Flight 93 was the plane which was hijacked by terrorists on September 11
of last year, turned and headed for Washington, but crashed in
Shanksville, Pennsylvania, apparently due to intervention by passengers.

Tangent: for a very thoughtful and moving discussion on the parallels
between Gettysburg and Shanksville, including the role of monuments, by,
of all people, the humor columnist Dave Barry, see
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/dave_barry/3972571.htm

News items now quote al-Qaida sources as revealing that the destination of
Flight 93 was the U.S. Capitol Building.

To me, this is a surprise.  Another one of the hijacked planes had to
execute a fancy turn and veer right past the Capitol in order to hit the
Pentagon.  If the Pentagon was such a high-priority target, it made sense
that al-Qaida would want to hit it in two places.  That would also make
for a certain symmetry: two planes for the World Trade Center, two planes
for the Pentagon.

But now it appears that model of the terrorists' intentions was incorrect.

What would have happened if Flight 93 had hit the Capitol?  An unthinkable
but unavoidable question.

As horrifying as it was to hear on September 11, as the World Trade Center
towers were falling, that "the Pentagon is burning," it would have been
so very much worse to hear that the Capitol was also burning.

On the other hand, the Capitol and other major buildings in D.C. had
already been evacuated by the time Flight 93 would have arrived, so loss
of life (apart from those aboard the plane) would have been minimal.

Presumably the terrorists would have aimed for the dome, an obvious symbol
of U.S. democracy, and the only part of the building that is instantly
visually familiar worldwide.  And they could easily have destroyed the
dome, which is made of cast iron.

But think about what that would have meant for the scope of the disaster.
There really isn't much underneath the dome, mainly the Rotunda.  The
House and Senate are in the wings to either side, actually at some
distance from the Rotunda, if you have ever walked it.  And the Capitol,
due to its location and layout, is considerably more accessible to fire
fighting crews than the Pentagon, so the fire could probably have been
confined to the center section.

Damage, in other words, might well have been quite contained, with the
rest of the building restored to service within days.

(It is possible that a plane hitting the dome above its base would have
smashed right through it, ending up beyond the Capitol and possibly
destroying other buildings, maybe the Library of Congress or the Supreme
Court.  But the Capitol is exposed on a hill, so it wouldn't have been
hard to hit it lower down, the way the Pentagon was.  And the Capitol
grounds are pretty spacious, so the impact zone of a plane angled down
toward the building would probably not have spread into the surrounding
neighborhood.)

In the aftermath of such a catastrophe affecting a historic landmark of
major national importance, we surely would have seen two divergent lines
of opinion:

(1) "Put it back!"  Make it just like it was, or the terrorists have won.
Presumably this would be a stronger and more effective movement for the
Capitol than it turned out to be for the World Trade Center.

If this line of thought had been successful, there would have been a big
new call for artisans skilled in stone carving and cast iron work.
Undoubtedly the historic preservation field would have benefited both
directly and indirectly.  Purists would still point out that the
replacement is a new building, not the historic landmark.  However, if the
wings both survived, SOMETHING would be needed to connect them.
(Ironically the Capitol started as two separate sections on opposite sides
of where the Rotunda was later built, and those two sections were burned,
but not destroyed, by enemy action during the War of 1812.)

(2) "The nation is its people, not a building."  Why replicate a 19th
century building at great cost?  Let's create new symbols, or at least,
modern buildings.

This argument would be a good deal stronger if the Capitol were destroyed
in toto, and the debate were between re-creating the quirky original or
replacing it with a modern building with some superficial resemblances.
A plastic or fiberglass dome would look exactly the same on TV as the
cast-iron original; some would surely point out that cast iron was the
fiberglass of its day.

Remember The Onion's piece last May (reprinted as news in China), about
"Congress Threatens to Leave D.C. Unless New Capitol Is Built"?
http://www.theonion.com/onion3820/congress_threatens.html

The spoof "quotes" Dennis Hastert as saying "Don't get us wrong: We love
the drafty old building ... But the hard reality is, it's no longer
suitable for a world-class legislative branch.  The sight lines are bad,
there aren't enough concession stands or bathrooms, and the parking is
miserable. It hurts to say, but the capitol's time has come and gone."

It's not hard to imagine the real Hastert, or others in Congress, saying
the same thing over the ashes of the old building.

The most extreme form of this might even have included calls to relocate
the national capital to the heartland, say, to central Kansas.  Here
again, this kind of thing rises in likelihood with the scale of the
destruction.  If the White House and the Capitol had both been totally
destroyed, and the Pentagon perhaps more heavily damaged than it was, the
concept of starting over someplace else might have gotten a lot of
momentum, notwithstanding the colossal investment of other federal
facilities in the Washington area.

Just a few grim thoughts about what else might have happened one year ago
today -- and the debt we owe to the heroic passengers on Flight 93.

Again, I recommend Dave Barry's eloquent essay:
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/dave_barry/3972571.htm

                                Larry

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
Washtenaw County Commissioner, 4th District
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com
Mailing address: P.O. Box 2563, Ann Arbor MI 48106

--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>