Bleeding Edge: "The Trade Center towers were religious too" (p. 338)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Shawn, as a fake Zen therapist, might not be the novel's most 
trustworthy voice, but here he is on to something. Discussions about the 
symbolic dimension of the Twin Towers tend, also on this list, to reduce 
it to its phallic element. This is there, no doubt, but if this was all 
there is, it could have been just any skyscraper. Yet the Trade Center 
Towers were not just any skyscraper. Artists like Philippe Petit or Wim 
Wenders ("Der Amerikanische Freund", 1977) realized this right away. The 
Twin Towers were the symbolic center of Western capitalism. And when 
they were destroyed, Western people in general and US people in 
particular perceived this as an attack on "our way of life", as 
chancellor Schröder put it back then. Shawn's comparison of the WTC 
attacks to the blowing up of the Buddha statues in Afghanistan makes 
this symbolic dimension clear.
The shock and the confusion afterwards (including the belittling of the 
terrorists' courage) have to do with the recognition that on the 
symbolic level the battle was once and for all already decided. The 
biggest single anti-modernity statement ever! So what the fuck can you 
do? Nothing. You can lead war in the Middle East as long as you want: 
This will not make it undone. The only adequate symbolic answer, 
Sloterdijk hinted at that immediately, would have been to blow up the 
Kaaba in Mecca. But that - thanks to the crumbs of rationality being 
left on the table - was never an option. Not even for the most insane 
military person.  Another religious symbolic dimension of the event lies 
in the fact that a person socialized into one of the three monotheistic 
religions could hardly avoid thinking of the Tower of Babel, a 
problematic association when one considers the origin of this story.

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l