LEAVE IT TO BEAVER

 LAURIE KERR, SCOTT SHUGER, MINORU YAMASAKI AND WTC TOWERS

by Lowell P. Wigglesworth for CPW News Service

     Three months after the World Trade Center towers 1 & 2 accordioned into a deadly pile of rubble alongside the miraculously imploding Building 7 to clear the way for the new One World Plaza and building, Slate.com’s Laurie Kerr wrote on December 24, 2001 the story of the WTC’s architect Minoru Yamasaki’s place in the Bin Laden/Saudi Royal family galaxy of building professionals.  Her story documents Yamasaki’s vision of the WTC as a “mecca” amid world capitalism’s bustling center of evolving credit default swaps, bundled subprime mortgages and Wall Street greed gone wild.  Within  three months, Slate.com’s Scott Shuger would write IGNORAD, the story of the  U.S. air defense system's failure to defend against an attack on New York and the Pentagon.

     This led John Falcon Talon of Seattle, Washington to write the following:  “Yamasaki was treading on Islamic mythology and theology, having incorporated into the WTC design an alternate vision of Mecca.   Employed as he was primarily by the Saudi royal family and Bin Laden’s, his primary benefactors, to tread on their hallowed ground was a sticky wicket," said Falcon Talon.

REMAKING MECCA IN MANHATTAN

     More than this, Yamasaki's remake of Mecca in Manhattan was named for the secretive New York Port Authority Director who had demanded that the WTC steel be supplied by a hand picked list of suppliers excluding US and Bethlehem Steel, Austin Tobin, who when Congress wanted to know more about the Port Authorities' activities refused to provide it.  This  led to a contempt of Congress law suit, U.S. vs. Tobin.  Now, we would expect that Tobin's secrecy would be defended by serious Cold War warriors given that Yamasaki's St. Louis Pruitt-Igoe project was used for radiation experiments on an unwitting populace, the subject of Lisa Martino-Taylor's 836 page doctoral dissertation.  Pruitt-Igoe, like the WTC, was demolished by the same controlled demolition company, Controlled Demolition, Inc., in 1972 which used thermite charges based on a steel and iron melting product patented in 1895.  Tobin would be followed after thirty years as head of the New York Port Authority by Richard Leone who was appointed by Governor Thomas Kean, the future chair of the 911 Commission.  Leone was head of New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine's transition team....Corzine....former head of Goldman Sachs.  Leone was also head of Century Foundation that once had John Kenneth Galbraith and J. Robert Oppenheimer on their board with major funding coming from the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.



Austin J. Tobin

     Indeed, Tobin's chief defense attorney was Roger Robb who had led the assault on J. Robert Oppenheimer who had refused to build a bigger atomic bomb and who wanted to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.  Robb's chief witnesses against Oppenheimer were Rice University's Kenneth Pitzer and William Liscum Borden.  Shirley Locke Holmes covered the Tobin connection in her article 911 Thermite May Have Been In Building At Erection.  Holmes covers the connection of Rice University's Prof. Dr. Frank Vandiver to one of Tobin's steel suppliers, Mosher Steel, which supplied steel for the first nine floors.   What she did not cover was that the 1961 law suit against Tobin and the NY Port Authority identifies "Woodson D. Scott, Attorney for the New York Chamber of Commerce, pro hac vice by special leave of court (Harry A. Inman, Washington, D.C. of counsel) amicus curiae."  Woodson D. Scott was a two-term president of the National Rifle Association and a life member since the 1930's.  The New York Port Authority had a long-standing relationship to the U.S. munitions manufacturers and few things fuel a war-machine-economy like a surprise attack.  Was the "arsenal of freedom" becoming the "arsenic of freedom" under Tobin's watch?  With Rice University's proximity to Houston's petro-chemical cartel Pitzer and Vandiver were the pitbulls overseeing its connections to fossil fuels, Freeport-McMoran's vast sulfur reserves and National Lead's historic connections to everything from lead pipes, lead paint, gasoline additives and bullets.  National Lead's connection to Dutch Boy lead house paint and the U.S. Civil Defense Agency's production of the film The House in the Middle which promoted a national fix-up, clean-up and paint-up campaign pushed lead house paint as a fire deterrent in a nuclear bomb blast at a time when official U.S. Cold War policy was MAD or "mutually assured destruction".   Scott Shuger's family, author of IGNORAD, owned the Baltimore paint company that made lead-based house paint, a story covered by Ivana Driver titled "No Painting Over A National Bamboozle."  There was no painting over Yamasaki's unique architectural designs.

