Reader Nate W. comments:
I'm not sure either factor you mention - the grandiosity of an airplane crash or the humdrum banality of an attack at a Walmart - is the compelling factor in how much a terrorist attack affects the culture at large. Much more important, it seems to me, is whether the attack itself is caught on film and broadcast to the populace. The visual images are what stay with us, haunt us, terrorize us. We like to think that we would have been just as outraged at 9/11 even if we hadn't seen the towers fall, that our indignation, sorrow and fear was a reaction to the nature of the events themselves, and not the fact that we witnessed them. But I suspect the truth is less flattering and that we would live in a very different world if the fiery deaths of that day were not something we all of us witnessed, but something we read about in the paper.
