13 years after the attacks, the 9/11 Memorial has opened at the site of Ground Zero. Among other criticisms, the facility has been drawing fire for an exorbitant $24 admission fee, behind which lie the remains of the victims of the attacks, thus monetizing their deaths. A gift shop will also sell T-shirts.
9/11 Memory Hole
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
44 Comments. Leave new
Interactive waterboarding while sipping on a starbucks?!
Work near it and will not go near it.
Expect tax revenues from busloads of tourists.
Great one, bravo!
Thank you, thank you , thank you.
Honestly, the whole thing is just disgusting. I didn’t know anyone who died at the towers, but I was significantly affected by it. I lived in Williamsburg at the time, and you could see the towers from the windows in our loft. My wife worked less than a mile from the towers, and she got stuck on the subway on her way to work, six months pregnant with our daughter. She ended up walking down to work from 14th street, and couldn’t get back to Brooklyn until pretty late. It was hours before I could get her on a phone. I watched the towers fall, not on television, just looking out my window. I remember thinking “I just saw 10000 people die” (luckily I overestimated). I drove to work in CT the next day, it was maybe the strangest experience in my life – I literally saw not one single other car on the LIE, it was like a zombie movie. There were soldiers on the bridge carrying automatic weapons. For weeks we had to close our windows if the wind was coming from the west, the smell was overpowering. My wife had to show ID to get to work south of Canal Street. How they can charge $24 for a memorial is beyond me…
American Exceptionalism: The belief that no matter how many foreign governments and their elections the US subverts; no matter how many baseless wars devastate no matter how many millions; no matter how many are tortured and imprisoned without cause for no matter how long; no matter how many non-white Americans populate the extreme lower classes and prisons: The Government of America would NEVER do anything so underhanded and deceptive to its own people.
Glenn, are you trying to take away the most precious of my many illusions ?!! Shame on you !…
Henri
… and why not? Remember the cynical and manipulative way the Bush admin used those deaths to advance Big Oil’s agenda. Maybe we can squeeze a few more dollars out of them.
Sometimes I’m proud to be an American. This is not one of those times.
I can’t imagine *buying* anything to *memorialize* what should be a somber experience.
“3,000 people died, and all I got was this lousy T Shirt”
gah!
Right on! But the mystery is that really sad people find comfort in it and in that way it cannot be made fun of or can it?
In a way, it’s appropriate. 9/11 has been a tasty treat for opportunistic scum from the first moment of the attacks: media, politicians, militarists, corporations, lawyers, you name it.
I Know.
I came across an auto accident many years ago, where the driver was obviously dead from a split skull. Someone seeing a carton of cigarettes on the dashboard reached in, and taking them said, almost apologetically, “He won’t be needing these anymore.”
It’s a shame to let a good opportunity go by even if it reflects poorly on human nature.
NEW YORK (AP) — The author of a book accusing firefighters of looting ground zero after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks defended his work Monday against mounting criticism by union officials.
Critics of William Langewiesche’s American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center have focused on a passage about the discovery of dozens of new jeans from The Gap — still tagged, folded and stacked — inside the cab of a fire truck pulled from the rubble.
I was watching live TV when it happened. I couldn’t help but think how much it resembled controlled demolition (of which I’ve seen a few). There’s still no reasonable explanation of why Building Number 7 came down. I watched as the first jumper plunged from one of the towers towards the ground.
I suspect there will always be questions (as with JFK’s murder).
It’s sad, really. 🙁
Familiar with “Cartoon physics”?
Mickey Mouse walks off the edge of a cliff, but doesn’t fall until he notices that he’s walking on air. Why’s that funny? That’s funny because we know that the real world doesn’t work that way.
Donald Duck pulls one can off the top of a pyramid, and the whole thing crumbles from the top down in an orderly, symmetrical manner. Why’s that funny? That’s funny because we instinctively know that such a small disturbance won’t cause the entire pile to collapse. That’s funny because we know that failures of that sort don’t happen in an orderly, symmetrical manner.
Wile E. Coyote gets hit on the head with an anvil. There’s a dramatic pause, then he crumbles from the top down in an orderly, symmetrical manner. Why’s that funny? It’s funny because we know that non-ridged structures don’t simply crumble. It’s funny because of the dramatic pause, we know that if something’s going to shatter it does so immediately – it doesn’t pause for effect first.
Wile E. Coyote gets hit on the head with a bowling ball, it pounds him a foot into the ground, bounces straight up, hits him again, pounds him another foot into the ground, over an over again. Why is that funny? It’s funny because we know that the ball wouldn’t bounce straight up. It’s funny because we know that if it expended its energy smacking him into the ground the first time, it wouldn’t have enough energy left to do it again.
We see these things on cartoons and we laugh because we know the real world simply does not work that way. Yet when they happen to a quarter-mile-tall building, we accept it without question. That’s not funny at all.
That sounds as if you might be receptive to this site (if not already hooked up):
Science vs Cartoon Physics
Here, let me “out crazy” you all. The invasion of Iraq was cover for destroying all untranslated cuneiform tablets that held proof of our alien over lords. Dorme bene.
@derleher – yep, I am familiar. In fact, I’m qualified to sign their petition but never did so (paranoia)
I used to argue this extensively on the internet, but have since given it up.
1) 99.
… continuing … (damned editor did a silly thing)
1) 99% of the American public is simply not capable of understanding the physics involved.
2) 98% of the American public would rather believe what they’ve been told to believe than to contemplate the horror of ‘what if.’ Look at how we all collectively turned away from Iran-Contra. Look at how we’ve turned away from the war crimes we *know* the Bushies propagated.
3) at the end of the day, Noam Chomsky is right. “It doesn’t matter because American Imperialism will continue unabated in any case”
@ CrazyH –
I’m neither an architect nor an engineer, but I signed their petition asking for an impartial and independent investigation years ago, because common sense requires objectivity and these are educated and scientific persons with reasonable doubt. Undoubtedly, Mickey Mouse can sleep well, but I don’t accept the cartoon version fed to the public.
[I didn’t grasp the significance of your inclusion of:
“1) 99.” Care to explain?]
I was watching, live from my window, not on tv, as the buildings fell. They looked like building falling, plain and simple. No controlled demolition. It’s not that I wouldn’t believe our government would do that, but they COULDN’T do that, they’re way to incompetent. The one thing that was weird, and I noticed it at the time, was how long it took military planes to get there. I was walking my dog right after the second plane hit, and it was dead quite, no planes. You could always hear planes since they went over (high up, but you could hear) on their way to LaGuardia. I remember thinking “why aren’t there any fighters?,” I mean obviously this was deliberate, and they planes which hit must have been tracked, and they had had plenty of time to scramble some fighters to the city. They had time to divert all the commercial traffic.
quiet, oops 🙂
@ suetonius17 –
You do realize that reporters were airing coverage that Building 7 had come down BEFORE it came down, don’t you? No airplane struck it.
@ CrazyH –
You answered my question, apparently while we were both writing. 🙂
The controlled demolition theory is absurd. Tens of thousands of people worked in the World Trade Center. A lot of them worked late. Some people, including artists who rented the space as studios, lived there. It was have required hundreds of workers, countless big holes in the walls and lots of dust and noise throughout the complex to install the charges. There is 0.00% chance that no one would have noticed.
@Ted
Agreed, the controlled demolition theory is absurd. But the problem is, violating the laws of physics is flat out impossible.
…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. – Sherlock Holmes
Why didn’t anybody notice suspicious activity?
Power Outages & Maintenance Personnel
In no particular order:
1. The media reported building 7 collapsed before it did because — brace for it — the media got it wrong. The media gets things wrong ALL THE TIME. Here’s how such a thing happens:
Fire guy: Well, we think Bldg. 7 could collapse any time now.
Reporter: And I’ve just been told Bldg. 7 collapsed.
This isn’t a case of a reporter being an idiot, either. It’s simply how journalism [sic] works now. Nine words? Make it three. So “We think Bldg. 7 could collapse any time now” becomes “Bldg. 7 collapsed.” It isn’t a conspiracy.
2. On conspiracies. As the “truth” groups simply will not accept any argument other than demolition charges, a discussion can’t be had. That isn’t the populace being unwilling to face the facts. That’s a small, shrill group automatically refusing any argument that isn’t “You were right.” It’s the same thing with evolution “debates.”
Yeah, yeah, Alex – your continued trolling on the subject has made your opinion well known.
“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
– Harlan Ellison
Get yourself a degree in engineering or physics and we’ll have something to talk about. Until then, you can feel all safe and secure knowing that the bowling ball can pound Wile E. Coyote into the ground.
As I said, the conspiracists won’t accept any response other than “It had to be a conspiracy.”
If I did have a degree in engineering, wouldn’t it simply be just one more person with a degree trying to argue with someone who won’t listen anyway?
As I said, the conspiracists won’t accept any response other … repeat, repeat, repeat.
@alex
If you had said degree, then you would at least be able to understand the arguments. Doesn’t mean you’d necessarily agree with them.
I find your references to ‘not listening’ to be rather humorous. Will you accept any response other than “it couldn’t have been a conspiracy?”
