Are we really that ignorant? Not only can no one make a freaking space movie without turning it into a poli-sci lesson, they can’t even make a memorial without a load of crap having nothing to do with what’s being memorlialised.

Opinion Journal – The Great Ground Zero Heist: Will the 9/11 “memorial” have more about Abu Ghraib than New York’s heroic firemen? BY DEBRA BURLINGAME

The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man’s inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich’s Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.

The public will be confused at first, and then feel hoodwinked and betrayed. Where, they will ask, do we go to see the September 11 Memorial? The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation will have erected a building whose only connection to September 11 is a strained, intellectual one. While the IFC is getting 300,000 square feet of space to teach us how to think about liberty, the actual Memorial Center on the opposite corner of the site will get a meager 50,000 square feet to exhibit its 9/11 artifacts, all out of sight and underground.

Okay, let’s review: We have (off the top of my head) Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Roosevelt statue, the Smithsonian, the Holocaust Museum, the new Native American museum, the Natural History museums all around the country, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, Capital Hill, Arlington National Cemetery, Monticello, Mount Vernon, the LOVE sign in Philly (two of them, actually), the Vietnam War Memorial, the WWII Memorial, the very probable (and probably including Abu Ghraib) Iraq War memorial, and hundreds of other places (publicly funded) reminding us of our history, lecturing us on our sins, pounding into us everything depressing in the world, for the purpose of “teaching us how to think about liberty.”

We only have one great big hole where the World Trade Center used to be. Perhaps we should concentrate on that, hmm? For the sake of at least avoiding gross redundancy?

The so-called lessons of September 11 should not be force-fed by ideologues hoping to use the memorial site as nothing more than a powerful visual aid to promote their agenda. Instead of exhibits and symposiums about Internationalism and Global Policy we should hear the story of the courageous young firefighter whose body, cut in half, was found with his legs entwined around the body of a woman. Recovery personnel concluded that because of their positions, the young firefighter was carrying her.

The people who visit Ground Zero in five years will come because they want to pay their respects at the place where heroes died. They will come because they want to remember what they saw that day, because they want a personal connection, to touch the place that touched them, the place that rallied the nation and changed their lives forever. I would wager that, if given a choice, they would rather walk through that dusty hangar at JFK Airport where 1,000 World Trade Center artifacts are stored than be herded through the International Freedom Center’s multi-million-dollar insult.

Date: Jun 8th, 2005 · Comments RSS · Tags: People and Current Events