Fear and Loathing Reflection

Martin Amis uses exquisite imagery from the very beginning of his essay. The metal pictures he creates enable the reader to visualize the events of 9/11, and feel the same emotions as witnesses of those events. Amis also deepens the reader’s emotional experience by personifying America: “Until then America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence raged against her.” By personifying America, Amis identifies the devastation of all Americans on 9/11. He articulates that it was not only the residence surrounding the twin towers, family members of the passengers on the planes, or the workers at the Pentagon or the World Trade Center that were affected, but rather America as a whole that was shaken by the attacks of 9/11. In this essay, the attacks of 9/11 are put into simple perspective. Amis not only pinpoints the emotional motivations behind the attack, he identifies the plan of the attack, the basic science behind it, and some of the major aftereffects as well. During the explanation of the attack on the twin towers, Amis makes an intense statement: “no visionary cinematic genius could hope to recreate the majestic abjection of that double surrender, with the scale of the building conferring its own slow motion.” This sentence is beautifully terrorizing. It indirectly describes the falling of the towers; however, it does so powerfully. Because the sentence lacks visual details, the reader is embraced by the emotional side of the statement. The Twin Towers did not, in fact, fall in surrender. They fell because their structure became unstable. However, in this sentence, Amis almost personifies the buildings; binding the emotional defeat felt by Americans as they watched them collapse, into the Twin Towers themselves. Towards the end of his essay, Amis states “All over again the west confronts an irrationalist, agonistic, theocratic/ ideocratic system which is