The meaning of 9/11 only became clear on 9/12

The meaning of 9/11 only became clear on 9/12 This much is apparent from the ferocity of the protests against the plans to build an Islamic cultural centre two blocks from the site where the World Trade Centre once stood. It is also reflected in the wanton lunacy of Terry Jones, Pastor of Dove World Outreach Centre in Gainsville, Florida, who had pledged to mark the immolation of almost 3,000 Americans in 2001 with a fiery offering of his own - in this case, a mass burning of copies of the Koran.

(This morning, ABC News reported that Terry Jones offered to cancel the event, so long as Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf agreed to relocate the planned cultural centre away from Lower Manhattan. This, Jones says, "would be a sign that God wants us to do it. The American people do not want the mosque there, and of course do not want us to burn the Koran.")

But what was it about September 11, 2001 that so affected the soul of the nation? I would argue that it was more than just the loss of life, horrific though that was. Nor was it simply the manner of those deaths, although the utter fragility of those bodies immingled with the steel and the glass and the concrete and the jet fuel and the flames have, in a way, been hallowed in the public memory - perhaps no place more tenderly than in John Updike's short story, Varieties of Religious Experience.

Rather, the devastation of the events lay in their symbolic potency, the fact that the ruin exceeded both the malevolent will of the hijackers and the material stuff of the twin towers themselves. The lumbering planes - miraculously, it would seem - hit their marks, and what once symbolised America's economic and political dominion crumbled in a trice. As French philosopher Jean 的 Baudrillard wrote a short while after th