Ground Zero Is So Over
recommended — frank rich
wow. i figured this was going to be a pile o’ tripe. not too shabby for an NYT entry.
In its not-so-brief and thoroughly unhappy life, ground zero has been a site for many things: tragedy and grief, political campaigns and protests, battling architects and warring cultural institutions, TV commercials and souvenir hustlers. Perhaps it was inevitable we’d end up at pure unadulterated farce.That’s where we are as of this Memorial Day weekend. A 1,776-foot Freedom Tower with no tenants – and no prospect of tenants – has been abruptly sent back to the drawing board after the Marx Brothers-like officials presiding over the chaos acknowledged troubling security concerns about truck bombs. But truck bombs may be the least of the demons scaring away prospective occupants. The simple question that no one could answer the day after 9/11 remains unanswered today: What sane person would want to work in a skyscraper destined to be the most tempting target for aerial assault in the Western world? As if to accentuate this obvious, if frequently suppressed, psychological bottom line, news of the Freedom Tower’s latest delay was followed like clockwork by a Cessna’s easy penetration of supposedly secure air space near the White House, prompting panicky evacuation scenes out of the 50′s horror classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
[...] But what has most separated America from the old exigencies of 9/11 – and therefore from the fate of ground zero – is, at long last, the decoupling of the war on terror from the war on Iraq. The myth fostered by the administration that Saddam Hussein conspired in the 9/11 attacks is finally dead and so, apparently, is the parallel myth that Iraqis were among that day’s hijackers. Our initial, post-9/11 war against Al Qaeda – the swift and decisive victory over the Taliban – is now seen as both a discrete event and ancient history (as is the hope of nailing Osama bin Laden dead or alive); Afghanistan itself has fallen off the American radar screen except as a site for burgeoning poppy production and the deaths of detainees in American custody. In its place stands only the war in Iraq, which is increasingly seen as an add-on to the war provoked by 9/11 and whose unpopularity grows by the day.Take a look at any recent poll you choose – NBC/Wall Street Journal, Harris, CNN/Gallup/USA Today – and you find comparable figures of rising majority disapproval of the war. Or ignore the polls and look at those voting with their feet: the Army has missed its recruiting goals three months in a row, and the Marines every month since January, despite reports of scandalous ethical violations including the forging of high-school diplomas and the hoodwinking of the mentally ill by unscrupulous recruiters. Speaking bitterly about the Army’s strenuous effort to cover up his son’s death by friendly fire, Pat Tillman’s father crystallized the crisis in an interview with The Washington Post last week: “They realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about this death got out. They blew up their poster boy.”
THE cost of the war is rapidly becoming the routine stuff of mainstream popular culture. July 27 will bring the debut of “Over There,” a powerful new weekly TV drama by Steven Bochco (“NYPD Blue”) and Chris Gerolmo (“Mississippi Burning”) that takes no political stand on the war but dramatizes the ripped torsos, broken homefront lives and unknown expiration date of our Iraq adventure in the unsparing detail that has often been absent from network news. The show is being presented not by some liberal cabal but by the rising cable network that “Nip/Tuck” built – FX – a franchise of Rupert Murdoch. On June 21 FX is also bringing back Denis Leary’s jaundiced look at post-9/11 firefighters, “Rescue Me.” In the first new episode, the hero throws a bag of “twin-tower cookies” back at the vendor selling them, heaving in anger that those who died that fateful morning have been usurped by kitsch.
Tomorrow, Memorial Day itself, will bring another “Nightline” reading of the names of the fallen: the more than 900 Americans who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since Ted Koppel’s previous recitation. When he read 721 names in April 2004, Mr. Koppel was labeled a traitor by the right for daring to call attention to the casualties, and some affiliates even refused to broadcast the show. This time the prospect of a televised roll call of the dead has caused little notice at all. Like the latest setbacks at ground zero, it is a troubling but increasingly distant event to those Americans who, unlike the families and neighbors of the fallen, can and have turned the page.
May 30th, 2005 at 02:33
Interesting, so what your saying is it could go either direction?
Liberal For Life
May 30th, 2005 at 03:26
oh don’t start with that bullshit. i’m not part of the “you’re vanilla, i’m chocolate” crowd. what you’ve said makes no sense in the context of either what i wrote or the article.
“duh… erm, it could go either direction, is that what you’re saying? interesting.”
“it”? “either direction”? what does that mean? mealy-mouthed dipshit. go polish your lenin statue.