The Day Before Two Years After

On the subway this morning
A remarkably ugly woman
Is reading a book called
God Don't Like Ugly

On the cusp of the anniversary true_felicity has posted some reflections I would like to share with you, and joffridus reminds us of this poem of Auden's.

I expect to be able to post something of my own later.

Frank

Terrorism Built the Twin Towers

"The devastation of 9/11 was a continuation of an earlier devastation. The Twin Towers became targets because they had been symbols of America's greatness. But they were never symbols for me of America's greatness. I see America's greatness very differently. For me, the symbols of American greatness were those little shops in 1960, owned by little people who were pursuing their own dreams. The Port Authority stuck a gun in their bellies and said, "Get off our land."
...
"The best use of Ground Zero was not the Twin Towers. The best use was those little stores run by nobodies. Nobody mourned the nobodies on 9/11, for by then, the collective acts of legalized terrorism that had driven them off their land were long forgotten. "

-- Gary North, Eminent Remains: The Buried Legacy of the Original Ground Zero

Who were these nobodies with their miserable small businesses who were such an embarassment to the Rockafellers? Arab-Americans, many of them, Christian refugees and children of refugees from Islamicist terror. By 1960 their little community was dwindling, drawn toward Atlantic Avenue through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Even the last chapel of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church had been sold off by Cardinal Spellman to serve as an Irish bar: only the facade remains.

My father was no friend to false progress. When the Hoboken ferry finally fell victim to the WTC project he took an early retirement. From my company cafeteria I can look down not only on Ground Zero, but the golden globe atop the magnificent architecture of 195 Broadway where he worked for so long. The gilded Hermes which perched upon it moved uptown, and I suppose, out of town, with AT&T, and it is only fitting, for Mercurius represents not only electronic communication, but the free markets of the Levant whose spirit our Levantine Americans, Israeli as well as Arab, still honor in spite of all the seduction and intimidation of government and the multinational corporate capitalism it fosters.