Skip to primary content

The Fireball and the Ice Pick | Oct 04 2001

Jeff Dorchen: The next morning I woke up and saw a plane smash into a famous American building and explode, and I watched those skyscrapers collapse and all the rest of it. Just like you would dream it in a nightmare. In your nightmare the sky would be perfectly blue and the plane would come just like it did and the explosion would come. That’s what I saw. And I think I was still a ghost then.

William Vollman (via Joshua Allen): I’m an American, and I’m proud of the fact that I can keep guns in my house, I can listen to the radio, I can have whiskey and pork in the kitchen, I can have pornography, I can read “Mein Kampf.”

Wylie Goodman: When the towers crashed, cries and gasps rose up the room. People began to cry. An announcement came over the intercom system that we were safe, that there was no reason to evacuate the building. But none of us believed the omniscient voice telling us what to do anymore.

Arundhati Roy: Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other’s rhetoric. Each refers to the other as “the head of the snake.” Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed—one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick.