Buzzing Manhattan

I don’t know what kind of photos the Pentagon was looking for, or what they got, but this image — taken yesterday by one Jason McLane on his cell phone — seems to have emerged, as I look around the web, as the signature shot of yesterday’s aerial misunderstanding over NYC. (For a cross section, here is a WSJ slide show of reader-supplied photos of the fly over, and here is the one the NYT ran.)

This one is a particularly macabre shot for a number of reason, including: a.) the grainy, captured-by-bystander quality; b.) the low orientation of the plane in what could loosely be imagined as an alignment to the building; c.) the sense of the fighter plane as either a second airliner further away, or the Air Force in pursuit of a hijack; and d.) the strange juxtaposition of the (phallic-looking) crane, which maybe (in a 9/11 do-over fantasy?) conjures a shoot-down scenario.

(image: Jason McLane via A.P.)