ABSTRACT
The eleventh of September, 2001 introduced the United States to the experience of domestic terrorism as no other event has ever done. For most people, word of this event first arrived as live television news. We are at home, or work. We see images of disaster of an extraordinary magnitude. As the morning of September 11, 2001 unfolds, television news anchors interrupt regular programming to speak to us from their studio chambers as they report what eludes their comprehension. Their reports and images offer evidence of a catastrophic event but provide no context or perspective. It is as if live television coverage rips the flesh from the face of the world and hurls it into our living rooms. Shocking, grotesque, obscene – this should not be conceivable. And yet it occurs – as rippled relays of incomprehensible destruction, catastrophic ruin.
