The United States can rebuild the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center within a year as the tallest building in the world, to underline the economic power of the United States, but the moral damage of this tragedy will leave an open door among the Americans whose belief and confidence in American military power and supremacy worldover may be shattered. This is a blow to the American image as the only superpower left in the world.
On the one hand, while the Turkish Daily News is quite correct about the damage to the confidence in our military ... their belief in our ability to rebuild is staggering.
Some are saying that we might never build another "supertall skyscraper" aside from Trump's Chicago dump. (Well, really, the world's tallest building on the Chicago River? Next to the squat but surprisingly graceful Wrigley Building? What a yutz. But I digress.) I suspect we will keep building tall buildings -- to be frank, I suspect we must, in part for psychological reasons; tall buildings somehow define this country ... but in part because, in Manhattan, at least, there's no other way to build. Until yesterday, there was no space.
According to an article I now can't find again, at least 20 square blocks of Manhattan are now classed as "totally destroyed, mostly destroyed, or slightly destroyed." I thought the word he meant for the last one was "damaged" until I saw some footage of what happened to the surrounding buildings, and "slightly destroyed" is really the only way to describe some of them, those most distant in what can only be called a peculiar fallout zone. For the closer ones ... One Liberty Plaza will have to come down -- in fact, it's trying very hard to take itself down in any event. The World Financial Center -- the set of skyscrapers surrounding the Trade Center complex -- will have to come down. Most of the buildings in that 20-block area will have to come down. How do you take down 20 blocks? Where do you put 20 square blocks of rubble? How do you rebuild that much?
The other misconception I've seen is that we'll have the worst cleared away in a few days, in the search for people. But ... it took years to build the towers. Granted that mostly, they contained air -- that's what buildings do, after all -- there's still no way this will be done in a few days. This process, with the WTC alone, will go on for weeks. I don't know how the workers will be able to bear it.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
Search entries:
12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!