Created To Be Destroyed

One of the most harrowing things about the attacks of two years ago was how destruction seems to be the law of the land in this, the greatest nation on earth. We Americans take pride in how our ancestors came here and built this country, how they constructed the cities, the railroads, the highways, and the great industrial colossus that made this country strong. Through the past few decades, though, we've happily allowed it all to be obliterated.

We've sacked most of our major industries and "outsourced" almost all of our manufacturing jobs to Mexico or China. Our towns and cities are full of abandoned factories, and the towns themselves, which depended on these factories for their economies, aren't doing much better. Whole neighborhoods in the part of Philadelphia where my paternal grandfather grew up look like the Second World War had been fought there instead of in Berlin. Detroit is completely gone. My mother's hometown of Orange, New Jersey, as my regular readers already know, is a wasteland of rotting houses and vacant lots.

The American middle class has long since abandoned the cities, leaving them to violent street gangs with AK-47's and drug kingpins pushing crack cocaine on the streets. The middle class decamped for the suburbia, a soulless, sterile environment of tract houses and shopping malls where you need a car to get almost anywhere. Some of our most beautiful countryside was sacrificed for the sake of suburbia; good farmland was bulldozed and forests were cut down to make way for all of this crap, with plenty of parking available. Because more people bought cars, freeways ruined our towns and countryside further, and our once-great passenger railroad system was largely junked. (And now some of the crime commonly associated with urban squalor, namely shootings in the schools, has arrived in the suburbs. More destruction.)

Urban renewal projects designed to save the cities, such as public housing and Modernist college campuses, only made the cities worse. Whole neighborhoods were wiped off the map to build these things, and so were several business districts. Lower Manhattan's Radio Row, an assemblage of electronics merchants was one such district; that was the site where the World Trade Center was built. The Twin Towers were constructed out of a desire to build something bigger and taller than anything ever built before, and to do it twice; the result were two tall buildings that no one really liked very much. To many, the towers stood for the ego and arrogance of the men (particularly David and Nelson Rockefeller) who commissioned their construction, and the initial impulse among many was to tear them down. This impulse, at its most politicized, its most extreme, and its most evil, drove militant, maniacal foreign agents to crash planes into each tower and bring them down, killing thousands of innocent people.

It seems that everything in America was created simply for it all to be destroyed.