the penthouse view just wasn’t grand enough, was it, and as the number of stories was less than the Twin Towers there were many who saw the design as humbling, lesser than, not proud and in-your-face like a tall-as or taller-than tower.
They said it was a wounded tower.
Topped by gardens.
And windmills.
Green space isn’t macho.
One of the reasons thus Freedom Tower 2005.
A 1776 foot tall fuck-you.
No vulnerable sense of a building half gone.
Without the green space.
Without the eco-friendly energy-producing windmills.
Those who walked around saying, “A park, let’s make it a park,” obviously don’t have a clue about business or what was happening in the world before 9/11, or what has transpired since.
P.S. This monstrosity will cost 1.5 billion to build. At 10 billion dollars, the Wal-Mart Walton family is worth 6.66 Freedom Towers. (Update note: Oops, my bad. Meant to write 100 billion and that they’re worth 66.6 Freedom Towers! But I was being manhandled by dragon puppets and was distracted. )
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