Bring Back the Twin Towers By Deroy Murdock City Hall Park - New York City July 26, 2003 I remember my first time atop the Twin Towers. Just days after I moved here from Los Angeles to attend New York University's Graduate School of Business Administration in August 1987, I joined two other newcomers -- from Baltimore and San Diego -- on the observation deck high atop Tower Two. Without saying a word, we realized we had come a long way from home to a city as grand as these skyscrapers were tall. I am not one of those who fell in love with these 28-year-old identical twins after they left us. I believed the Twin Towers were amazing, majestic and beautiful -- from when I first laid eyes on them. They stood at attention outside my window every morning as I woke up in my NYU apartment building in the East Village. They greeted me like old friends as I flew to La Guardia Airport and admired them through airplane windows. "Hey, you're back!" I almost heard them shout to me. In the summer of 1996, while attending a concert at Liberty State Park in New Jersey, I watched them from across the Hudson River that afternoon. Gray throughout the day, they turned a blinding gold as the sun bounced off their steel beams. Then they became almost black as dusk approached. Finally, they filled with lights as hundreds of desk lamps and thousands of neon tubes brightened the offices of industrious individuals inside the World Trade Center. The Twin Towers were gorgeous all along. I loved them very much, and miss them immensely. And I want them back! The Twin Towers were things of beauty, not just for how they looked, but for what they meant. The Twin Towers were immediately identifiable as the premiere symbols of America's free-enterprise system. They stood tall and every day declared America's independence as a free and prosperous nation. Those bloodthirsty bastards -- Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and their homicidal conspirators -- did not slam jumbo jets into Tower One and Tower Two just because they were big buildings, although they were. These mass murderers did not destroy these skyscrapers just because they were full of innocent civilians, even though they were. These homicidal pricks demolished the Twin Towers because they represented American liberty and U.S. economic prowess. The best way we can "just say no" to al-Qaeda is to put the Twin Towers back where they belong. So far, unfortunately, we are going the opposite way. Thanks to Governor George Pataki -- a weak leader, fake Republican and man of dubious taste -- New York is putting our collective tail between our legs and running away, as if to apologize for who we are, and as if to say: "The hijackers were right, and we are wrong." Well, we are not wrong, but Governor George E. Pataki is! Rather than restore the Twin Towers, Governor Pataki has foisted upon us the twisted, high-rise vision of low-rise architect Daniel Libeskind. His tallest building to date climbs just three stories into the skies above Manchester, England. Alas, what he has in mind for Ground Zero does not rise even to that level. I call his plan "Switchblade Park." Its jagged edges and piercing appearance resemble an explosion at a machete factory. Its plant-filled, so-called "Freedom Tower" is a 1,776-foot dagger plunged into the hearts of every American who loved these 28-year-old twins. And its exposed slurry wall eerily echoes the Berlin Wall. What a horrendous way to remember the 2,972 neighbors, colleagues and loved ones who were massacred just blocks from where we stand today. And did you know that Daniel Libeskind is a poet, too? "Fishing from the Pavement," a collection of his poetry, opens windows on the world of Libeskind’s psyche. The view is scary. "Only those who are frightened by worms possess sanity, desecrate gilded towers, endure," Libeskind writes. "Our days steadily bevel Mt. Zion into a figure resembling a tormented, destitute woman wrapping detonating charges around her forefathers before the gates were opened." Elsewhere he observes: "Executives are praying to a chicken, confident of their brazen dream in which cherubs can not grieve but are instead forced to defecate on ruins in their doctor's presence." He continues: "Totalitarianism is a magnificent idea which will eventually destroy the supremacy of White Biology. "But a successful portrait of Jesus cannot be as beautiful as a painting depicting the sycamore tree unto which he swooped." Elsewhere Libeskind adds: "Tempestuous Jewess, commence your flight on a ship sailing for Riga, all pink… "She'd rather disrobe in public than slow the hedge-sparrow in glass." Finally, he explains: "If you could delay the cat from joining a zero laterally with itself you might be the last to die." Daniel Libeskind does not deserve an architectural commission. It sounds to me as if he needs to be committed. Daniel Libeskind's designs and the corrupt process by which Governor Pataki imposed them on us are both embarrassments to New York City, the United States of America and the entire free world. There is just one way out of this mess. It has been the right thing to do since the last pebble was cleared from the debris pit at Ground Zero: Rebuild the Twin Towers as they were before, only stronger! Thank you very much. ===== New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.