The billion-dollar gravestone

IN THE NEWS
Tom Engelhardt's article about the proposed 9/11 memorial--"the largest, most expensive gravestone on earth"--captures many of my own feelings. There are no good choices about how to memorialize the World Trade Center victims; recent history has made these difficult decisions even more painful.

First, it's clear that the World Trade Center memorial is not going to be like the war memorial that marks American triumphs of right over wrong. You can feel sorrow when you visit the Gettysburg battlefield, or the Allied graveyard overlooking Omaha Beach, but the cold, stone markers stand for justifiable sacrifice as much as grievous loss. We beat the slave-holding Confederacy. We beat the genocidal Nazis. The historical and emotional scales dipped in the right direction.

However, there's no triumph to commemorate at Ground Zero in Manhattan. Nineteen terrorists, through a combination of guile and luck, slaughtered thousands of innocent office-workers and airline passengers. It's important not to leave a scar in the earth where the towers used to be; otherwise, you give the 9/11 hijackers and the people who helped them a kind of reverse triumphalist memorial, rubble instead of chiseled stone. Like the dead bodies and smashed buildings that the Nazis left in their wake, the wreckage of the 9/11 attacks need to be cleaned up.

But, short of paving over the original site of the World Trade Center, what should be done? The proposed underground museum, which will recount the 9/11 attacks, is fine, but at this point, hardly necessary. No one in the world, and certainly not in the United States, needs to be reminded of 9/11. Our memories of that day are not faulty; our grief hits us with no less force. Most battle sites lacked official markers or museums for years, sometimes decades, after the actual events. Why, then, the need to rush into construction a museum for the mass grave at the southern tip of Manhattan?

Engelhardt's article makes an important point about our memories and feelings about 9/11: since the Bush Administration worked very hard to connect the 9/11 attacks to the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo Bay, warrantless wiretaps, and other policies, it's nearly impossible to separate our feelings about 9/11 from our reactions to these subsequent events. Perhaps nothing should be done until Bush leaves office, since his legacy of hubris and calamity falls over the World Trade Center site as darkly as the shadow of two airliners slamming into the towers.

Certainly, the 1,776 "Freedom Tower" should not be built (if for no other reason than it gives future terrorists a brand new target). The allusion to the Declaration of Independence is too kitschy and inappropriate for chief target of the 9/11 terrorists. The name itself invites too much angst. Exactly what sort of "freedom" are we talking about? The freedoms that Americans enjoy, but Saudis and Egyptians do not? The freedom to continue living, in a way that the 9/11 victims cannot? The freedoms that Americans enjoyed before 9/11, but have been curtailed since then? Most of all, the name "Freedom Tower" borders on the sort of triumphalism which is exactly the opposite of what most Americans feel about 9/11. More than "Freedom Tower," two verbal points to describe a more complex emotional picture, this excerpt from Bruce Springsteen's "My City of Ruins" might be the constellation of words that better approximates the shape of our feelings:

There is a blood red circle
On the cold dark ground
And the rain is falling down
The church door's thrown open
I can hear the organ's song
But the congregation's gone
My city of ruins
My city of ruins

Springsteen's song (written before 9/11, but which fit into his post-9/11 album The Rising with eerie appropriateness), continues with the sentiment that I think is more fitting to a World Trade Center memorial:

Come on, rise up!  Come on, rise up!
Come on, rise up!  Come on, rise up!
Come on, rise up!  Come on, rise up!

Americans can't celebrate the 9/11 attacks, squeezing some non-existent victory out of that terrible day. We can rise up, in defiance of the sort of monstrous evil that killed the World Trade Center victims. We can abandon momentary despair for confidence, but not arrogance. They can renew their faith in our own country, without letting nineteen hijackers drive us to abandon our own cherished principles and institutions. We can take comfort in the fact that we are not alone (approximately one-fourth of the World Trade Center casualties were not US citizens; the world offered its help immediately after the attacks), instead of charging forth in unilateral rage. We can keep the 9/11 attacks in proper perspective (over 125,000 Americans died liberating Normandy in 1944, of which 1,465 died on D-Day alone), instead of embracing the role of World's Greatest Victim.

As a symbol of defiance against evil, and remembrance of those who died, one or two spotlights shining from Ground Zero might be a good idea. However, mounting a light on top of a 1,776-foot "Freedom Tower" is wrong for far too many reasons.

Comments

[tim]

Thanks for writing this. While we're still fighting, I don't think it's time for a memorial. Later. When we get the job done.

Whenever that is...

[barmor]

Very well said. I agree entirely.