I moved into Grogan Towers in Hoboken in 1975 just two years after the WTC went up. This subsidized high-rise was named after the former mayor of Hoboken who was SWP member Pat Grogan’s dad. Grogan Towers had an unobstructed view of the WTC that I could enjoy from my picture window overlooking the Hudson River and the Manhattan skyline. I never gave much thought to them except for really enjoying the reflection of the setting sun on the buildings that endowed them with a scarlet glow. When I had a party up in my 25th floor apartment once for Hoboken’s bohemia, I showed artist and the city’s unofficial historian Jim Hans the photo I had taken of the WTC at sunset. He smiled and said, “Very nice. It reminds me of the red glow on a dog’s penis when he is aroused.” I couldn’t tell if Jim was putting me down or whether he was complimenting me, although I leaned toward the latter. That had no effect on my admiration for his passion for Hoboken that bore fruit in the small-scale museum he established in 1986. Like the WTC, the Grogan Towers were demolished long ago—the first a victim of terror, the second a victim of gentrification.
A day after the WTC went down, I wrote about it on the various mailing lists I belonged to. This was before blogs existed. I found what I wrote on the archives of the World Systems Network, a mailing list devoted to the theories associated with Immanuel Wallerstein.
One of the key elements of the transformation of New York was the building of the World Trade Center in an area formerly dominated by small manufacturing and retail. The loss of such businesses meant the loss of a working class. I used to love wandering around this neighborhood, looking into electronics shops, bookstores, etc. Now it nothing but granite and glass. I should say, broken granite and glass.
I quoted from a Sidney Trachtenberg article that had appeared in The Columbus Dispatch on January 30,2000.
Le Corbusier believed that the house was “a machine for living.” Darton says “Corbusier argued that the concentration and disorder of the modern city could be cured by increasing urban density. This would be accomplished by erecting very tall buildings on a small portion of the total ground area.”
Perhaps the French architect’s most radical position: “There ought,” he once wrote, “not to be such things as streets.”
Despite the destruction of the WTC, its legacy lives on in a million different ways, from CVS, Chase Bank and Starbucks that have swarmed over the city like a blitzkrieg to the invasion of oligarchs who live in $25 million condos in Chelsea, another neighborhood that has succumbed to the globalization of finance that allows American capital to grow wings and take flight everywhere and its cohorts in places like China, Russia and India to mark Manhattan as its home territory just like a dog pissing on a parking meter.
Le Corbusier had a brief fling with the USSR from 1928 to 1932, when his proposal for the Palace of the Soviets in 1932 was nixed. Like many “futurists”, his aesthetics could easily be adopted by Marxists and fascists alike. Like Lenin, he was mesmerized by Taylorism and the Ford Motor Company assembly lines. He proposed to French capitalists a style of architecture that would incorporate his ideas.
His 1922 scheme for a “Contemporary City” entailed sixty-story skyscrapers made of walls of glass—in other words, what much of NY looks like today. At the center of a complex would be a transportation hub just like the one that the Port Authority envisioned for the WTC. Le Corbusier was a huge fan of the automobile and advocated that pedestrians be kept far from streets that were meant for high-speed transportation rather than leisurely window-shopping.
Appalled by the economic decline of the 1930s, he became a fascist. Recently, there have been reports on how his politics and aesthetics overlapped. On July 12, 2015, the NY Times reported:
In 1940, just days before a Vichy ruling banning Jews from elective office and other professions, Le Corbusier wrote to his mother: “The Jews are going through a very bad time. I am sometimes contrite about it. But it does seem as if their blind thirst for money had corrupted the country.”
But, scholars note, he also built for Jewish families in Switzerland, never publicly denounced Jews and never joined a fascist organization. “It’s an error in my view to insist on his anti-Semitism,” Mr. Chaslin said. But what he and his fellow authors find more troubling is the architect’s involvement in the 1920s with the right-wing elements. Later, some Vichy supporters saw his well-ordered Radiant City plan for Marseille, France — based on the shape of the human body — as a perfect expression of the Fascist program.
During the Second World War he was friendly with Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning surgeon asked by the Vichy government to explore means of “national renewal.” Le Corbusier had read and enthusiastically underlined Carrel’s 1935 best seller, “Man, the Unknown,” which argues that parts of the French population should be gassed to preserve the most “virile” elements.
For weeks after September 11th, the city smelled from the charred wreckage of the twin towers. My next door neighbor was a woman in her 30s and a bit of a crank. She once accused me of placing her garbage at her front door as if she had any right to be so accusatory when she was obliged to drop the trash into a chute on our floor. One night she knocked on my door at around 10pm. What did she want? To accuse me again of some other offense? She said that she thought our building was on fire. No, I replied, that is only the WTC ruins that you smell. She said she couldn’t believe me and went back to her apartment.
About a year ago I had a chat with a man who lived down the hall and the subject of the WTC came up, I can’t remember why. He told me that he was working as a programmer about two blocks from the towers and saw people jumping out the windows. It disturbed him so much that he was in psychotherapy for a year. Can you imagine what Syrians must be feeling now after five years of war? Isn’t it logical that the growth of groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS is to some extent a result of Arabs wanting to retaliate for the terror they have endured for decades now? And we “get back” at them by using Predator drones against wedding parties and joining Putin soon in bombing East Aleppo.
In the same month as the WTC went down, Bush invaded Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. On the day the war started, there was excitement in the air, so much so that a guy walking next to me on 3rd Avenue near my building turned to me with big smile on his face and said, “Now we are getting those bastards”. Since he had a bit of an accent, I asked him where he was from. His answer was Guyana. I told him that he should be more careful about endorsing American intervention abroad since the president of his country had been overthrown in 1953 in a coup backed by Britain and the USA. He looked at me like I had two heads.
A couple of months later my boss moved me from the cubicle I occupied at Columbia University because the guy in the next cubicle had been complaining about the phone conversations I was having with an old friend about Bush’s barbaric war.
I was moved away from the programmers into an office with a door that I liked to leave open since closing it made me feel cooped up. The only drawback to leaving it open was having to hear the PC support people who surrounded me in their various cubicles whooping it up every day about Bush blasting the Afghans to kingdom come. Finally, at my wit’s end, I told them to quiet down because I didn’t want to have to listen to their war cries. They too looked at me like I had two heads.
The war fever was all around me in NYC, on the TV and radio. Even the left succumbed with Christopher Hitchens being the most extreme example. I went to the Galloway-Hitchens debate and felt great about Galloway’s take-down.
Oddly enough, I discovered that I had written an article for CounterPunch at the time about the debate. It must have been one of those infrequent moments when I wasn’t feuding with the editors. Here’s a snippet:
Hitchens’s supporters in the audience were just as crazed as their hero. While Galloway’s supporters, including me, were content to absorb his rapier-like arguments, the opposite side seemed more like the sort of people who show up at athletic events, including one woman who kept screaming at the top of her lungs. Another Hitchens supporter, a young man in his mid-20’s I would guess, sat in the row in front of me and seemed determined to argue with everybody around him in what he must have considered a superior Socratic method: “So you would have not intervened against Hitler then?” But mostly he couldn’t sit still, jumping around in his seat like a monkey overdosed on Methamphetamines.
History seems to be repeating itself now. If poor Christopher Hitchens hadn’t croaked from cancer of the esophagus, isn’t it possible that he and Galloway would be reconciled now that the USA and Russia have agreed to unite in a popular front to “get al-Qaeda”?Perhaps the only constant in politics over the last 15 years is that you can’t go wrong with Islamophobia. The solution to Sharia law, beards and terror is aerial bombardment, something that has a long history.
In 1919 Winston Churchill wrote: “I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes.” This is the Churchill who was commemorated on the Socialist Unity website that features the musings of one John Wight, a regular contributor to CounterPunch about the need to destroy al-Qaeda. Go figure.
Nothing much has changed. The Muslims were the first to be bombed by the air and remain the one people in the world today who are being targeted by American Predator drones, Russian and Syrian bombers with the assistance of other European imperialist powers determined to keep the homeland safe. In 1919, the British were anxious to put down a rebellion in Somalia led by Mohammed Abdullah Hassan who Wikipedia describes as having a “thirst for Islamic learning…so intense that he left his job and devoted about ten years to visiting many famous centres of Islamic learning including Harar and Mogadishu and even some centres in Sudan.”
This is what obviously made England determined to get rid of him. Such a fanatic could not be allowed to run a country. In Sven Lindqvist’s “A History of Bombing”, a book I keep returning to help me understand the mad world we are living in today, he describes the British version of Operation Enduring Freedom:
Mohammed Abdille Hassan, called “The Mad Mullah” by his enemies, had long been a thorn in the British lion’s paw. Countless punitive expeditions had failed to punish him. Now the general staff wanted to engage two divisions for twelve months in a big offensive against the mullah. In addition, millions would be required to build the roads, railroads, and military bases necessary to occupy the country. Trenchard proposed to fix the mullah from the air, with twelve airplanes and a maximum of 250 men. Squadron 221, which soon would bomb Tsaritsyn—later Stalingrad—on behalf of the British Empire, was first sent to Somaliland. Mohammed A. Hassan had never seen an airplane, much less a bomb. He gave no evidence of fear. He did what he usually did when he had unexpected visitors: he dressed in his finest clothes and presented himself, surrounded by his most respected counselors, in front of his house under a white canopy that was used on ceremonial occasions. There he awaited the arrival of the foreign emissaries. The first bomb almost put an end to the war. It killed Mohammed’s counselors, and he himself had his clothes singed by the explosion. The next bombardment killed his sister and several of his immediate family members. Then for two days the British bombers attacked Mohammed and his family while they fled through the desert like hunted animals. Finally they were forced to give up. Total time required: a week instead of a year. Total cost: 77,000 pounds—chicken shit compared to what the army had asked for. Churchill was delighted. He persuaded the government to maintain the air force out of purely economic considerations. Then he offered the RAF six million pounds to take over control of the Iraq operation from the army, which had cost eighteen million thus far.
The war on terror continues. As Kurt Vonnegut said in “Slaughterhouse Five”, so it goes.