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

[Joseph Tracy]

I read Paul ONeill's book about being in Bush White House and he was appalled that Bush was talking about attacking Iraq within days of 9-11. The biblical symbolism of Babylon falling is certainly something that resonated with  biblical folk and that the Bush people knew about. 
On Nov 18, 2013, at 7:14 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:

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> 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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