The 9/11 Terrorist Attacks Did Not Take Place: Requiem for the Hudson River

The 9/11 terrorists used the Hudson River to navigate themselves down to New York City.

The Hudson — this river that cuts New York off from New Jersey, this river that has always simultaneously divided and unified America (through geography and trade, respectively), the river at which George Washington made his greatest stands, and the river over which Jerseyans witnessed the collapse of their beautiful skyline. A river just like the sliver of sky which always divided those two towers, which the two towers cut like a pair of scissors — towers contradictorily symbols both of a glorious freedom and of a generalized vapidness and avarice. Like twins who vow to murder each other.

Super-rapid transportation, like that provided by a jet, has abolished time along with space. The towers died (or committed suicide: we never say that they were “destroyed” but that they “collapsed”), but by the same means the Hudson has, in a sense, disappeared. Along with it, as if by destiny, so did that slice of sky which divided the towers.

If space and time have been abolished, then so has the meaning of cultural difference — hence our whateverness (Agamben). Culture today is a simulation of itself: it’s the dude with Japanese ancestry who studies kendo, or the hipster from Munich who wears his Lederhosen to Oktoberfest, or even the Indian chick from LA who takes Bharatanatyam classes. Glimpsing the nothingness that surrounds us, we desperately reach back to the past in order to distract ourselves from the fact that everything solid has already melted into air.

The hideousness and exploitativeness of “cultural appropriation” has therefore already lost all significance: the sombrero worn by the white girl on Halloween doesn’t hide or distort “true” Mexican culture but rather serves to distract us from the fact that culture itself has disappeared into meaninglessness and simulation. Her poncho and her cornrows are never what cover up the truth of this or that culture — instead they hide the fact that, in the cultural realm, there is no truth left.

The terrorists on 9/11 therefore died in vain. Their assault was made against an enemy which had already disappeared, and — in the seconds before collision — perhaps they felt a sentiment similar to the one which must have been experienced by the Soviet soldiers who found Hitler’s already-suicided body.