My experience has been that the Falsers are much less inclined to consider alternatives than the Truthers. I started out as a Falser, myself. When some of my fellow first engineers started talking about conspiracies I started muttering about tinfoil headgear. But I just couldn’t explain away the anomalies they pointed up. F still equals ma, even after an airplane hits a building.
My ‘cartoon physics’ examples weren’t chosen at random. If the commonly-excepted explanations of how the towers collapsed were true, then those examples would work just fine.
“… when my fellow engineers first started talking …”
:: sigh ::
@ CrazyH –
Thanks for your post. Even at my age, I’m still learning new things. 🙂
I had to do a Google search to discover the meaning of “F still equals ma”:
“force equals to the product of mass and acceleration.”
The material on the site I previously provided makes that point. 🙁
commonly-accepted
Coffee first, post second…
@ alex_the_tired –
I fail to see how the call for an objective, independent review of the circumstances and the evidence equates with the “demolition charges” that you mention. The fact is that this “theory” was discounted by the authorities from the outset.
BTW, there were more than one “journalists” who reported that Building Number 7 was down, while it was clearly visible in the background.
Do an objective search of the matter and you might come to a rational conclusion. 🙂
I didn’t see it until the end, but the “Twin Towers w/ Plane” hat the guy is wearing gave me a real gut laugh. This is where Ted is peerless. He can take such a horrible event and make one laugh at the absurdity of the American response, specifically and in general.
@ exkiodexian –
Thanks for that!
I didn’t see it until after I read your comment and went back to look again! (It took me a while, too!)
If I make myself laugh, and a little scared, I know I’m onto something.
Try this on for size:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnCIVeX0Ukc
Susan Lindauer is a voice that needs to be heard. This presentation is over 1:35 hours, but the first twenty minutes or so are worth watching and listening to. She is definitely not a nutcase:
Susan Lindauer
I’m not sure that anyone participating on this forum, including Ted, has professional experience of controlled demolition or has worked in the field of structural engineering. But enough people who have have questioned the received story of the collapse of the Twin Towers – that planes hit them and the burning jet fuel so weakened their steel structure of the structures that they came tumbling down (as did another structure, which was *not* hit by any planes, but which fell anyway) in surprisingly good order, i e, falling straight down, without severely damaging any neighbouring structures – that it must be considered as a modern-day version of the «Protocols of the Elders of Zion», cf this link : http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/wtc/how-hot.htm. But of course, just as the US government does not «do» torture, it does not do false-flag operations that kill thousands of US residents – perish the thought !…
Henri
I do have a relevant degree & experience, Had to study statics & dynamics, stress analysis, strength of materials, thermodynamics, physics and several related fields to get said degree.
It was the physical impossibilities that turned my head. People can lie, forget, misinterpret, etc, but you can’t fool mother nature.
In the 144 years we’ve been building steel frame buildings, not one has ever collapsed due to fire. Yet on 9/11, three did. Two in the same heretofore unknown failure mode; one in a completely different heretofore unknown failure mode.
There are only two possibilities, here. Either everything we know about large-scale construction is wrong, or someone’s lying to us.
Thanks for the heads up, CrazyH ; I myself have a background in, among other things, maths – insufficient to permit me to pontificate on exactly what happened, but perhaps sufficient to arouse justified suspicions with respect to the official stories and reports, which read to me like a whitewash. I hold with you that it’s amazing that just these three buildings would collapse – and in the particular manner in which they did – while, as you note, no other steel frame buildings have collapsed due to fire. But then, perhaps, the age of miracles is not past….
Henri
I am encouraged that people like you two exist, along with the architects and engineers who are calling attention to the government lies.
.
I don’t have the training in physics to understand most of what I’ve read, but I can chime in with my support for a new and impartial investigation, knowing from common sense and observation that the “official” explanation does not jibe with what I have seen.
.
Thanks. 🙂
And thanks to you as well, derlerher, for having the intelligence and the courage to smell the rat (barely) concealed in the official account of the collapse of these buildings. When I read the rather flimsy excuses people adduce for trusting that account, I am reminded of the words of Michel de Montaigne : «… il n’est rien creu si fermement que ce qu’on sçait le moins, …»
Henri
“… par ce que l’ignorance des auditeurs preste une belle et large carriere, et toute liberté, au maniement d’une matiere cachee.”
I hope that Ted and other skeptics are still following this thread. YouTube alerted me to the following video, which I found to be very interesting. I warn you: It’s about an hour and forty-five minutes long, but I found it to be worth my time. The conclusion: “… And the people should be ashamed of themselves for not seeking the truth.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU961SGps8g