Looming Tower

By ROB PATTERSON

Lest we forget – and the horror of the event tends to impel us to wish to if not to some degree do that – the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, affected and changed America in profound ways greater than anything else since World War II. One can directly trace from them to the rise of Trumpism and the rancid political pickle our nation finds itself in today.

I claim no great prescience yet still somehow locked into something strange prior to the attacks when living living in the late 1980s on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I can’t quantify how many times walked out the door of my brownstone tenement apartment building and would look across the island at the nearby Twin Towers, and then think, “Wow. What an ideal target for a terrorist attack.” They truly loomed over lower Manhattan as striking markers of American capitalism.

I chalk that perception up to being more attuned to how the situation in the Mideast and Arab world was a threat after living through the 1973 Yom Kippur War in Israel (on a college kibbutz study group). And after 9/11 pondered how, if I foresaw the future, too many others charged with protecting America failed to see the probability.

The terror attacks didn’t just shatter people and buildings but also devastated our American senses of security and superiority (which were in a way illusions). They ginned up powerful undercurrents of fear and following from that a heavily simmering if not boiling anger in the body politic. And in doing so had a long-term effect well beyond Osama bin Laden’s aims in masterminding the attacks.

That’s why the Hulu original TV series, The Looming Tower, is so important and critical for any thoughtful American to watch. It did face in its making the many challenges of transforming true events into dramatic visual entertainment, compounded by how 9/11 is such recent major history. And as such is indeed fair game for us critics to judge how it tells the story of the failures and glitches in the American intelligence community and political leadership left us open to the attacks. But as I’ve been gripped by watching it, I’ve suspended much of my critical faculties if not duty.

The main reason why is the man at the center of the story: John P. O’Neill, the former head of the FBI’s counter-terrorism division who was pressured out of government service in 2001. And about two weeks before 9/11, he joined the World Trade Center as its security chief.

When I read writer Lawrence Wright’s January 2002 story in The New Yorker about O’Neill, which led to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name as the series on which the TV show is based – it was a validation to know I was not the only one who saw the WTC danger. I also found him a genuine hero – likely the most over- and misused term in the American lexicon – for how he died in the collapse of the north tower trying to save lives.

Jeff Daniels plays O’Neill, which in and of itself overly romanticizes the man. Yet it slots in with his recent role in “The Newsroom” to make him symbolic of the often elusive American conscience.

The show does make plain at the outset of each episode that true life figures and events have been fictionalized and invented to meet the dramatic strictures of the TV series form. Yet the series still conveys important truths about the story.

One net effect of the series on me is that I now feel compelled to read Wright’s book and become even better acquainted with the facts. As should any aware and thoughtful American who wants to understand the times we live in.

Populist Picks

TV Documentary: Truth and Lies: The Family Manson – With the recent death of Charles Manson late last year, this ABC “20/20” production, which aired earlier in 2017, has a certain timeliness. It’s a solid and informative overview of the cult leader and his followers whose murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others reflected the dark underside of the 1960s counterculture and were one signal that its idealism was shattered.

Print Magazine: The New Yorker – Referencing it above reminded me to re-subscribe, as I’ve been intending, and to plug it here (again, as I am fairly certain that I did before). I do value having much reading and some of its contents available online. But at the same time, I sorely miss having a printed magazine to read. And will assert that it remains the gold standard for an American magazine.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2018

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