Ltr2RogerCohenNYT: New York & the Planes

Ltr2Roger Cohen — Op-Ed Column: New York and the Planes. 2July11

Dear Roger…

Read with interest your remembrance of things past, 9/11-style:

No doubt it was nuclear Armageddon he had chiefly in mind. But his words captured some deep truth. Ten years ago. it was the perverted dreamers of Al Qaeda who loosed the lightning. New York shuddered; the world changed.

This is no doubt a quixotic request, doomed to go unheeded, but please, oh please, do us all the favor of spending some time at this technical, rather than polemic, website, by architects and engineers, concerning the matters of 9/11/2001. Were you to wrap your mind around the topic (and I agree with you that “It’s treacherous to reread,” I don’t think, hopefully, that you’d have typed a line like “the perverted dreamers of Al Qaeda who loosed the [fateful] lightning [of His terrible swift sword?--sorry; reminded me of the Battle Hymn of the Once-Upon-A-Time Republic].

At any rate, the more I read about this stuff, the more clearly it looks like “the 19” were little more than more numerous and more expensive versions of Lee Harvey Oswald — “a patsy,” he called himself.

Perhaps it’s the skies of a 9/11 blue, perhaps it’s the passage of a decade, perhaps it’s the thought of all the articles and reflections and memorial services now just weeks away, I can’t help seeing the city as a kaleidoscope of now and then, jagged images of molten steel and lost ones alternating with scenes of careless summer laughter.

I take some hope from the line in bold (my emphasis) that you still can see images of molten steel. If you do indeed still see them, then I’d ask you to look into the metallurgy of structural steel, the melting point thereof, the chemistry and physics of fire, the temperature of kerosene fires, etc. And compare the fate of #1, #2 --and #7, its collapse known only to Manhattan residents, it seems--to the fates of other burning, steel-framed skyscrapers before and after 9/11.

As I may gather from your thumb-print, you’re of an age where perhaps your grandchildren are playing with the wooden blocks you had as a child, then passed along to your own children. If you do have access to such blocks, I’d ask you to perform this simple exercise: Build a tower of blocks on their sides, two by two, with each course perpendicular to the previous one. Stop when you reach desk height--about 30 inches. Then quickly pull out one block from the 2nd course.

I think you’ll notice that the tower topples over, toward the missing block. Just as a tree falls toward the lowest notch the woodsman has chopped.

Now recall how the top of (tower #1 or #2, I can’t remember which) started to topple over. One could see it going sideways, toward the corner with the molten, dripping iron. And then, poof, it disappeared into clouds and clouds of dust and smithereens.

My profound disquiet is that we will indeed be inundated with “all the articles and reflections and memorial services now just weeks away,” but that none of it will bend back one single finger of the hands of propaganda strangling our body politic, our once Constitutional Republic.

We’ve seen our Bill of Rights gutted by the profoundly mendaciously labeled U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act (I pronounce it, “The Youzapat Riot Act”.) Guantánamo is not closed. Our government officials who sanctioned (and watched, for all I know) the torture of POWs, who violated the US War Crimes Act (18 USCode §2441), who I’ve no doubt continue daily to illegally eavesdrop on every American citizen and copy (via “splitter boxes”) every binary digit of their information passing through the fiber-optic cables of all our telecommunications companies — as they have done, according to James Bamford (The Shadow Factory) and others (Jane Mayer, The Secret Sharer, May 13, New Yorker) since Jan-Feb 2002 (That means the illegal, warrantless wiretapping, in violation of the FISAct, has been transpiring for nigh onto a decade, representing perhaps billions of individual crimes by the National Surveillance Agency, et al.).

Bamford writes that the copies are piped into a huge disk farm (a.k.a. “Data Center” or “Cloud”) in Texas; Mayer writes that there’s also one in Utah. FYI: I was watching Steve Jobs’ June 6 World Wide Developer Conference last night, where he intro’d Mac OS Ten Seven “Lion” and “iCloud,” and at the tail end of the two-hour presentation, he showed a couple of slides, introduced by, “In case you don’t think we’re serious about iCloud, this is our third data center.” [Drag the “play-head” trapezoid to minute 116:33 and look/listen from there, to see what a disk farm looks like. It’s mammoth. One should perhaps be able to spot them in Google Earth.

