The World's Tallest Building -- finally

If the news stories are to be believed, the world's tallest building will start construction shortly in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The significance of the building is two-fold: one, in this era of frustratingly incremental height increases, this structure beats all comers with a thorough finality. With skyscrapers like the Petronis Towers (1469 feet tall) and Taiwan's 101 Building (1651 feet tall) claiming top honors by dint of tactics like counting a building's spire (as opposed to the highest occupied floor) to beat the Sears Tower (1450 feet tall) as the world's tallest building , there is something satisfying about a skyscraper that quashes all the hairsplitting equivication to reach a height of 2312 feet. The rules that the Council for Tall Buildings uses to determine the tallest buildings, Highest Occupied Floor, Top of the Roof, and Top of Pinnacle or Antenna -- the engineering equivalent of everyone being special -- are all rendered irrelevant by this monster. At 2312 feet, this structure is almost 1000' taller than the late World Trade Center and represents the first clear advance in building height since the construction of the Empire State Building and Chrysler Buildings in the early 1930s.

Secondly, the location of the tower in the center of the Arab Middle East cannot be ignored. The United Arab Emirates is one of the few progressive and tolerant Arab counties in the region, a model of where the Arab world could move should it decide to chuck its backward and revanchist behavior. The destruction of the World Trade Towers represented Western Enlightenment ideas under attack by the forces of religious intolerance. It is marvelously symbolic that this tower, a product of Western rationalism, will be built in the heart of a malignant, death-centered, anti-intellectual Muslim culture. Building such a structure in the U.A.E cannot help but be a provocative challenge to the rest of the Arab World.

The Other Stolen Election
Why a Nixon's presidency should have started in 1960 instead of 1968.

In American history it's hard to think of eight years as epic as the span between 1960 and 1968. During that brief, convulsive period we managed to kill a president, finally eliminate the Jim Crow laws, and spawn a war that created a political and societal chasm that pushed the U.S. closer to revolution then at anytime since the Civil War. The easiest benchmark for this eight year gulf is a pop culture reference. Watch any movie, listen to any pop music from either side 1960-68, and marvel in the sheer compression of change. With the bruises of the 2000 election still smarting it seems appropriate to go back four decades and look at the 1960 presidentital election; a contest, that had it gone the other way, would have resulted in a very different history than the one we study today.

Speculation on alternative histories is an old and whorey endeavor that is of more interest to adherents of the Great Man theory of history than to those who believe that the currents of history can only be shaped by its participants, not changed. For years many have speculated on what would have happened if John Kennedy had not been assassinated, if Bobby had survived and won the Democratic nomination in 1968, and if LBJ had retired as Senate majority leader. But the true watershed moment occurred years earlier in 1960. It was in that election year that John Kennedy beat vice president Richard Nixon by a plurality of 118,000 votes out of a total of 68 million votes. Though it is well-known that Kennedy's father, Joe Kennedy, had substantial mob and union connections in the key state of Illinois, Seymour Hersh admits in his book, "Dark Camelot", that mob boss Sam Giancana's help was of an unknown nature -- however, Hersh asserts, Chicago Mayor Richard Daly's assistance wasn't. Kennedy himself related Daly's comments to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee the following evening, "Mr. President, with a little bit of luck and help of a few close friends, you're going to carry Illinois."

Hersh goes on to say:

"Without the state's 27 electoral votes, Kennedy would have had a plurality of only 7 votes over Nixon in the electoral college, with 26 unpledged Democratic electors in Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama threatening to bolt unless they received significant concessions on federal civil rights policy from the Democratic Party. They had the power, if Kennedy lost Illinois, to throw the election into the House of Representatives for the first time in the twentieth century."

Nixon was encouraged to appeal the election by Republican leaders but chose not to because of fears that being labeled a "sore loser" would dog him his whole career and jeopardize "any possibility of a further political career".

If Nixon had been elected president in 1960, instead of 1968, the mind reels. Obviously, the decade's central event, the Kennedy assassination, would not have occurred. U.S. involvement in Viet Nam is a little less sure since Nixon was as much a cold warrior as Kennedy and no doubt would have been lured by the same fears of a communist takeover of South Vietnam as had Kennedy. But if an early-60's Nixon administration had become involved in Viet Nam it would not have been run by Robert MacNamara and the Best and Brightest cadre. The strategy of determining victory by body count, and of fighting only in certain corridors for fear of inviting intervention of the Soviet Union and China, would most certainly not have occurred. How effective the strategy that would have replaced it is unknown.

With his challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, Kennedy is given credit for launching the space race. Since the drivers for the endeavor were cold war politics, not science or exploration, it is entirely possible that an early Nixon administration also might have also heeded the call for a moon landing -- but on what scale and on what timeframe?

It is not clear how much progress Civil Rights legislation would have made under an early 60's Nixon administration, but considering that such legislation as the 1964 Voting Rights act was pushed through congress by an arm-twisting LBJ (playing to a congress's loyalty to a fallen president by finally passing Kennedy sponsored legislation that had been held-up for years) it is likely that it wouldn't have approached the scope of what ultimately was passed. This isn't to say that Nixon's progressive tendencies would not have made themselves known during a '60-'68 term. It was during the real Nixon presidency of '68 to '74 that the EPA was enacted and welfare was expanded.

A Richard Nixon presidency that started long before the beginning of any student demonstrations and ending eight months before Woodstock (had it still occurred) would have muted Nixon's paranoid impulses set off by the war. Indeed, they may have remained dormant and prevented the very scandals that ended his career. Alas, timing would not have allowed for Nixon's greatest triumph, his opening to China. Nixon's '60-'68 term would have run simultaneously with Mao's calamitous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. It is inconceivable in such an ideological hot-house atmosphere that Mao would have been open to any rapprochement with the U.S.