Friday, June 7, 2002 |
02:20 - It's "just defiance"-- but defiance is everything
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27860
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Ann Coulter says to Build Them Back, exactly as they were-- perhaps bigger, but definitely not smaller.
There have been many unsubstantiated assertions that no one would rent property in a rebuilt World Trade Center. But if fear of another terrorist attack were a major factor in New Yorkers' decisional calculus, they wouldn't be living in New York. The military has the technology to make the buildings safe from incoming missiles. Sept. 11 was a sucker punch. That particular trick doesn't work twice.
Moreover, this argument neglects to consider that by the time a new World Trade Center is built, Arabs will be about as threatening as the Japanese. Who would have imagined after Pearl Harbor that the Japanese were governable? Yet Japan hasn't shown a disposition to fight in 60 years. It is the rare individual who does not succumb to horrendous physical pain. Muslims feel humiliated now? We'll show them humiliated.
Aesthetes complain that the buildings were ugly. Perhaps. But the important thing is, they were really big. There can be a new design, but whatever goes up on that site has got to be bigger and better than the buildings the savages destroyed.
Read the whole thing; I had a hard time picking two or three paragraphs to quote.
It's clear to me that rebuilding on the site is a project that can't be dictated by economics alone; it's something we will have to attack as an ideological imperative, a symbol, a public work, like the dams in the 30s. They were useful, yes, and essential-- but they were also art, monuments that captured the spirit of an age. The WTC should be no less. It may turn out to be impractical; people might not even rent out all the floor space. But that's a subsidy that we as a nation should be proud to pay.
If they had stood for another fifty years, the towers would probably have been designated a national historic monument or something, and great pains would have been taken to preserve them as they were. Now, they should be afforded the same honor that would have been due them, plus a whole lot more.
To me, that means putting them back up, so similar to the previous towers that the opening of Crocodile Dundee II wouldn't look anachronistic. And holding a grand opening during which the biggest American flags on the face of the Earth would be draped down their eastern walls.
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