June 25, 2006
Nearly five years after 9/11, chaos still reigns supreme at the massive hole in lower Manhattan. Friday morning I took a long walk around the site, wondering about this revised Ground Zero memorial, which Nicolai Ouroussoff so adeptly skewered in last Thursday's newspaper. Coming nearly nine months after his previous disquisition (as well as my own) on this subject, it appears this gestation period of the present mini-me Memorial has been retrograde rather than progress towards birth. Our gloom has not just deepened; it has hardened into concrete. So when Mayor Bloomberg announced Friday that an admission fee to the Trade Center Memorial would be necessary, the earthquake of public opinion was merely a blip on the radar screen. While Bloomberg is quite correct that charging an admission fee to a museum is "a common practice," one generally does not find a fee structure in place to visit hallowed ground, and charging admission to the site of the largest terrorist attack in American history certainly does strike one as unseemly, if not utterly vulgar. Yet he is most likely bluffing, still outraged and still finding clever new outlets to vent our collective rage that the multi-headed hydra known as "Homeland Security" has shortchanged this city in favor of such threatened places as Omaha. (Previously I'd assumed Nebraska's Offutt AFB—home of the vaunted Strategic Air Command—had enough firepower to guard the threatened meatpacking houses of Omaha.)
And what of our collective rage? I haven't seen The Great New Wonderful but probably it's more a documentary than a work of fiction. Summary: We just carry on, utterly self-absorbed in wake of 9/11. As A.O. Scott writes: That none of Mr. Leiner and Mr. Catlin's carefully cultivated urban specimens expresses a political opinion — or even the slightest hint of curiosity about or engagement with the larger world — creates a ringing silence that also amounts to a glaring false note. We are invited either to identify with them or to feel superior, which is not much of a choice. It may be that our mockery is meant, by the end, to melt into sympathy, but it is hard to feel much warmth toward people whose most salient feature is their disconnection from reality.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. A more apt synedoche might be the Freedom Tower, whose 20-ton cornerstone got carted away on Friday. In other words, after all the speeches, memorials, tributes, arguments, and so on, we've simply checked out. And so have the Memorial, the Freedom Tower, and the politicians. But the tourists are still there. Even in a light drizzle, video cameras were everywhere as the office workers dodged the visitors with the usual snarls on their upper lips, fully aware yet morbidly silent about the truth that dare not be spoken: We are really sick of this hole in the ground, but rigor mortis has set in, and we haven't got the ability to move forward just yet.
Meanwhile you can go visit the cornerstone in its plexiglass case (by appointment only) at Innovative Stone on Long Island.
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Posted on 6/25/2006
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