As television cameras transmitted the aftermath of the first crash, smoke and flames billowing from near the top of the northern tower, the video captured a second plane slamming into the southern tower.

The horrific images of the second crash were caught in live video. At about 10 a.m., the south tower disappeared behind a huge plume of billowing smoke, apparently indicating part of the building collapse.

Witnesses said they saw people jumping from the building before the collapse.

The New York Port Authority said it had closed all bridges and tunnels into the city.

Sources told CNN that one of the planes was an American Airlines Boeing 767 that had been hijacked after take-off from Boston.

The scene on the ground was chaotic, witnesses said.

Sean Murtagh, a CNN vice president, was in an office near the World Trade Center towers at the time of the first crash. He witnessed the crash. Murtagh said he saw the plane "teetering back and forth, wingtip to wingtip" before the plane smashed into the side of the building.

Jeanne Yurman witnessed the explosion that followed the crash. "At first it was like leaflets," she said, describing the debris that fell to the ground. "There was tons of debris and it continues to fall out." NEW YORK (CNN) -- Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan on

Tuesday in what President Bush called "an apparent terrorist attack on our country."

About an hour after those crashes, an explosion forced the evacuation of the Pentagon in Washington and a fire erupted on the Washington Mall. Another fire was reported at the State

Department. The White House and other government buildings were also evacuated. In Chicago, the Sears Tower was evacuated.

Witnesses told CNN that a helicopter circled the Pentagon and disappeared on the other side of the building shortly before the explosion and fireball.

The Federal Aviation Administration shut down all airports in the country.

Bush, in Sarasota, Florida, where he was to speak on education reform, cancelled those plans.

"Today we've had a national tragedy," Bush said from Sarasota, Florida, where he had been reading to children at Emma E. Booker Elementary School. He described the incidents as an "apparent terrorist act."

The president said he was returning immediately to Washington and had authorized a full investigation to find those responsible.

Reuters

Sep 28 2001 6:17PM

MIAMI (Reuters) - Whatever happened to the fizzy, confident American culture of celebrity gazing,

millionaire sports stars, reality television and obsessive media speculation over a congressman's sex life?

The love lives of singers, the drug problems of retired ball players and people pretending to be "survivors" for television shows seemed starkly irrelevant after Sept. 11.

Nobody could predict when such issues might regain a grip on the public imagination. Some hoped popular culture's brassy trivia might be permanently relegated to a lesser space.

"During these recent days of nonstop news, did anyone miss the aggressive advertising or obsession with fame, sex, celebrity and beauty?" the Los Angeles Times pondered in an editorial this week,

wondering whether the disastrous attacks on New York and Washington might have perhaps "cured our infatuation with shallow fame and hollow shocks."

"Does the buzz over cleavage at a canned awards show merit even a sigh now? Or the celebrations of gossip and notoriety, misogyny and violence that pervaded our public chatter as recently as Sept. 10? Having seen the obscenity of real violence, does anyone await more of the staged stuff?"

Even if it does not turn out to be a deep-seated "shake" of the culture sought by that newspaper, the change was abrupt.

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's marital problems, documented so relentlessly over the summer, were forgotten as he steered his city through grief to near universal admiration.

Amid the tragedy that left nearly 6,500 people dead or missing in a matter of hours, it seemed an age since cable television's epic quest for more information about California Rep. Gary Condit's relationship with missing Washington intern Chandra Levy.

Who now recalled the "Summer of the Shark," when media whipped up a storm over what marine-life experts kept insisting was just the normal, low rate of shark attacks on beach-goers?

NEW, REAL HEROES

The new heroes of America were not film stars overcoming a messy break-up with their partner but people like the New York firefighters who plodded up the World Trade Center's flaming towers as they urged office workers to keep moving out.

Several hundred firefighters and New York police were lost when the towers collapsed in a rumble of dust and debris.

Well-paid sports stars, once so readily dubbed "heroes," were up for reappraisal by commentators, who mused on their past use of words like tragic to describe a losing team.

Writing on Michael Jordan's return to basketball, New York Times sports columnist Harvey Araton wrote he was coming back to "an industry suddenly defined more than ever as a diversion."

"Fans will scream for your autograph. Sportswriters will flock to your news conferences. But they may also very well be judging you by the instantly created standards of Sept. 11, by your attentiveness to the world around you, by how much of a better place you actually make it," Araton warned.

And, after Sept. 11, the big story in the entertainment world was not Tom Cruise's new love interest or yet more navel-gazing in the direction of lithe teen Britney Spears.

The story was what entertainers did to help relief efforts. Many, including Cruise, stepped up to organize benefits. Some made clear they knew their place in the bigger scheme of things.

"We are merely artists, entertainers, here to raise spirits, and, we hope, a great deal of money," said Tom Hanks during a televised show to raise help for victims.

"We had not seen the stars in a while," wrote a columnist in the Miami New Times of the show. "Hundreds of tiny photos of the murdered and missing squeezed out large airbrushed glossies of George Clooney and Julia Roberts. Brutally interrupted, the lives of ordinary people suddenly

seemed more remarkable."

There was a scramble for respectful good taste by television networks, advertisers and Hollywood.

Networks delayed their fall program schedules by a week and Hollywood postponed release of two fall films with a terrorism element, Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Collateral Damage" and "Big Trouble" starring Tim Allen.

Film director Woody Allen predicted that Hollywood might shy away from making violent movies for a while.

"I am sure the people in Hollywood whose main drive in films is making money would feel that any reference, any use of the word 'hijacking' or any reference to anything violent or anything remotely associated with the terrible tragedy that occurred would lose customers for them," Allen said.

As commentators mourned a collective loss of innocence, it was too early to tell what the long-term effect might be on popular culture. But there were signs of a return to normal this week with the reappearance of irreverence.

The Onion, an online magazine, returned with trade-mark parodic headlines savaging mainstream cliches -- such as "Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake."

Bill Maher, host of late night ABC show "Politically Incorrect," questioned social pressure to fly the flag.

The man flying five flags from his truck said to the man displaying just four flags from his vehicle, "Go home to Afghanistan," went the joke on his show on Thursday night.

 "I stayed home and clung to my boyfriend all day, completely blown away

and in shock, speechless."

-- ALANIS MORISSETTE, in Rolling Stone.

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"Unfortunately, some people are going to use this horrible tragedy as a

pretext to trample on our civil liberties. We simply can't allow it."

-- Rage Against the Machine guitarist TOM MORELLO, in Rolling Stone.

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Ray Chat w/Elle 10/03:

I just think it's making people THINK again...where for so long everything was animal reaction. Independent thought is a marvelous medicine for the consciousness of a person OR a country!

Above was my quick thought...what follow are my collective, reflective thoughts that morning as it was still just sinking in...