Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

We can, when we listen carefully, hear many distinct echoes in the reverbations from the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. To some, it simply represents the barbarians' sacking of Rome; to others, it has detonated a 21st-century crusade against Islam. Yet others see it fundamentally as Arab revenge for centuries of Western imperialism, greed and arrogance. Its undeniable parallels with Pearl Harbor and, because of the raging conflict between Israel and Palestine, its links to the aftermath of the Holocaust of the second World War are discernible.

We can also see that Hollywood disaster movies have emigrated from imagination to reality. Likewise the glossy US comic books which preceded the movie industry's ability to create convincing films of superheroes defending Megalopolis or Gotham City from some arch-villain set on world domination and enslavement. Indeed, a dominant arch-villain, Osama bin Laden, has been popularly indicted. He is cast as Lex Luther come to life. The sight of stricken people leaping to certain death from gigantic skyscrapers reawakened images of the Wall Street crash of 1929.