The Ultra Macho Freedom Tower

Get a grip on it. The Freedom Tower. A sacred subject. Right? No.

The Freedom Tower. Honors those who perished there and the whatever for which the new urban warriors fought daily. Right? Wrong.

The victims of 9/11 (here in America) were not urban warriors laboring for freedom, they were thousands of people from all walks of life who died terribly, tragically, and hate me for saying it but though everyone insists it’s the why of their dying that is a horror, the why is not at all what cuts 9/11 out from the rest of the mind-numbing numbers of victims who are a testament to humankind’s appetite for making grizzly entertainment of thinning the herd. No, instead it was the how of the spectacular, gut-disordering, mind-revamping nature of the man-made catastrophe that made 9/11. I’m not going to post a list of numbers of the people dying yearly in this war or conflict or that, or the masses of people starved by genocidal intent or caustic neglect, and I won’t be so crass as to bring up how childhood mortalities in Iraq in the early 90s had spiraled from 43.2 to 128.5 per thousand, due to the embargo, and that courtesy the war in Iraq those thinning-of-the-herd childhood mortalities are now reported to be twice what they were under Hussein. No, I won’t bring that up because it would be political and lord knows we have to give the Freedom Tower and its Memorial and Museum a good (say) fifty foot no-politics buffer zone. So I’ll just say that no the why of 9/11 is not what spasms the imagination, because if it was the why that was the horror then victims of the why in general are in abundant supply all over the globe and it’s tough to muster up a news agency that cares to fling a photo in anyone’s and our general direction. Instead it was the spectacular eruption of glass, concrete and steel, the cutting asunder then mind-boggling collapse of one of the biggest roadside attractions this side of the Atlantic. A symbolic double stab at the commercial money-sucking heart of the global corporate (not only Americans perished, it was an equal-opportunity double stab) made by one of the in-club for reasons we peons will never quite get because we’re not of the in-club and the in-club is kind of like the biblical leviathan that you can make all kinds of guesses about but not ever get a good picture of as you never see it directly. What we do know is that spectacle galvanized the desired response, the public rallying behind a call to war.

Do your duty and get back out to those malls and shop, Bush said.

Yes, sir!

A roadside attraction is ad copy translated into the three d world. The bigger, the wilder, the more spectacular the better.

The twin towers were a great big commercial roadside attraction before they were struck through and collapsed.

They were great big commercial attractions like great big concrete dinosaurs are roadside attractions.

A problem with the twin towers is they were lots of office space. On the Isle of Manhattan. An expensive little island where a little piece of property costs an incredible amount of money. And you know that one of the immediate concerns after 9/11, a concern that arose about the same time the towers went down, was how to afterward milk out of that property the kind of office space cash represented by those towers, because who wants to work in a graveyard.

The real estate agents in Wichita, Kansas don’t tell prospective buyers that the house they’re thinking of purchasing was visited by the Wichita killer. The real estate agents in Manhattan weren’t going to have that option.

Solution? Of course. Build another wow of a roadside attraction.

The icing on the cake was the Sacred Ground advantage. No longer just twin monuments to commerce, we now will have the Freedom Tower, a straightforward obelisk. Is it business or church? Calling it the Freedom Tower brings in politics but it’s office space. Supposed to honor the dead but it’s office space. What is it? Citizens approaching the fortified castle base of the Freedom Tower won’t know whether to genuflect or pull out their wallets.

Oh. OK. I get it. Church, indeed.

The Freedom Tower is wrongly named. It should instead be called the Freedom Cathedral. It’s going to be the sacred church of commerce with a great big steeple. For those who believe the construction again of an inhuman-sized building at that spot is an act of defiance, fine, for them it’s a monumental phallus. But it’s not defiance at all. It’s money, money, money, money, money. How to get as much real estate again out of that same spot as is possible.

I didn’t like the 2003 design for the Freedom Tower. I don’t like mile high skyscrapers. Then I saw the 2005 design for the Freedom Tower and I thought well if I had my druthers the 2003 had it over the “sleeker” 2005 design. Looking back at the 2003 design I see that the open-air structure atop the office building acknowledged the terrible vulnerability of the twin towers and the loss of life and in that way the design is humane. But the penthouse view just wasn’t grand enough, was it, and as the number of stories was less than the Twin Towers there were many who saw the design as humbling, lesser than, not proud and in-your-face like a tall-as or taller-than tower.

They said it was a wounded tower.

Topped by gardens.

And windmills.

Green space isn’t macho.

One of the reasons thus Freedom Tower 2005.

A 1776 foot tall fuck-you.

No vulnerable sense of a building half gone.

Without the green space.

Without the eco-friendly energy-producing windmills.

Those who walked around saying, “A park, let’s make it a park,” obviously don’t have a clue about business or what was happening in the world before 9/11, or what has transpired since.