Our troops and mercenaries are still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, where the opium poppies once again are flourishing. (Bill Casey must be sporting a rictus of supreme satisfaction at that development). And (Simon/Garfunkel come to mind) “We’re bombing them in Libya/we’re saber-rattling Iran/...”

And increasingly it’s looking like 9/11 was our recent government’s version of the Gulf of Tonkin “incident,” the “Old” Pearl Harbor (Washington knew it was coming but didn’t alert Hawaii), Hitler’s Reichstag fire, Remember the Maine, Polk’s lie about where the Mexicans first skirmished w/US troops (and Rep. Lincoln’s “Spot” resolution(s)--“show us the spot where US blood was spilled”, the Lusitania--I can’t remember them all--seems like about one every year since 1945.

It’s difficult for a senescing Viet vet w/ 4 children & 2 grandchildren to countenance the wrack and ruin we’ve been subjected to in the name of, what? Mammon? (“We’re doing God’s work,” saith Lloyd Blankfein. I assume he meant Mammon)? I’ll send you a copy of my note (after comments closed) to Maureen on Sir Thomas More, whom she referenced re: the Cuomo’s, père et fils, art collection. And this was 1516, in Latin. Utopia on the Hudson was her column head.

The late Howard Zinn pointed out this Adam Smith quote to a batch of folks crowded into a Kennedy School conference room a couple of years ago:

Laws and government may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence.

Adam Smith—Tuesday, Feb. 22, 1763;

lecture series on Laws & Jurisprudence.

Page 208, facsimile (PDF) version, vol 5.

Ltr2M.Dowd-NYT-“Utopia OT Hudson” 3July11

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/opinion/29dowd.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=dowd%20utopia&st=cse

Funny thing happened on the way to the Parliament--Utopia On The Hudson/Mohawk/Erie Canal:

Maureen Dowd did a Sunday op-ed piece on Andy Cuomo’s support of the NY unmixed marriages law, and showed her eye for art, recollection and art collections. It just so happened that I was ploughing through the very book she and the gov. referred to. Excerpts from the column:

“I have a portrait of Saint Thomas More in my office,” the governor said, calling from the statehouse in Albany. It is a picture Mario Cuomo once kept in his office. He gave it to Andrew as a present when he graduated from Albany Law School, and the younger Cuomo has kept it with him for 30 years as he moved from job to job and city to city. “It’s not the first time there is a tension between the teachings of the church and the administration of the law, for my father and for myself.” Dryly, he adds: “I haven’t lost my head yet.”

{“Hey, I’ve just about reached the end of More’s Utopia my darned self,” I said. “What a curious happenstance.”}

For the moment, and it may only be a moment given all the thorny issues he has coming up, he is in that imaginary place his idol Sir Thomas More invented: [U]topia. [Or Nowhere--which of course is Erewhon spelt (mostly) backwards.]
He wanted to prove government could work and the two parties could trust each other, and he has — avoiding his father’s mistake of being too highhanded with lawmakers. He wanted to transform a dysfunctional Albany from a joke, after the shenanigans of Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson, to a respected place where young people once more aspired to work, and he has.

“For a moment in time, you had people in this state capital who really heard their better angels and responded,” he said. “Government here has a renewed bounce in its step.”

The governor says he sold the marriage-equality bill as a matter of conscience and didn’t try to buy off any recalcitrant lawmakers with promises about roads or bridges.

What I find curious about the More thing (I’d formerly thought he spelt his name Moore, but, now purged of that error, I can see that less is More) is what a Lord Chancellor had to say in 1516 about the society in which he found himself. (As I don’t do Latin all that well, I have a 1551 translation by Ralph Robynson, with some modernizing orthographical tweaks by Emile van Vliet for Heritage Club’s 1935 edition. But the phrasing & words are pretty much intact, which you’ll perhaps find contribute to heavy slogging.)

So, to Sir/St. Thomas More’s Utopia (pp. 153-156) (And I must admit that Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon and the rest of the Wall Street Casino banksters came immediately to mind):

Here now would I see if any man dare be so bold as to compare with this equity [(i.e., the fairness of a commonweal where all things are indeed owned in common)] the justice of other nations, among whom I forsake God if I can find any sign or token of equity and justice.

