Towering Trump
Former White House Communications leader, BILL MOYERS: In a sense, people are anointing the land where they believe there is energy which empowers them. There is an organic relationship between the land and the structures people build upon it.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, but that ended with the coming of the metropolis.
BILL MOYERS: In New York now, the competition is over who can build the tallest building.
Again, that was 1986, from a New Yorker, Joseph Campbell who was a teacher in New York at Saarah Lawrence College.
On 9/11/2001 Trump bragged he now had tallest building in Manhattan
Twenty-one years after 9/11, we can still hear Donald Trump’s reaction to the terrorist attacks – and it was a strange one.
That’s because on 11 September, 2001, the future US president called into the TV station WWOR to talk about the day’s tragic events. Then, oddly, he turned his attention to the height of one of his properties, which he falsely claimed was now the tallest building in lower Manhattan.
“Well, it was an amazing phone call,” Mr Trump told WWOR. “I mean, 40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan. And it was actually – before the World Trade Center – was the tallest. And then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest, and now it’s the tallest.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It takes me back to a time when these spiritual principles informed the society. You can tell what's informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace that's the tallest thing in the place. And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life.
If you go to Salt Lake City, you see the whole thing illustrated right in front of your face. First the temple was built, right in the center of the city. This is the proper organization because the temple is the spiritual center from which everything flows in all directions. Then the political building, the Capitol, was built beside it, and it's taller than the temple. And now the tallest thing is the office building that takes care of the affairs of both the temple and the political building. That's the history of Western civilization. From the Gothic through the princely periods of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth centuries, to this economic world that we're in now.
Again, that was 1986 interview at age 81, before 2001 September 11. And WHO was it the Islamic media fanatics of Mecca venue (Saudi Arabians) attacked, but the TALLEST buildings, World Trade Center, NYC....