Monday, January 08, 2007

Maxho I know, It's Beautiful Below

This is a rare and wondrous image, as beautiful to look upon, as it is fruitful to my agenda. It occupies a singular status in the record of the attack on the Pentagon, as being the only image, to my knowledge, of the medical triage in the center court on September 11, 2001, released by Di Lorenzo Tricare Health Clinic. (Apparently several vignettes were produced under the spreading yews for commercial release.) We don't see the famous, soon to be lamented, hot-dog stand, but is that an Oleander in bloom? How divine. What a paragon of color theory is this composition, to relax the mind and rest the eye. And look at those strides the men make! That's the way forward, purposeful, not lachrymose!

But what are so many of the men doing wearing towels around their necks? Have they been fighting fires? And what are those long dark objects they carry? They look like metal bed frames, are they gurneys of some kind? Or grills?

With their open metal mesh construction, they look awfully similar to these containers for holding propane tanks, we see in the damaged area at the front of the Pentagon. Why propane was held there is beyond explanation. Very Forward Operating Base Falcon, if I do say so. I can't imagine how they weren't seen for what they were before, by the unaided human eye. Was a similar pyromancy going on inside the Pentagon, as was taking place outside, or one even better?


In an interview she gave in 2002, to Women in the Fire Service, a District of Columbia Fire Department firefighter, Tomi Rucker, said,
"When we got into the building, we started to feel the heat right away, and as we walked deeper down the hallways, it got hotter and hotter. It was just fire everywhere: not so much smoke, but just fire all around us. You couldn't see the plane, just debris wherever you looked. We'd put water on it, but it would come right back up. We were probably in there 20-25 minutes before they took us out and sent other crews in. After that, we worked outside, doing SCBA changes and other support tasks."


It sounds like she was taken on a ride at the state fair. My imagination runs the gamut from a simple jumbo revolving George Foreman grill to something completely Dante-esque. And isn't it interesting, men who start fires instead of putting them out. Just like in the movie of Ray Bradbery's book, Fahrenheit 451--the temperature at which paper spontaneously ignites, which is much lower than the temperature at which steel eventually melts. And where have I heard this construction before, oh yes, Fahrenheit 9-11, the movie made by the nemesis of the Bush administration, Michael Moore. Well, isn't that...hot.

Daryl Donley said during a videotaped slide presentation at the Library of Congress, here that the famous two-page spread in a year-end Life magazine of his photograph of a fireball, was of "a secondary explosion, probably, don’t know, probably another tank of fuel in the back of the plane and, it was probably about three or four minutes after the impact, umm, it is about 35 feet in diameter, the explosion goes up to the fourth floor, above ground on the Pentagon." Obviously, it wasn't a tank of gas, both tank and fuel had atomized, remember? Maybe it was a shaped charge?

Once you get your head around all these awful facts, you stop dissipating your energy defending the indefensible. The performances put on by the firemen in front of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as recorded in the photographic record, are a big joke. We never, not once, see firemen doing their job, which is, and I'll speak slowly here, putting t h e w a t e r o r t h e f o a m o n t h e f i r e. Like with the staged rescues, and the imagined heroism, we see only malingering, with a total lack of focus, shamed-based split-personalities, which before, the public mistook for a kind of Kabuki-awe. The fire was out within the first ten minutes, it didn't restart spontaneously during the "intermissions," when everybody pulled back due to fake "incoming" warnings, this was time to redress the stage, and rethink the improvisations and restart the fires.

Poured concrete is an excellent insulator, how the fire crawled up the walls and got into the roof is impossible to explain, but what a pretty fire it made during the night. In the context of the deaths in New York, these firemen appall me. I wonder who out of the 189 named dead, may be alive, living in seclusion or rendition. But I know some good people died that morning--stuff happens. So to the grill men, manning the gauntlet, you came to work that Tuesday morning knowing full well. That's the opposite of valorous--callow and craven for a start. I hope Kevin Schaeffer gets you. You've got it coming. On edit: Fuck Kevin Schaeffer.

Alan Ladd Yokum, his wife Beulah, bury their son,U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer Kevin Wayne Yokum, First Community Baptist Church in Lake Charles, LA September 29, 2001.

In this well known, high-resolution image, the attention has always been on the fireman to the right, who breaks at the hip as he leans on his "staff" like a shepherd, invoking Him, I suppose, although I think our man looks more like an elegant form painted on a black-figure Attic vase.

But if you look closer, peer into the background, you'll find His antithesis, our man in white, Mephistopheles, now with a blue jacket on. As shocking as it was to first spot a devil wearing white, even devils become mundane after overexposure, as he fiddles with his camera, or rolls a joint, he inappropriately draws the only focused attention shown by the firemen all day.

Is it Will Morris, or a stand in? May be the last good read on the subject of journalists being co-opted by the CIA was written by Carl Bernstein in 1977, titled simply, The CIA and the Media, it was published in the October 20 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. It doesn't really matter one way or the other is the short answer.



In an earlier blog I said the Russian language web site I link to for the aerial view of the Pentagon in relationship to Reagen National Airport, also posted on his site some scenes of the devastation in New York following 9-11. I was wrong. He was actually in the air flying on the Hudson, and flew past as the buildings burned and before they fell. He captures that terrible moment when the world changed from an unique vantage point. The effect it has is very powerful. The majestic lesson inherent in our collective experience of 9-11 cannot be imposed by the criminals who think the day belongs to them, we must co-opt it. If you see it for what it is you must respond with truth. Seeing these images again, as if for the first time, but of course, I couldn't have, is a sign that I remain in the flow of God's consciousness. I hope you have the same sense of God's presence viewing them. There are no coincidences. We live in amazing times. Blessings. http://www.maxho.com/wtc/ The disaster as it unfolds By the way, this is what disaster, rescue, heroism, green aircraft primer, and grace, look like. The color theory is all wrong though. They obviously just didn't know.

3 comments:

  1. Found your post via the link to my archived Carl Bernstein article.

    FYI, here is the link to my original blog post that cited the Bernstein piece:

    Rather, JFK and the Blogosphere

    Best,

    DW

    ReplyDelete
  2. This article is right down there with the rest of your work.

    ReplyDelete