It is not just a date, but a copyright-free trademark that symbolises of an epochal change, as was AIDS in the early 80s and as Covid19 is now. The world, the society and the economy itself have changed their perspective.
At 8.55am, local N.Y. City time, two airliners in the hands of kamikaze hijackers crash into the famous Twin Towers, symbol of the New York skyline. A third plane hits the Pentagon and a fourth one is finally shot down before it can cause damage, presumed to the White House. The victims, the official ones, are 2,977 in the end, but among the unrecognised and the pulverised ones, literally, it is thought to be many more.
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It was 2.55pm in Italy and I was, with hindsight, in the only place in the world where I wanted to be, apart from New York itself, in the editorial office of the program I was the author of, in Rai. We had recently returned from lunch break, after the morning broadcast. The summer heat had subsided, leaving room for the September breeze which characterise Rome as much as autumn does for New York. And it is exactly in that autumn that I should have gone to N.Y., invited by my ex-wife who was organising a gala dinner in one of the Twin Towers.
Sitting at my desk, I was checking the press offices for the latest news, when I heard a strangled scream coming from the next room: “I immediately think of a mouthful of food stuck in my throat and try to memorise the Heimlich manoeuvre”. I rush into the room where a television is broadcasting images of a plane hitting one of the Towers. The colleagues, young boys and girls, are stunned; the first thought is of an accident, a dramatic event but still an accident, because it is comforting to think about it! After around six/seven minutes a second plane crashes into the second Tower: no, it is not an accident, it is an attack. America is hit in the heart, and so is the Western world. A joke came out of my mouth, which seems ridiculous but doesn't want to be at all: "But where the fuck is Bruce Willis?"
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Years and years of specific film and television series had "educated" us to American infallibility, to common men who turn into heroes and save the world and to all that propaganda that makes the US the Empire of the good. Now the King is naked in front of the eyes of the world.
I go back to my office to call Aimee Mullins, the 100m Paralympic champion in Atalanta for whom I had written a script and that a few months earlier had come to Rome just to meet me becoming friends. She was fine and was about to leave New York. I was glad of it.
I go back to the television room and what was feared happens: the first Tower collapses; after a few minutes the second one collapses as well. The images are impressive, it is hard to believe that it is not a film but is the reality; we are all in shock, unable to speak and imagine the future, not so much the next one but the immediate one.
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A colleague, the author responsible of the next morning's episode, "wakes us up”. He had remained at his desk all the time to write the script, regardless of the drama that was happening. He enters the office all pissed off and reminds us that there is a program to prepare, as if we were playing. I was about to send him to hell, when I realise that his cynicism was what we needed to get out of that sort of media astonishment and recover a minimum of lucidity. Then you say: "Cynical TV!” By the way, the next day's episode will set the audience record, never beaten in twelve years: honour to merit.
That day we all left the editorial office quite early, which was unusual. At the time we did not realise that, as with all trauma, the greatest pain would come in the following days.
What happened in the following days, months and years is History and somehow we are still paying the consequences, as the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan demonstrates.
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In recent years the most disparate theses have been advanced: investigative deviations, internal conspiracy, international conspiracy by friendly Countries; since the business relations between the Bush family and Bin Laden's family came to light and again, when it was discovered that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were a lie invented by the Services, to favour armed intervention in Iraq, conspiracy theses have multiplied unstoppably.
In these days, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, the American President, Joe Biden, has ordered the Justice Department and other US government agencies to review the FBI documents on the attacks, so as to be able to declassify them within six months.
We will see.
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