no. The twin towers opened in 1973 at a time when NYC was becoming a hollowed out urban core. "New York City never officially declared bankruptcy, but it came very close in 1975 due to severe financial distress. The city faced a fiscal crisis, and through negotiations involving unions and state assistance, it managed to avoid formal bankruptcy" [wikipedia] The buildings were not a commercial success and suffered vacanies and low rents. This is the reason that they were not rebuilt, but rather a smaller building was erected in their place. (one of the problems with tall commercial buildings is that they require a non-trivial amount of elevator square feet in the middle of each tower; this is sq footage that does not make money. if you look at tall buildings being built today, they are almost all residential structures. The require less elevator because the number of people in each apartment is far smaller than the number of people in offices)
New York City only bounced back financially during the Reagan revolution. The Democrat party was dead in the water at that time (similar to today) but it bounced back when Clinton came from out of nowhere (a place called Hope!) to win. but looking back today, Clinton was part of the "hollowing out the economy, sending it to China" (I'm not blaming nor absolving here, that type of idea was popular in economics. It didn't work because it turns out the world is not a nice place where opening up to China and Russia turns out not to open up in the other direction (and also because economic efficiency entails "in efficient markets, economic profits go to zero" and everybody except consumers doesn't like that, and consumers don't like it either on the other side of their ledger, their jobs))
>diverted critical funds from development... into conflict and war far away.
defense spending is not and was not a major factor wrt spending in the economy
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/pub...
What we should have done is, as a symbolic act, rebuild the towers exactly as they were (with some structural improvements maybe) and go about our business. We should have gone after the terrorists as an international police action and not much more.
That would have been a symbol of true strength. "No, your little act of vandalism won't have any effect on us at all. We are above that." Be like the "wall" archetype in fiction, the huge guy someone punches as hard as they can and they barely notice.
Instead we showed stupidity and weakness disguised as strength, something we're now wallowing in with a whole culture revolving around fake strength and compensatory narcissism. Nothing says dying nation like gold plating everything.
The Freedom Tower is so unimpressive in large part because it had to fit within the constraints of the main event at this location.
The freedom tower literally looks shattered, and next to it is a giant wound that never heals. That’s what that whole site says. “We are broken now.”
I remember reading an article in 2003 how Clinton's team wanted to handover intel about terror threats to Bush's team during the presidential transition, but the latter skipped those meetings. And remember how Bush supposedly ignored warnings in his daily briefings?
Without hanging chads and the shenanigans in Florida, maybe Al Gore's administration would've caught these terrorists, there'd be no sending kids to die in Afghanistan and Iraq... what else?
Everything new is "gross" for the people who are on their fifth year of therapy with no end in sight. It's always someone else's fault but don't change anything because community character is the most important thing.
Some of the best “preserved” (via this ‘build nothing change nothing’ tactic) communities in my expensive socal city are dead. They were turned from diverse beach communities into dead information technology/finance monoliths.
My feeling is that the response was the thing that kicked off the decline. At the time of the attack, the US had quite a bit of goodwill around the world. The US could have surgically gone after the people responsible, with minimum civilian deaths, and most of the world would have backed them to the hilt, and the US would have come out stronger. Instead we had spurious claims of weapons of mass destruction, the coalition of the "willing" going into Iraq with jackboots on, over the widespread objections of their own populations, and abuses in Guantanamo Bay. That response burned an awful lot of goodwill around the world: which kicked off the decline.
China's rise wasn't "inevitable" it was underwritten when Nixon went to China and they subsequently got their most favored trading nation status.
Looking at where America is right now. It seems to make a downfall.
It's been happening for years now. 'America', the idea, died the moment the 2nd plane hit the towers.
People saw that happen, and were so fearful they immediately opened their hearts to fascism.
2025 is merely the year where all of Bush's fascist policies & Obama/Biden's failure to clean it up metastasized into the overt fascism that hurts everyone in a country & eventually destroys the country itself.
There's a high number of coincidences about the towers getting destroyed. It's no conspiracy, it's because the towers and NYC meant something in the eyes of the world with regards to the USA.
Just rattling off a few of the wild ones:
The episode of The Lone Gunmen which predicted an attack with a plane on the towers.
The Sega Master System game (I forget the name, but I own it) where it depicts a missile hitting the towers on the opening screen. It's pixels with little wings, and super spooky in retrospect.
The Dream Theater live album released on 9/11 which showed the NYC skyline burning.
There's so much stuff, I almost don't blame the conspiracy theorists. But they have the causality backwards. They also really like to ignore the fact that 8 years earlier somebody tried to blow up the towers and killed 6 people...
Tom Clancy's book "Debt of Honor" is very similar in a spooky way as well. Including the hesitation to shoot down commercial airliners being used as weapons. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Music [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor
That totally freaked me out when I re-read the article a few years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...
I imagine this terrorist attack inspired some of the art on your list.
It was a ringing bell, bringing the attention back to the old ugly worldorder of great games, land-empires and bloody conquest and the inability to isolate from hostile ideologies, even if you are the usa and living on a giant island. Bush went to iraq and the failure to build any working state there- showed not only the failure of neoncons, but also of the whole "all cultures are equal" and academic impotence. There explanation models had nothing for this but tired rehashes of colonial/anti-colonial ideology, no predictions, no real help, just "belief in universal values and western culture, and righton" - and that was it. No help for the 2 billion stuck in religious ember, not real analysis to free the wasted geniuses trapped under burkas. Silence, ideology and absence, thats whats left.
The middle east is already gone. They will nuke one another, rather sooner then later. And their governments know. They desperately embrace the surveillance state as stabilizer, move there centers of government out of population centers expected to implode in senseless rebellion and anarchy again and again - they want to build cities optimized to escape nuclear retribution, for the day when some of their madmen lob a device at Israel.
They celebrate right now in Ghaza and chant for more violence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3yaBgGzANc
And that boiling cauldron of madness is wide spread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwdlsHaRD1k