Take Back The Memorial

(H/T to The Pete)

Build the damn towers again. That is all. Put at the bottom of the tower a statue or something commemorating ONLY those that died on 9/11. Everyone else...go somewhere else for your political agenda. Too bad the New York Times is too stupid to get it.

Somewhere in the ill-conceived campaign to "take back the memorial" at ground zero, false impressions have managed to triumph over facts. This week, Debra Burlingame, a board member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, and others called for a boycott of fund-raising for the memorial until the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center have been banished from ground zero. She argues that money for the memorial will be intermingled with funds for the cultural building that is supposed to house the Freedom Center and the Drawing Center. This is both misleading and harmful to the memorial itself. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation has

pledged that its first priority is to build the memorial and create an endowment for it. Private donors are free to specify how they choose to have their money spent.


The attacks on the International Freedom Center - and, more broadly, on the cultural component of Daniel Libeskind's master plan - make it all too easy to forget the existence of a Memorial Museum that is devoted wholly to the events of 9/11. Opponents of the Freedom Center, like Ms. Burlingame, claim that the Memorial Museum will be dwarfed by the cultural center. In fact, they overstate the size of the Snohetta building, which is being scaled back for other reasons, and they have exaggerated the floor space allotted there for the International Freedom Center. They also make it sound as if the Memorial Museum, which at 50,000 square feet is larger than the public spaces in the Whitney Museum, is somehow an afterthought relegated to the basement. It will be built underground, but that is because the 9/11 families asked to have access to the bedrock and to what remains of the foundation of the twin towers. To argue over the size of these two spaces is to assume that emotional power is solely the result of square footage. It is also to forget the profound effect that going to the roots of the World Trade Center will have on most visitors.

But this is not really a campaign about money or space. It is a campaign about political purity - about how people remember 9/11 and about how we choose to read its aftermath, including the Iraq war. On their Web site, www.takebackthememorial.org, critics of the cultural plan at ground zero offer a resolution called Campaign America. It says that ground zero must contain no facilities "that house controversial debate, dialogue, artistic impressions, or exhibits referring to extraneous historical events." This, to us, sounds un-American.

That is because you (the NYT) have lost your grip on reality. A memorial for A tragic event should never be a discussion about MANY tragic events. It should not become a lesson in history outside the scope of that ONE memorialized event.

This is why I no longer waste my time scanning the New York Times. They do not understand America or Americans. They have lost touch with this country years ago. And the useful idiots that read the NYT religiously are equally out of touch.