The missing towers

While I respect the sentiment embodied in your post, I wonder if we don't do ourselves a major disservice by focusing on the SYMBOLS of a once-great nation instead of the SUBSTANCE of that fading glory (and freedom)?

With now over 50% of our population CONSUMING tax dollars from the other 50%, millions of illegal immigrants here (with the tacit -- and explicit -- blessing of those now in power), a war on terror which will soon become (like the war on drugs already has) perhaps the final blow to the now largely moribund Bill of Rights, a government school system literally indoctrinating new citizens with the idiotic idea that more government is the only solution to problems, etc., etc., is it smart to fixate on yet MORE symbols of what America was SUPPOSED to be?

The Nazis, the old USSR WERE and China still is BIG on concrete and stone symbols of their hollow, freedomless societies. Is that where we're headed?

Frankly, I'd rather take that $ and spend it on courses in the REAL Constitution and what it all means. That assumes, of course, citizens would be interested enough to take them.

"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path to destruction." Thomas Jefferson

Symbols can be empty, as you suggest, or they can serve to spur a people to action, to ignite an otherwise dead or decaying spirit. As tragic as the events of a year ago were, we now have an opportunity to show the barbarians and, come to that, the world, what we as a people can do.

I sensed a stirring in the national spirit on that and the following days that gave me hope, after years of despair and moribund national pride after the long, weary years under Clinton. A new and better WTC could just as well serve to renew and strengthen the national spirit, if it is done in a manner and in form that will serve that purpose. My fear is that, like often in the recent past, we will squander this opportunity. The signs are already there ("leave it empty", or "build a park", or "build four smaller buildings"). All of these symbolize a fearful and cowardly national spirit. Surely there will be those who will fear to go there if it is rebuilt. The fearful, the overcautious, the risk-adverse, the cowardly, they will always be with us. But just as surely there will be those who will not fear to ascend again into the clear, clean air of a sky that graces a mighty and noble people, one that will symbolize the optimistism and faith and courage of a free and brave nation. That is my hope for the WTC site, and I pray that we have the courage and national will to fulfill it.

Saddam Plans World Largest Mosque

PARIS, April 15 (AFP)
With its eight minaret towers thrusting several hundred feet (metres) into the air above the city, the new Baghdad mosque will be the biggest in the world. President Saddam Hussein's plan for a new mosque in the Iraqi capital will surpass even the holiest site in the Moslem world, the mosque in the Saudi city of Mecca which can only boast seven minarets. The four highest minarets, to be built 280 metres (925 feet) tall in a square formation, will be "the highest in the world, in order to be closer to God, according to the wishes of Saddam Hussein," the French architect chosen to oversee the project, Jacques Barriere, told AFP. Worshippers will be given no room for doubt over the identity of the project's instigator. As they enter the mosque, they will be faced with a huge digital image of Saddam, facing in the direction of Mecca and accompanied by his signature. The announcement of the project to build the Saddam Grand Mosque last Thursday highlighted once again the Iraqi president's desire to establish himself as a leader of the Arab world, despite his status as a pariah in the West.

The waters of the river Tigris will be diverted to form an artificial lake surrounding the mosque, Barriere said, water being the symbol of purity. Pathways across the lake will allow visitors to walk around an outline representing the contours of the Arab world. The scale of the project is immense. The concrete mosque itself will be 135 metres (445 feet) in diameter and 120 metres (almost 400 feet) high, Barriere said. It is to be built on thirty hectares (75 acres) of land on the site of an old airport bombed during the 1991 Gulf War. "The project features a rectangular perimeter 480 metres (1,580 feet) wide and 700 metres (2,310 feet) long, where there will be buildings used as libraries, souks, residential buildings for students and a Koranic school," said Barriere. The cost is immaterial for the Iraqi regime, said the architect based in Limoges, central France. "It will cost what it will cost. It's not so much the price that counts as the technical achievement." It is an attitude that contrasts starkly with the miserable living standards for most ordinary citizens in Baghdad, where crippling UN sanctions targeted at Saddam's regime have resulted in food and medicine shortages.