     "Yamasaki’s 'Beaver Building' in Seattle, Washington serves for those of the West as a warning that tall high-density structures are balanced on a precarious precipice.   A replica of Mecca in Manhattan treaded on Islam’s prohibition of images, but no more than monarchial models of government, as with royal family legacies, tread on the same in cultural and political structures.  The circular field around the brass orb at the old WTC park between the two towers was a symbol of the simplest form of primitive campfire design.    Putting a tall structure next to it is to move toward the old Babylonian Tower of Babel building.  It was creeping pyramidism and we all know how Moses felt about pyramids.    Mecca is one symbol that evolved from the ancient tribal fireplace around which people move or sit in a quest for god, yes, but equally for community and warmth.  While Mecca's obelisk is not covered at all, the Dome of the Rock, another high holy place for Islam is covered, but not in a penile profile, but as a circular 'mammorial memorial' inviting images of warmth and nurture.  The WTC's double-dongs or One World Trade Center's new taller twig-symbol phallic are like all obelisks recalling not trust, but thrust...as 'in god we thrust'," said Falcon Talon who noted that alongside Judaism's distrust of monarchial political systems is their sacramental penile reduction and obelisk snipping called "circumcision".  "Some say it was a symbol of cleanliness, but that was before the Israelites had a scientific world-view.  It was an anti-Babel gesture of humility and bearing the physical scar of self-imposed limits on ambitions run amuck," said Falcon Talon.

Austin Joseph Tobin Park and sphere
after 911 (photo courtesy FEMA).

     "Decreasing density structures mimic the purest form of democracy, shared governance.   The most nurturing and protective of communal images is the campfire in all of recorded history, though it is not recorded in Egyptian or Inca, Aztec or Mayan culture where the leadership sought, as with the European and Arab monarchs, to sit atop the pinnacle without reference to the powerless. In time the populace limited the pinnacle promoters with correctives like the Magna Carta.   Mecca's imagery, too,  is of a ring around the sacred fire like that found in early aboriginal, heck, prehistoric assemblies.   In this case even the obelisk's stone-cold symbolism serves to confound many just as did the globe in the center of the WTC's replica of Mecca," said Falcon Talon.

A SPACE ODDESSY

     Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey used the obelisk as a monument to the assassination of humanity, not its preservation.  Sky scraping is, as in the Babel mythology, a monument to sun god worship, pyramidal pinnacles and ruinous stalagmite imagery which in their optimum form would render the earth tilted and out of balance.  Where Sitting Bull's Sioux warriors circled Custer's men in the Black Hills like Muslims in Mecca at Ramadan, in the case of 911 the imagery is not of Muslim warriors circling the towers, but of the towers dominating the courtyard and spewing humanity in an Onan-esque sacrifice onto the steel and concrete below, a well-choreographed battle between industrialized mercantilism and pedestrian communalism.  Could Edward Bernays have constructed a more power filled image for the battle between the high ground of space-age industrialism and the low ground of tribal affections?  Sadly, this battle is like a pimple on the bulbous ball of cosmic perfection, planetary spheres like the earth and other planets which seem in their simplicity to challenge the obelisk as an artificial construct.  Whether in Jewish, Christian or Islamic traditions these perpendicular monuments to concentrated power, congealed in the prohibition of image worship, are at their core anathema to the system of shared justice, peace and harmonious relations finding their political counterpart in monarchial, pinheaded power structures leading to as disfigured an existence as a jutting jaw on a Hapsburg.   The Christians' theology found a built-in trifurcation of this top to bottom dialectic, but few theologians talk of it.  Catholic theology, for example, serves the linear imagery in its stair-step, seven sacramental system....a linear ascent to heaven. 

BELL TOLL FOR OBELISKS?

Click to enlarge.  Mosher had main responsibility for constructing the WTC's core columns.  Sold to Trinity Industries in 1973,  Trinity Industries provided steel for Texas Stadium, the Pennzoil Building and other architectural landmarks, but was also fined $663 million in 2014 for defrauding the government in a design change to inter-state highway guardrails that proved dangerous to motorists.

