9/11
~

That immense global tragedy of what has come to be known to all as just "9/11" changed the world in very many ways forever. And amidst all of this was the matter that never before had so many people around the world together seen such huge history unfold right before their eyes in real-time, as nearly every single television news channel in existence beamed out that same visual sequence ~from so many different angles and perspectives~ right as it happened. and then replayed it, over and over again.

We've of course seen history unfold thus before our eyes many-many-many times before by now. Even the outrageously creepy-crawly voyeuristic experience of riding a missile nose-cone camera live, right into the final explosion at it's eventual target in god knows whose home/office/workplace/factory/shop was something jaded from almost a decade ago.

but this was different. 'Twas almost as though immovable mountains had been brought down, precious innocent lives lost in numbers not experienced in man's history of assault upon fellow man in one such fell stroke for decades ~ perhaps not indeed since the nuclear holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that savage and primitively faraway era of a half-century ago.

The world and all mankind itself seemed rent in two like never ever before, between a vast and very visible "us", and a handful of ghoulishly half-invisible "them".

And then, like almost never before again, the 'ghouls' turned up on TV too, speaking from their holes for themselves via their own video cameras and Al Jazeera ~ a regional television channel no one had ever heard of before! And then everything they had to say was audio-visually relayed all over again, and again and again by all of the other news channels of the world.

Finally, as if all of this was not extraordinary and unprecedented enough, John Q. Public joined the fray with a deluge of e-mails and e-mail attachments ranged from expressions of sympathy and outrage through to rumour and humour bouncing all about the world for weeks.

The pictures here express just a microcosm of all that went down, and are collectively reproduced for the record without any intended sequence, bias or comment.