Sept. 11, 2001 scarred our national psyche. Even today, it provokes impassioned responses across the political spectrum. It's important to treat this sensitive subject with delicacy and restraint, and we promise to do so, just as soon as we get finished showing you all these people who most certainly did not.

9 Towers Shrinking to Dodge Planes in European Ad

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This is an ad for a French newsmagazine. The tagline is "Learn to anticipate."

The visual seems to suggest that the easiest way to prevent 9/11 would have been to construct the WTC towers shorter. We shouldn't have increased airport security, or paid more attention to our foreign intelligence, or maybe not trained and funded Osama bin Laden in the late 1970s; it all could have been avoided if we'd just quit at the 80th story.

What possible defense is there for this? "We, the French, were simply unaware that the planes were piloted by terrorists! We thought your planes just could not fly high enough to overcome your mighty buildings!"



"This is why we build plane-holes into our towers."

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This ad is clearly implying that, had the buildings been shorter, the terrorists would have simply continued their flights unabated, like they stole the planes in the first place only to fulfill their long-held dreams of attending flight school. We don't want to make fun of all French people here, because this is just an isolated incident by a really stupid company, and also because we actually have a lot of respect for their military prowess and innovative whoremongering.

But this ad demonstrates a very shaky grasp of aeronautics, engineering, tact and even the loosest definition of sanity. Or maybe it's simply suggesting that we should have had the foresight to build magical squishy buildings -- ones that could comically shrink to duck under missiles. You know, looking back now, it's easy to come up with a solution like that, France. Everything seems clearer in hindsight. But the world was a much simpler place back then; we didn't know how bad we needed the squishiness. We just ... we didn't know.