     "The Muslim obelisk contains a similar image that confounds their own expressed intent.... wholeness and sanctified living.  Not unlike the Iranian Muslims who distrust the Arab monarchs, the Israelites distrusted their monarchs and we can see that the primogeniture system of Saul was replaced by the evolution of David's golden age and his anti-pyramidal and anti-primogeniture legacy.   Bandar Bush stands as a direct contradiction to this evolution, a throw-back to the Dark Age of primogeniture-puke, and Yamasaki was simply stirring the architectural designs of the Saudi monarch's well-financed puke-bowl where in New York, under the nose of the Goldman Sacks, AIG and other Goldspan's 'put'-pooters Yamasaki meshed the images of Babel with Mecca," said Falcon Talon.   "This is, of course, why the Bush family is seen at every turn to be promoting dynasty and supports the Saudi royals with their embrace of a draconian past under the false image of a pristine, industrialized and drone dominated present.  The Renaissance, Enlightenment and Reformation jettisoned this pin-headedness and now it is being re-formulated as the new snake oil of future progress with more clever ways to kill greater and greater numbers, but with surgical efficiency.    Yamasaki’s design could not have been a better canvas for symbolizing the clash of two worlds,  setting the stage with the fall of the twin towers for endless warfare, consent for war,  and the assault on the illusive goal of worldwide civility and continuing enlightenment....a claim that both the West and Islam, at their best, say they both desire.   Ironically, the great mono-theocratic religions had, like the vanquished circle-fire-sitters of antiquity, the best promise for continuing harmony on earth had their theological evolution and ideals not been so commandeered, convoluted and conflicted.  The new One World Trade Center has replaced Yamasaki’s alternate ‘mecca’, but his Beaver Building stands to remind us that the beavers still nibble away at Babel’s base and no amount of Saudi oil dollars which paid for a significant number of Yamasaki’s structures can lubricate the gears of genuine and sustainable goodness, to mix my metaphors," said Falcon Talon.

     Falcon Talon is proud of his history in promoting decreasing density structures as the optimum structure for the future of humanity having begun his own construction business in the American Northwest at a young age.  "Sky scraping of the type that singer/songwriter Cat Stevens said, before his conversion to Islam, leads to 'building them higher and higher 'til there's no more room up there,' has led to a penthouse 'pimpology' that plays into the power elites putrefied pomposity," said Falcon Talon noting that the pompous Donald Trump confounds the Neo-Con Republicans who hide their devilish pomposity beneath yellow cake icing and who used the WTC disaster to kick-start wars in the Middle East.  Trump is a "sky scraper-scraper", but he's also "yellow cake intolerant".   "Even the beautiful historic Bedouin ethic of level living was sold out by the Arab royals like Henry VIII selling out his six wives.  Copernicus and Galileo determined that the earth was not the center of the universe and freed the world to pursue a new enlightenment, but their equivalent today, those scientists who would provide alternate energy sources, are under house arrest to the oil cartels.  Today, thanks to a suicidal addiction to oil, mercantilism has re-established that the earth's non-renewable fluids make earth only a bladder for oil's slick profits in a universe where our sun can produce radiant heat for about four billion years, and I haven't even mentioned the race against the global warming clock," said Falcon Talon.

From Bedouins To Bandar Bush

     There's not much to be said for Bandar Bush and the Bin Laden's alliance with the WTC architect, Yamasaki," said Falcon Talon who does not believe that the WTC or Building 7 came down by plane crash or building fires and who recommends reading the works of David Ray Griffin on the subject.  "Shirley Locke Holmes' article on 911 thermite should also be read," said Falcon Talon, noting Yamasaki's connections to both the WTC and the St. Louis Pruitt-Igoe projects where the U.S. government conducted secret radiation tests on its own people similar to the Tuskegee Experiment.  "And we must never forget what unbridled mercantilism did to people when it miniaturized and mobilized the communal campfire with the introduction of pipe, cigar and cigarette smoking.  Ed Bernays and Albert Lasker saw from their perches above the masses the lucrative applied sociological and psychological adaptation of our most basic human desires for warmth and connectedness," said Falcon Talon whose great, great grandfather smoked peyote instead of tobacco.

 

Now in building of chaises, I tell you what,

There is always somewhere a weakest spot,---

In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill,

In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill,

In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace,---lurking still,

Find it somewhere you must and will,---

Above or below, or within or without,---

And that's the reason, beyond a doubt,

A chaise breaks down, but doesn't wear out.

 

                      -Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr.