I Am Not Running For President, by Mike Gold
I was in Manhattan last week, joining Martha Thomases and Glenn Hauman for a ComicMix mini-staff meeting. We were at a nice little diner in Greenwich Village, which is always a pleasantly nostalgic experience. I had to meet my wife and daughter in Newark for the Devils / Islanders game; I, of course, am a Blackhawks fan but it’s always swell to see Martin Brodeur in action.
I had a bit of time to get to the new stadium, so I took the E train down to the connecting PATH train to Newark. This happens at the World Trade Center station, and I wanted to go there.
Yep. The station’s still called “World Trade Center,” despite the fact that the World Trade Center (stop me if you heard this one) was blowed up on September 11, 2001. Sadly, the site is still a big ugly hole in the ground. The subway stations were in a deep structurally-protected basement and have been shorn up to allow tens of thousands of commuters to continue to get to work. Sadly – and to our national embarrassment – it is six and one-third years later and the World Trade Center is still a big hole in the ground.
Certainly, things have been delayed because of the input from the victims’ families who, understandably, are not of one mind. But that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. The insurance companies held things up while they tried, somewhat successfully, to weasel out of their financial commitments. The politicians need to figure out how they can cover their political bases and maximize their opportunities. The bureaucrats have to do their thing – imagine a thousand Hermes Conrads interfering with every phase of development.
Worst of all, from time to time everything had to come to a halt to recover more body fragments, woefully abandoned in the area by the one New Yorker so hated he was actually booed at a Yankees game… twice. A man who acts as though he owns the trademark on the phrase “September 11th.” A man who has been running for president of the United States on the graves of Al Qaeda’s victims. America’s greatest fraud, Rudy Giuliani.
When I walked from the E train to the PATH train, I was walking through this gaping, unattended wound to America’s soul. Obviously, I hadn’t been in that passage since the attack, although I had been to the WTC and its environs many times in the past. I think Peter Sanderson and I had even been to a Dark Shadowsconvention there, of all things. Seeing the debris from close-up, seeing the open air that had been filled with steel, concrete and people… even in 2008, it’s something else.
The damage lasted well into the PATH train tunnel. I was on a subway car filled with people who were understandably nonchalant. It was an amazingly emotional experience for me; I was really moved. I felt like I was visiting East Berlin in 1952.
That hole must be filled. I know there are all those plans and studies and stuff, but hell, there’s really only one appropriate way to do it: rebuild those same exact towers, as ugly as they were. Build them stronger, build them earthquake proof, build them greener, build them better with all the knowledge we’ve gathered about building such structures during the past four decades. But build them one storey taller. And do it now.
Both the NYC subway station and the PATH station continue to be named “World Trade Center.” I was always in favor of that. It’s been the only memorial at ground zero.
Now? More so.
Mike Gold is editor-in-chief of ComicMix.
Mike – Odd isn't it? The whole thing seems like yesterday. Martha was the person to put me up that horrible day. I thank God (and Martha) every day I had someplace to go that day.I was still working in Manhattan when that horrible thing went down. When I regrouped with my commuter family a few days after 9/11 and found out where everyone was (and those who did not survive). I touched base with one of fellows who was a structural engineer and his firm was contracted to clean up the underground mess in the subway and above ground, too.Some of the pictures he showed me of the destruction right next to areas that were literally untouched was eerier than any Hollywood creative team could manufacture for any post-disaster film. One photo had a giant steel girder that had been hurled into a nearby building at about a 30 degree angle. It was a chilling experience then. I couldn't look at all the subterranean pictures he had. It was too creepy.On the rare occasion I've had to go back to NY I'm strangely drawn to that neck of the woods just to check the progress.It still hurts.Peace.
That's interesting, as Martha lives pretty damn close to ground zero. Anybody venturing below 14th Street (Denny O'Neil's line of demarkation between Metropolis and Gotham City, by the way) had to produce I.D. It was an astonishing day. I could see the smoke from Stamford, and the Navy was gathering its fleet at Westport, about two miles from my place.
From Martha's neighborhood we went to the pier that day.It looked like the whole south side of the island was on fire from that view.
One of the things said (by the people who feel the need to say these kinds of things) this weekend was whether or not it was "too soon" for a movie about New York getting the big finger to be made. Well, 41 million dollars later, that question seems to have been answered. What those people seem to forget was for the next couple of days the most rented movies in America's video stores were disaster movies, Independence Day topping the list.Japan's been making movies about monsters taking out their cities for decades now, and no one ever suggested it was in poor taste.The WTC lack of memorial, or building, or anything, is a classic example of too many people getting involved in something. I don't think we'll ever see anything builr there, because it's a news magnet, and no matter WHAT they try and do, there will be someone to protest it, or offer suggestions (at a press conference, of course) or demand to know if the survivors or the families have been asked, and then they'll go ask them, and there will be an inquiry started on the affect on the hot dog vending industry, and well…I don't see much getting done.Sometimes we're too sensitive for our own good. We're so worried about being offended (or worse, offending someone else) that we're paralyzed most of the time. If someone stepped up and pulled the project forward, that'd be great. Heck, I think even Trump just said build the damn towers again, one foot taller, and that's it. Sounds good to me.The question is, will anyone want to work there? I see a parallel to Coast City in Green Lantern. They rebuilt it after Hank Henshaw obliterated it, but no one wanted to live there. Only after last issue (in a GREAT sequence) have people started streaming in(*). The WTC sat mostly empty for a long time, if memory serves, and only after the government moved a lot of its offices in did it start to catch on. When it gets rebuilt (in whatever Green, PC compassionate form they finally decide on), will people strwam in as a big f-You to Al-Queida, or will they all cheer at the grand opening and rush back to their offices in Jersey?(*)Jeez, I actually pulled comics into a poitical talk on a comics site. Cool…
Given Trump's recent history with construction in New York (a worker fell to his death due to lax safety standards at his new condo hotel in SoHo), I don't think we want him in charge. The problem with the WTC site is that the families of the victims are, understandably, opposed to building on the spot that might contain the remains of their loved ones. Unfortunately, there is no place in New York that does not contain the remains of someone's loved ones. It would do us all a lot of good to build something there so people can go to work and make a living.Life goes on. So should we.
I suppose part of the problem is that it's so recent. I live on a Civil War battlefield and we all live on remains of loved ones. I don't think the WTC families will get any more back from the site — I think they have to assume this is it.
Every time I go downtown for a job interview (I'm doing so again tomorrow morning), I look toward the area where the sun used to be blotted out by two buildings that never really fit the landscape or the neighborhood, but which came to symbolize "modern" New York City anyway. They were ugly and unimaginative, but we got used to them. I'd drunk in the WTC myself, having been to the bar at the top and a bar at the lower level. When the NY Sushi Society used to meet on John Street, Steve and I would take the "N" to and from the WTC station.It would have been so easy, and so appropriate, to build a memorial park on the site. More greenery is desperately needed in that area, and a park would also have filled mourners' need for contemplation. But the greed factor triumphs over all, particularly in the financial capitol (capital!) of the world. There were claims the WTC had an 80% occupancy rate but I never believed the buildings were all that full. A tremendous waste of space, that's only being made worse by some people's insistence on rebuilding more offices, ever higher, quien es mas macho… why don't they just paint a big target on them while they're at it?
The towers were ugly, but they anchored Lower Manhattan. The skyline looks out of scale without them. And at certain times of the year, when the sun set, there was a violent pink on the western side, looking for all the world like quotation marks.We could see the Towers from our apartment, and they certainly looked to be full. I say this because there was no consistent pattern to the way lights were left on at night, so it seems logical to believe that there were workers there at all hours, in different places and on different schedules.Parks are wonderful, and should be part of the plan. However, so many people need jobs that it seems to me it's a waste to leave the area empty. Let's have more offices and more work.