A mass funeral was held in Baghdad Monday for 29 children the government says died as a direct result of sanctions and a lack of medicines. It was the latest in a series of mass funerals aimed to mobilize public opinion against the crippling economic embargo. However the building falls outside the range of the sanctions, Barriere said. "We examined the United Nations' Resolution 986 to know if we could go ahead with it or not," he said. "But intellectual projects totally escape the embargo." Iraqi authorities approached Barriere and his colleagues last September following their work on a giant obelisk in Paris to mark the bicentenary of a French scientific expedition to Egypt.

The American Empire Center: A Proposal

The events of September 11 mark a dividing line -- the line between the post-Cold War interregnum and the worldwide War on Terror. In a world where fanatics can destroy thousands of people in an instant, where madmen wielding gas, germs, or atoms can wreck a nation at a whim, there is no more room for half-measures, appeasement, or the endless squabbling of the so-called "united" nations. If we must have a global policeman, a planetary power both willing and able to keep the various conflicts between nations, cultures, and ethnic/religious groups from spiralling out of control; if we must have, in effect, a global version of the Roman Empire; then let the United States step to the fore and become the new Rome. If we are to have Empire, let it be an American Empire.

The new Twin Towers are built with this new Empire in mind. The transition from a de facto to de jure empire will not be done with soft words and diplomatic finesse; to be effective at all, the new Pax Americana must be imposed on the world forcefully, unabashedly, and -- where unavoidably -- brutally. The new American Empire Center rises from the ashes of the World Trade Center as a symbol of this steely resolve.

These twin towers, each half again and more the equal of their predecessors in height, are each founded on a square composed of four triumphal arches, symbolizing (as does Napoloeon's Arc de Triomphe) a forcible unity of peace; the stone façades of each of the eight immense arches are inscribed with the names of the fallen of September 11, and with the names of those brave warriors who lose their lives in the war to avenge them. The square plaza within the arches at the base of each tower is an empty expanse of white marble, centered on twin eternal flames of remembrance. Towering above this open-air atrium are the towers themselves, 166 stories of mixed work and living space, faced with granite and connected by atomic-powered elevators proof against any conceivable impact. On each of the towers' two setback levels are placed four stone Screaming Eagles, crying defiance at the four corners of the globe; each setback also houses the buildings' Point Defense System, an integrated array of antiaircraft missile launchers and Phalanx Close In Weapons System autoguns capable of projecting firepower on the scale of a naval cruiser, making each tower a constant sentinel in defense of the city. At the top of each tower is a penthouse Citadel, an enormous multi-level meeting facility for use by civic and religious organizations. A gleaming pyramid of golden-faced glass admits light into each Citadel; atop its highest point stands a gilt statue of a spread American Eagle grasping the Globe in its talons, a fitting symbol of the new international order.

Finally, the upper floors of the towers are each faced with an immense bas-relief carving of a spread eagle bearing the shield of defense and the fasces of Order -- the same fasces that grace the chambers of our Congress in the Capitol. These eight immense images project the message of the edifice to the world: the message of Pax Americana.

The remainder of the former WTC complex site surrounding the new Twin Towers is left to go back to nature, and is utterly devoid of construction; the towers rise from an uninterrupted plane of grass and soil, representing in literal form the source of the new America Empire's strength: the grassroots of its people, rooted in the soil of this great land.

The American Empire Center is a brutal, uncompromising structure, a structure for a brutal, uncompromising world. But its brutality is based in the sincere desire for an end to brutality; its lack of compromise based in a refusal to compromise further with the forces of barbarity. The spirit of the new Twin Towers is expressed in written form by the V of Victory, engraved upon shield of the bas-relief eagles that crown them; its motto, carried by each of the great birds of prey, is the motto of the great Roman emperor Tiberius: Oderint dum probent ("Let them hate me, so long as they respect my power".)

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