World Trade Centre Oculus

Source: Bigstock

In other words, it’s kind of a Stonehengey idea. There’s supposed to be this magic moment once a year when the Life Orb transforms our subway-station drabness into a sparkling Light Dance. There were hundreds of people wandering around the Oculus on 9/11, just sort of taking it all in, and all of them read the standee and thought it was the coolest thing ever”€”which was a good thing, because I didn”€™t notice that the building ever got the promised solar transcendence. It looked exactly as it had a week before, when the main object of attention was an elaborate multimedia exhibit devoted to the history of Lacoste, both the apparel company and the tennis player-turned-designer who founded it. (There are actually quite a few French companies that have taken up residence in the Oculus, and that’s a major blow for international peace since we no longer feel any need to change our menus to read “€œFreedom Fries.”€)

At any rate, as far as I know, the supreme moment of Oculus Illumination never actually occurred, but we all pretended that it was happening, in order to not spoil the coolness. Again, we were pilgrims praying for a miracle from a well-known saint, so part of the ability of the saint to perform the miracle involves all of us projecting the miracle onto, in this case, a white marble esplanade awash in mixed metaphors.

Besides, we”€™re much more comfortable with the religion of shopping than we are with the religion of international peace-symbol dove-release light shows. Leave that stuff in Barcelona where it belongs.

Which brings me to the final thing that I couldn”€™t stop thinking about.

All of this must make Marwan al-Shehhi feel pretty damn good.

Marwan was the 23-year-old hijacker who piloted United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767, into the South Tower, and he was the only one of the four pilots who carried out his mission perfectly.

Mohamed Atta had sailed down the Hudson River at the helm of American Airlines Flight 11, but apparently he hadn”€™t paid close enough attention during his flight lessons in Florida because he hit the North Tower way too high. I mean, he killed a lot of people and got his virgins, but he should have gone into his descent way earlier.

Hani Hanjour is the guy who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, and he had plenty of time to work out his game plan since they were way out in western Maryland when he turned the plane around. But he choked at the last minute and just hit the western wall, killing hundreds instead of the expected thousands, and not getting anywhere close to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Ziad Jarrah had the biggest martyrdom fail of them all. He was supposed to fly United Airlines Flight 93 into the White House but ended up vaporized in Somerset County, Penn., after some pesky Americans rushed into the cockpit.

But Marwan al-Shehhi had it down. He made one early mistake, almost clipping a Delta plane, but otherwise he was stellar. He came down the Hudson a few minutes after Mohamed, made a wide arc over the Statue of Liberty, then not only put the plane into a steady descent as he headed back north, but waited till about five seconds before impact and wrenched the control wheel to the left so he could enter the South Tower at a 45-degree angle, thereby destroying much more real estate than if he”€™d gone in straight. Not only that, but he was still doing 590 miles per hour at impact. So it was Marwan who put the fatality numbers up near the 3,000 mark.

And now his followers and admirers can take comfort in the fact that we have a sacred holiday devoted to the event. We have a National September 11 Memorial and Museum that’s so depressing it takes more than two hours to go through it”€”longer than the actual 9/11 events took. And right next door to that museum, we have exactly what Islamic fundamentalists would expect us to build”€”a shrine to shopping that has the power to bring us to tears.

I say 15 years is enough.

I don”€™t like monuments to a day when we got our ass whipped. Let’s stop this never-ending public mourning, which gives the enemy hope and confidence. Let’s put some waiting-area benches and some hot dog vendors in the Oculus, because it’s a goddamn train station, it’s not a monument to Marwan al-Shehhi. Let’s do something like they do at Hiroshima, where it’s just families of the deceased and the mayor, or at Kilo Pier in Honolulu, where they allow survivors of the USS Arizona to be buried with their fallen comrades in the hull of the sunken ship. Let’s leave the ceremonies for the families, the friends, those first responders who got sick from the smoke, and let’s stop dwelling as a nation on one lucky sucker punch organized by a bearded creep in the Middle East.

We could start by not hiring any more crazy-ass European architects named after cities in Chile to Photoshop downtown Manhattan.

Put a cigar store in there”€”and I don”€™t mean Davidoff.

Put a sports bar in there.

Get rid of the Teuscher’s Chocolate Truffles. I don”€™t know why, but that one bugs me more than any of the others.

Who will be the first to throw his chewing gum down on the perfect Italian marble floors? I say go for it. It’s New York. Nobody’s gonna trust the place until we ugly it up a little bit.

And, oh yeah. Marwan al-Shehhi: I watched your whole trip down the Hudson and around and back and into the tower, and SCREW YOU.

There were no virgins.

We”€™re walking on your carcass.

The only thing you accomplished was to make it harder to get to Jersey City for two years.

You died in vain.

I”€™m going to the Mets game.