the falling man

To me the iconic image/thought/meme of 9/11 is the photo of the "falling man." A photographer caught a series of images of a man falling from one of the upper floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center. He has never been definitively identified but he is widely believed to be Jonathan Briley, a worker at an upper floor restaurant in the North Tower. There is even a documentary based on the image of the falling man. It is estimated that about 200 people were blown out or fell out or jumped from the WTC that day.

It is iconic to me in that none of these people, when they went to work or had business in or were sightseeing at the WTC that day, had any idea that they would be shortly plummeting to their deaths. Though with such a long fall they surely has time to contemplate the unlikelihood, in addition to the sheer terror, of their predicament. I could imagine myself simply crying "WHAT THE FUCK?!" about a dozen times in my brain were I in that situation.

But the falling man could not have guessed the truly maddening chain of events that led to his unlikely predicament, one chain link receding back in time to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. That led to the CIA arming and allowing to come to prominence of Osama Bin Laden. That led to his hatred of the imperialist west. That led to his embrace of radical Islam. That led to his forming Al Quaeda. And so forth up until that fateful day. Intersecting with Gulf War, and Saddam Hussein being in power, and ending up with the neocons in the Bush administration in 2001 ignoring the warnings about Al Quaeda'a imminent attack because they were focused on ginning up a reason to invade Iraq. and on and on, one unlikely circumstance leading to another, all finally culminating in the instant of existential absurdity of one man, a few minutes before focused on serving food to customers at a restaurant, suddenly finding himself in midair. Absurd. Insane. Like much of this century so far.