For what justice is this that a rich goldsmith or an usurer or, to be short, any of them which either do nothing at all, or else that which they do is such that it is not very necessary to the commonwealth, should have a pleasant and a wealthy living, either by idleness or by unnecessary business? when in the meantime poor laborers, carters, ironsmiths, carpenters, and plowmen, by so great and continual toil as drawing and bearing beasts be scant able to sustain, and again so necessary toil that without it no commonwealth were able to continue and endure one year, do yet get so hard a poor a living and live so wretched and miserable life that the state and condition of the laboring beasts may seems much better and wealthier; for they be not put soot so continual labor, nor their living is not much worse; yea, to them much pleasanter, taking no thought in the mean season for the time to come. But these silly poor wretches be presently tormented with barren and unfruitful labor; and the remembrance of their poor, indigent, and beggarly old age killeth them up; for their daily wages is so little that it will not suffice for the same day, much less it yieldeth any overplus that may daily be laid up for the relief of old age. Is not this an unjust and an unkind public weal, which giveth great fees and rewards to gentlemen, as they call them, and to goldsmiths, and to such other, which be either idle persons or else only flatterers and devisers of vain pleasures; and, of the contrary part, maketh no gentle provision for poor plowmen, colliers, laborers, carters, ironsmiths, and carpenters, without whom no commonwealth can continue?

But when it hath abused the labors of their lusty and flowering age, at the last, when they be oppressed with old age and sickness, being needy, poor, and indigent of all things; then, forgetting their so many painful watchings, not remembering their so many and so great benefits, recompenseth and quitteth them most unkindly with miserable death.

And yet besides this the rich men not only by private fraud but also by common laws do every day pluck and snatch away from the poor some part of their daily living; so, whereas it seemed before unjust to recompense with unkindness their pains that have been beneficial to the public weal, now they have to this their wrong and unjust dealing (which is yet a much worse point) given the name of justice; yea, and that by force of law.

Therefore when I consider and weigh in my own mind all these commonwealths which nowadays anywhere do flourish, so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men, procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely without fear of losing what they have unjustly gathered together; and next how to hire and abuse the work and labor of the poor for as little money as may be.

These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth’s sake, that is to say, for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws. But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their unsatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? out of the which in that all the desire of money with the use thereof is utterly secluded and banished, ho great a heap of cares is cut away? how great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots?

For who knoweth not that fraud, theft, ravin, brawling, quarreling, brabbling, strife, chiding, contention, murder, treason, poisoning, which by daily punishments are rather revenged than refrained, do die when money dieth? And also that fear, grief, care, labors, and watchings do perish even the very same moment that money perisheth? Yea, poverty itself, which only seemed to lack money, if money were gone, it also would decrease and vanish away.

One of the features of More's Utopia was that it fashioned the chains and shackles of its prisoners* and “bondsmen” out of gold; also all the chamberpots.

Which reminded me of one of my late dad’s sillier puns: “Couple checks into what they’ve been told is a genuine colonial B&B for a restful, historical visit. Man notices the 4-poster doesn't have any covering and asks the bellman, ‘Where’s the canopy?’ Bellman answers, ‘Oh, that’s under the bed, sir.’”) I think he got them from the sci-fi magazine fillers.

Another, Merlin discovers jet propulsion, sends Sir Galahad off to investigate the cosmos. He crash lands in a verdant field, sees a farmhouse in the distance. Torrential rain begins. He's clanking in his armor. Reaches house, asks if he can ride the horse he sees in the barn back to the wreck to salvage it. Farmer says that's a dog, not a horse. 'And I wouldn't send a knight out on a dog like this,' he says.

Or: Fra. Squegg runs a little theater group in the progressive monastery in which he serves. They're doing Uncle Tom's Cabin. But the trained dog slips his leash, and the father must make other arrangements. Next morrow's review is headlined, "Père Squegg Fits Hound Role." Worse befalls: Small plane loses its way in storm, decides to land on expansive lawn of monastery, but doesn't see Fra. Squegg hauling in gardening tools. Headline: "Out of the Flying Plan and Into the Friar." (For those in durance vile, the time-saving numbers are 112, 281, 18 and 19, respectively. But of course it's all in how you tell them.)

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* While having slaves/prisoners doesn't seem to fit with the idea of a Utopia, recall that the example most frequently trotted out as the "poster city" of a working democracy was Athens, way back before the common era, and that only something like 10-15% of the population formed the "demos" — the people. Excluded were children, women, slaves and males whose parents (one or both) were not native Athenians.

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