P.S. This monstrosity will cost 1.5 billion to build. At 10 billion dollars, the Wal-Mart Walton family is worth 6.66 Freedom Towers. (Update note: Oops, my bad. Meant to write 100 billion and that they’re worth 66.6 Freedom Towers! But I was being manhandled by dragon puppets and was distracted. )


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10 responses to “The Ultra Macho Freedom Tower”

  1. Arvin Hill Avatar

    I’ve reached the point of audible sighs and stomach cramps when I hear the word freedom — hardly surprising since George W. Bush and his voyeuristic harpies have been gangbanging it nonstop since 911. It must have an interminably long shelf-life (in some markets).

    So I’ll just call it the F Tower, as in “That F Tower is butt ugly.”

    It’s a McMansion built on a graveyard, a shining beacon of all that is possible when a nation surrenders itself to fear and greed without so much as a second thought. Strangely fitting yet gaudy, vulgar and inappropriate – not unlike the man who benefited most from the original buildings’ destruction.

    George W. Bush, whose hatred of New York is no less than that of his fellow neocon warriors, will undoubtedly view F Tower as a shrine to his greatness, a grand extension of his mortal penis for the sycophantic groupies of the moneyed elite who just can’t get enough.

    I would like to say New Yorkers deserve better – that Americans deserve better. Never has an American president reaped such political – and probably monetary (but who would tell us?) – profit from a heap of his own dead. Bush’s disgusting necrophilia is still being praised and rewarded by the American Culture Machine. And because of that, we’ll be getting exactly what we deserve for a long time to come.

  2. Jim McCulloch Avatar

    I haven’t paid much attention to it–is this thing really gonna get built? I can’t imagine how any sane building owner could expect to rent out office space there. If it gets built I think it will be a totally subsidized totally empty building.

    That would be interesting, although the waste of money would be regrettable.

  3. site admin Avatar

    Yes, its’ going to be built. It’s supposed to help heal the nation. It’s supposed to show we bounce back bigger and better. They say they’re confident it will be leased out but then they would say that.

  4. Jay Taber Avatar

    My 80-year-old father postulated the bounce back theory recently–albeit in a slightly different context–as he attempted to form a more positive vision of America. (He loaths Bush.) But I noticed he did not expound on what we might bounce back to. And I wonder, just what is the vision of good-hearted Americans for the future? Do they have one? I mean, beyond equal opportunity and social security, is there a widely received image of what we ought to work toward becoming?

  5. Agitprop Avatar

    Why don’t they just call it The Big Cock Tower?

    USA: Our cock is bigger than yours!

  6. Crzy Mofo Avatar
    Crzy Mofo

    ok…..since the freedom tower is such a piece of shit tower…..but if its to be built…how bout dont build it in new york..build it in the shittiest place in the world so noone would have to look at it

  7. roger Avatar
    roger

    regardless of whether it’s right or wrong, whoever wrpte this filth should be ashamed of themselves. people died for no other reason than they went to work. and the authorities who perished did so attempting, and succeding in some cases, to save lives. for this idiot to trivialize what happened that day with pure self-commentary is not only rididculous, but a slap in the face to americans.

  8. Brian Foxx Avatar
    Brian Foxx

    I’m a New Yorker and I say REBUILD THE ORIGANAL WTC, taller, stronger, safer, and BOLD. So, as New Yorkers, as Americans we WILL NOT FOLD UNDER PRESSURE, WE WILL NOT FOLD TO TERROREST. AMERICANS WILL PREVAIL IN WAR AGAINT TERRORISM, WE WILL BECAUSE WE’RE AMERICANS. BEING AMERICAN IS CONTAGISIS. THANK YOU -BRIAN –

  9. Northsea Avatar
    Northsea

    The design of the FreedomTower is rather critical, isn’t it? As you can see it is based on a pyramid-model. One up and from the top one upside down. On top there is something that looks like a topstone. Also consider this:
    F 6 = .6.
    R 18 = 9
    E 5 = 5
    E 5 = 5
    D 4 = 4
    O 15 = .6.
    M 13 = 4
    T 20 = 2
    O 15 =.6.
    W 23 = 5
    E 5 = 5
    R 18 = 9 Yep that’s right: …666 (sum 66)

    Just funny? Accidental?
    Maybe it’s far-fetched. Maybe not. Maybe it’s freedom…….Maybe not.

    Please, open your eyes and think it over. Also search on the internet for: NWO, Bilderberg Group and “The great global warming swindle” (movie). It’s all one.

    You are an intelligent person. Be the master of your own mind and you will find the answers for yourself. Love to you all.

  10. patrick the rogue Avatar
    patrick the rogue

    I agree that the word “freedom” has lost all its resonance with me. They have propagandized it to death. So let’s use a variation, such as Liberty Tower. That has a nice ring to it. And a good solid base in American History: Liberty Bel, Sons of Liberty, “Liberty or Death.”
    If we want to be really macho of course, we would go with my political leanings – call it the Libertarian tower, sell pot in the observation tower, and designate hook up zones for prostitutes. Now that’s what I call Freedom!

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