In the face of terror, Britain has surrendered to men in yellow fluorescent jerkins

Had your fill of 9/11 porn yet? I guarantee if you turn on the TV at this moment on some channel there’ll be a plane crashing into a building and a nutter from the Midwest telling you it was organised by the Jews via the offices of the Zionist Occupation Government, the towers packed with thermite, the Pentagon hit not by an aircraft but by a missile, Rumsfeld an alien lizard creature, Charlie Sheen or some other madman asking why They keep lying to us. Or one of the more upmarket programmes — same shot of the planes crashing in and people jumping out of the windows, but done in slo-mo with accompanying music by La Monte Young or Philip Glass.

Those images were, for a while, considered contraband, deemed for some indeterminate period of time after 9/11 to be too harrowing to watch; but now we cannot get enough of them.