The Towers were butt-ugly, but if we blew up every butt-ugly building in Manhattan office rents would skyrocket.Hmmmmm. I wonder…
Nobody is going to rebuild the Twin Targets because you wouldn't be able to rent them. Who's going to move in — even at reduced rates? I'm not worried; I firmly believe this era can come up with something just as ugly as the Towers to build there.Nothing got built mainly because of the insurance questions which (I think) may have been legally answered. Or maybe there's an appeal still going on. I've lost track.They won't build a park even if that would be the best idea for the area; the land is too valuable.So what we have are holes in the ground. Pretty bad memorial but as a statement of where we're at — just about right.
Who's going to move it? Based upon previous experience, Rudy Giuliani. After the first time the Towers were bombed back in 1993, he thought it would be brilliant to move the city's emergency management offices right there at Ground Minus-Zero. A poll came out this weekend revealing a majority of NYC REPUBLICANS wouldn't even vote for him in the primary.
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No, it's not. It seems rather appropriate.
My house is a mile away from the WTC, the first plane flew right overhead, I saw it crash. Looked like a loss of control accident; the pilot sure wasn't in tight control of the aircraft. He was a cowardly nut case, a grown up version of the kid in nursery school who would rather knock the blocks over than put one on top of another. He found a club where the bosses were processing sad sacks like him into weapons. The hole is still there because the last New Yorker to be mayor here was the Hon. David Dinkins, who figured out the anti-crime strategy that brought this city around and that Rudy takes credit for. Rudy and Dave are classic capital-F Fascists, genius outsiders who will come out of nowhere to "fix" this awful government that we poor ignoramuses have found such a challenge to run without them. They're all hype. They don't know what this city needs any more than I know what's going on in the Hamptons and Bermuda, where R and M like to hang, to unwind after trying to care for their miserable constituents for five whole days in a row.For the record, the WTC was fully rented when it was destroyed and, finally, after many false starts, the center of a happening retail, hotel, entertainment center that people who lived and worked in the neighborhood came to rely upon. If you saw it once in a while or in a picture you could put down it's looks, but I never heard that from anyone who saw it every day, sometimes blue, sometimes pink, sometimes with a red stripe going down the corner, sometimes with a cloud caught in between them. Shock of the new, eh?And maybe we're too scared of the bad guys from over there and their scary beards to rebuild, it sure looks like that now. But that's not my stand. I'm not afraid of them because they're cowards. There are always more crowds in the world than insane/misled bombers. They can't win, without their paradise myth to draw the crowds they'd have to face facts and fix their neighborhoods instead of plotting bloody murder. Even the clergy can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Sorry to all you Dave's out there. It's Rudy and Mike, Mike Bloomberg, curse his name, that are the hole-meisters history will surely trash.
When it comes to the coward analysis, I side with Bill Maher: it takes a twisted, sick and totally UNadmirable courage to strap yourself to a flying bomb and ram it into a skyscraper, no matter what you think the resultant damage might be. Generally speaking, we see that sort of courage a lot in zealots: it's fueled by mindless religious fervor. We need to learn from that, and recognize those tendencies in ourselves.
Suicide is painless, it's the coward's way out. Maher is a putz and a scab. His original quote was a pig ignorant comparison with the crazy, holy suicide killers and people who work for the Air Force. If he thinks it's not dangerous flying military jets he should ask Tom Wolfe why in all the years he researched the Right Stuff he never once got into a jet. I'm guessing what would really have taken courage is for one of these killers to speak to a woman his own age or to imagine a world without borders, hell, heaven, all that. That's guts.
Maher being a putz, well, yeah, he's well suited for his job. He's the Babe Ruth of political comedy: every time he hits one out of the park, he says at least two things that are insane or stupid.But technically he's not a scab. He's management. He owns Bill Maher Productions. I think he said some stupid things about the WGA (and a few things that weren't), and he's going to have a bitch of a time with his writers once the strike is settled. But he's management, and technically in a strike situation management performs the task of the workers in addition to their own. That's always an important part of the strikers' action plan: burn the bastards out.