It's all a conspiracy...except it's not

Eight years on from 9/11 and how time has flown. What’s interesting for me though is how many conspiracy theories have sprung up in quite a short time.

Just to set out where I’m coming from – I don’t believe any of the conspiracy theories for two reasons. 1) As I see it, a jet plane crashing into a skyscraper is likely to destroy it without the need for thermite charges or the CIA. 2) I don’t believe large groups of people can keep secrets very well.

A lot of people would have to be involved in a conspiracy to bring down the World Trade Center. And human beings are unreliable blabbermouths. Someone would have let slip that there was more to 9/11 than the official view, if there was more to it.

Plus there’s the reasoning (if you can call it that) of the conspiracy theorists. Basically their argument runs like this: If the Government conspired to destroy the WTC, then they would deny it. So the fact that they deny conspiring to destroy the WTC ‘proves’ they did actually conspire to destroy the WTC.

Just about every conspiracy theory I have ever seen has that circular reasoning at the heart of it.

Ultimately conspiracy theories are just people looking for a ‘supernatural’ explanation for something quite mundane. We don’t want to believe that a handful of people with only rudimentary flight experience could cause such carnage, so we invent a conspiracy to make us feel safer – this must have been a huge operation with government complicity and decades of planning and so on. That’s far better than the thought that this was a random act of terror caused by a few people, which could be easily replicated.

As a race we have often created ‘supernatural’ explanations for random, frightening events that we have no control over. Whether it’s sacrificing virgins to appease the volcano gods, or throwing gold coins into rivers to ask the river spirits for safe crossing, it comes down to the same thing. We want to ‘explain’ the randomness as somehow caused by something, because that makes it less scary. We can perhaps do something to propitiate the gods (or the government) so that the danger goes away.

But the thing is, just wishing the world was a safer place doesn’t make it so.

My Ground Zero story

It's hard to believe it's six years since 9/11.

Earlier this year I visited Ground Zero, which has apparently gradually shrunk as parts of it are redeveloped. Opposite the site where the Twin Towers stood is St Paul's Chapel, which I think is the oldest church in New York. The chapel became an emergency room following the terrorist attacks, and then a place to eat and crash out for those working through the debris several storeys underground. In the chapel are a large number of displays about the aftermath of 9/11, photos of the church workers and volunteers who gave up their time to care for the rescue workers who still had to toil on even though there was no hope of rescuing any more survivors.

St Paul's Chapel was where George Washington worshipped on a regular basis - in fact Washington's private pew was kept as a kind of monument to the first president. But with space at a premium, the church leaders decided they'd have to use Washington's pew as if it was any other part of the church.

Because Washington suffered with foot problems in his life, they turned the pew area into a podiatry station. As you can imagine after 12 hour (or more) shifts down in the rubble, workers were footsore. Damp conditions didn't help and there were numerous bits of rubble or metal which could scratch or pierce a worker's foot.

Americans are very aware of their history. It isn't as long a history as most European states, but they celebrate it with far more reverence than we do. So, converting the pew was a big deal. But they managed to turn it into a useful treatment point, which didn't preserve a historical event, but used it as an inspiration to create a further bit of history.

And that's my Ground Zero story.

Two very contrasting films

United 93
Is it too soon to be making films about 9/11? Some people think so, and certainly this film made me feel a bit uncomfortable. The big question it left me with was 'what would I do, in that sort of situation?'

A couple of points:
1) Technically this film is excellent, with the gimmick of it being filmed in real time actually working for a change. The documentary feel is captured through close-range shots and the emotional impact is heightened as a result. In fact the opening half an hour is so normal that if you didn't know what was going to happen you'd find it tedious.
2) The hijackers are portrayed fairly sympathetically. One is a violent killer, The other three are fanatics, but still human. There is an interesting contrast at one point between the passengers muttering the Lord's Prayer and the hijackers praying or reciting the Koran in Arabic. Whether this juxtaposition of religiosity was planned, or just happened in the spontaneous filming, it is a very interesting part of the film.

Jongudmund's rating: 7/10

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
As a total contrast to United 93, we watched this big-screen version of the cartoon series. I have to admit, I do find SpongeBob entertaining, and this film was as good as the TV show. The song "We are men" that SpongeBob and his best buddy Patrick embark on after being given fake seaweed moustaches was hilarious. And any film that includes the line "I rode the Hasselhoff" should be destined for cult legend status.

Jongudmund's rating 8/10

It's only a film

Today I've learned not to watch films like United 93 the night before I'm due to get on a plane. Especially as everyone on the doomed flight did what I do - ignore the safety instructions. At least one of my travel companions, Ms Marjorie, had seen the film too so we could agree that it wasn't ideal pre-flight viewing.

Five years on from 9/11

It seems weird that we’re already five years on from 9/11. Much has changed in those five years.

I was working back in my Minimum Wage Hell that was the cinema at the time and I remember one of the projectionists coming down from his booth to say that someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center. 

I assumed he meant it was a stunt in a film he’d been watching, until he said he’d seen it on the news. From then on we took it in turns to watch the news coverage in the staff room. So I saw the second tower fall, live, in a state of numb disbelief.

This really was one of those events that just happened out of the blue. There were rumours, apparently dismissed in the upper echelons of the US government, but nobody really thought a war was going to kick off as a result of those rumours. But it did, and it has, and in many respects it’s going to be a long and dirty war fought on multiple fronts.

I worked in MWH with a number of Somali Muslim lads; all of whom were shocked and horrified by the events of 9/11. How any Muslim could launch such an attack was beyond them.

I imagine there’ll be loads of people blogging about this, talking about it on the radio, replaying the news footage on TV, and so on. Normally I don’t bother to comment on the things everyone else is talking about – what’s the point of adding one more voice to the maelstrom of conspiracy theorists, platitudinal pietists and would-be societal commentators? But, for what it’s worth, this is my story about 11 September 2001.