Shining moments
The Chrysler Building, for a moment the world's tallest building, has been likened to an Art Deco rocket. Dubai's new tallest, by more than 300 meters (unless you count Toronto's CN Tower, which many do not), is also compared to a rocket.
Why do they build them? Because they can. Does this make building the world's tallest buildings simply exercises in hubris? Consider the words of John F. Kennedy:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
"Organize and measure the best of our energies and skills..."
Two generations have gone by since Americans walked on the moon. It has been a generation since the world's tallest building was built in the West. Meanwhile, the West cowers under the siege of Muslims, Europeans dhimmis in their own lands, feckless western governments supplicating to the Iranian terrorist state, while the jihadis bring paroxysms of fear and panic, even in their failed attacks. What more appropriate symbol of Islamic triumphalism than this 828 meter minaret?
Oscar Wilde said we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Preoccupied by our orgy of consumerist self-gratification, addled by television and computer screens, distracted by the equivocations of academics and pundits and the cheap bromides of demagogues, enervated by the sloth of luxury, fewer and fewer in the West are looking at the stars.
Sending men into space and building ever taller buildings have less to do with where we are than where we are headed. We think it fitting to build monuments to the past. Why not monuments to the future?
