Edward Gibbon at America’s Grave: What the Future Will Remember About America’s Decline and Fall

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from TomDispatch:



Edward Gibbon at America’s Grave
What the Future Will Remember About America’s Decline and Fall

By Mike Davis


1. Twin Towers

Two years from now the staffs of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker will move into the most haunted building in the world. There, the elite of American celebrity photographers, gossip columnists, and magazine journalists may meet some macabre new muses.

Aloft in the upper stories of 1 World Trade Center (where Condé Nast publishing has signed the biggest lease), they will gaze out their windows at that ghostly void, just a few yards away, where 658 doomed employees of Cantor Fitzgerald were sitting at their desks at 8:46 AM, September 11, 2001.

Not to worry: The “Freedom Tower” -- the boosters reassure us -- will be an enduring consolation to the families of 9/11’s martyrs as well as an icon of civic and national renaissance. Not to mention its dramatic resurrection of property values in the neighborhood. (I confess that I find this conflation of real-estate speculation with sublime memorial unnerving: like proposing to build a yacht marina over the sunken Arizona or a Katrina theme park in the Lower Ninth Ward.)

One World Trade Center, in the original design, was also meant to restore vertical architectural supremacy to Manhattan and to be the tallest building in the world. This global phallic rivalry was won instead by Dubai’s Burj Khalifa super-tower, completed last year and twice as high as the Empire State Building. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175440/tomgram%3A_mike_davis%2C_how_obama_became_the_curator_of_the_bush_legacy/#more (story follows a brief intro)

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1. As usual, Mr Davis kicks some ass. nt