Blogorrhea Junior

Who Owns Ground Zero?

The simple answer to this question is, of course, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who have leased it to Silverstein Properties for the next twenty years or so. But because it's the site of a tragedy of vast if not epic proportions, the site belongs at least metaphorically to everyone: the victims families, the people of New York, everyone who was deeply affected by what happened there. But you'd never know this from the squabbling that's going on about the presence of the Freedom Center on Ground Zero.

If it were an either/or question of the Freedom Center or the memorial, I could understand the rejection of a museum dedicated to exploring notions of freedom all over the world. If the Center were not going to make a point of discussing freedom in the context of 9/11, I could understand the outrage then, too. Neither of these facts are true. The Freedom Center is planned to co-exist with the memorial to the victims, and the first galleries visitors enter will be dedicated to the events that took place on that site. What's at issue seems to be two things: both the museum's vision and its right to occupy space adjacent to the land considered to be the resting place of the victims.

First, let's dispel the latter myth. There are no human remains at Ground Zero. If there is anything left there after the fires, the tons of water applied to put them out, the pulverization from the weight of debris, the mechanical maceration from digging, the natural decay of unpreserved biological matter over time, it's mere undifferentiated molecules. Where bodies were not rapidly recovered and removed from the site for burial, actual remains were only fragments that found their way down a conveyor belt at Fresh Kills. Tons of debris was trucked there in the clean up operation and very little of it was organic. What remains now at what was the World Trade Center is a hole in the ground, nearly down to bedrock. There are not even ashes left and barely dust. It is not a grave site.

What makes Ground Zero sacred ground is what happened there, not who yet abides in its soil. That said, there can be nothing holy to desecrate with the presence of a secular building.

I have a lot of sympathy for the families of the 9/11 victims. Losing people we love is hard enough without losing them violently and with no warning. The grief from violent loses is so much more sudden and agonizing that I find it impossible not to empathize. One of my cousins was murdered several years ago, and I've just lost four people, including both of my parents, in the last ten months. Saying that kind of loss is painful doesn't begin to cover it. I'm not sure people ever get over the sudden loss of people they love, whether it's by accident, violent intent, or the normal course of things. And that kind of pain can make us do and say things we normally would not.

So I am trying to cut the family and friends of the victims who are protesting the museum some slack. (Political naysayers are another matter.) It's getting harder and harder as this protest goes on, because the protest seems both selfish and an attempt to negate the reason these people died. It seems to me they are doing their own loved ones a dishonor by protesting the location of the Freedom Center and by trying to muzzle its message.

Debra Burlingame, sister of one of the pilots, epitomizes this blinkered view. For her, Ground Zero is a personal memorial, divorced from any connection to larger world events. No one else seems to have any right to share in her grief, to be appalled by such a waste of life or the reason for it, to focus on anything but that loss of life, as though what happened at Ground Zero were itself that simple. It's all about her grief and the grief of like-minded families, and worse, all about a certain sector of the U.S. population that feels government actions or American ideology should never be analyzed or questioned:

"So the very first experience that the visitors will get when they come from Cedar Rapids, Portland, Ore., and Tallahassee, Fla., was not how we experienced 9/11 but how the people, say, in Bangladesh experienced it?" she asked. "Imagine erecting an edifice at the U.S.S. Arizona where before we hear their story, we get the world's view, maybe the Axis powers' view of World War II," she said. "I can't imagine how they're thinking."

If this were just an argument about what belongs at Ground Zero, that would be bad enough, but Burlingame has only couched the argument in those terms. One of the points she's making, whether she realizes it or not, is that there is only one interpretation of history, and in this case, that's the interpretation of some of the victim's families and a few other groups. Actually, it's worse than this. In Burlingame's view, there is not even any history to interpret; there is only this isolated event, plucked from history to stand without context. The only event that has any meaning to her is the deaths that occurred on that site, not what lead up to them, or why they happened, which are among the issues the Freedom Center would explore.

Not only is this tantamount to censorship, it's like saying it's wrong to examine the history and causes of the Holocaust on the grounds of Auschwitz. Where better to analyze it than at the scene of the crime, surrounded by the echoes of the victims voices? Surely some of them would want to know why this happened, not just for us to remember that it did.

Neither the Pearl Harbor memorials nor the camp at Auschwitz are the correct comparisons however. The Pearl Harbor memorials are, after all, war memorials to soldiers killed in combat: a tragic but not unexpected or unusual occurrence. Auschwitz, in this sense, is closer to the circumstances of Ground Zero, in that it memorializes innocent civilians caught up in the machinations of an evil ideology. The motto of countless Holocaust memorials the world over is "Never Forget": never forget that this happened, and just as importantly, never forget why it happened. The Holocaust is one of those events that are so appalling that it makes one doubt the humanity of the perpetrators. The same could be said of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with a difference. In this case, Americans were the perpetrators and to call that act inhuman holds an uncomfortable mirror up to our image of ourselves. I suspect this is part of the reason for the Burlingame crowd's protests.

At the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it's good to remember what sprang up as a memorial in the latter city: not just a memorial to the dead but a museum and monument to peace. Out of the ashes of the ideology of superior races and imperial invasion rose a complex whose message is not just to memorialize the dead and maimed but to spread an ideology of peace, and a clear political message that calls on all nations to disarm their nuclear arsenals so that no one ever again suffers as the citizens of these two cities did.

Not just the Japanese. Not just Americans. No one should suffer. Isn't that what we should be saying with the Freedom Center? No one should ever again suffer such an atrocity ever again. Not Iraqis, not Israelis. Not Palestinians. Not Spaniards, not the British. Perhaps if we keep saying this, if we say it long enough, enough times, ideologues will get the message. But to act as if the suffering endured by the victims of 9/11 is relevant only to them only furthers the sick ideology that we are somehow different from the rest of the world.

An antidote to this attitude is Elisa Salasin's take on September 11th:

We are all wronged until we are able to collectively recognize and articulate the continuity of tragedy, which stretched long before September 11th, and lives on today in Iraq, in Niger, in the destroyed lives of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. This continuity of tragedy is fueled by Martin Luther King’s interrelated triple evils of poverty, racism, and war, and by each of our blindness and indifference to our role in this poisonous relationship. In his Beyond Vietnam address, King spoke of the need to send a message to the world, one of longing, of hope, of solidarity, and commitment: “The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.” This is a choice that requires we do more than bring our bodies to the streets . . . and then retreat back within our own lives. . . .

If we refuse to examine the situation and circumstances that led to 9/11, if we refuse to question the role of our own ideology in the rage of others, we remove ourselves from any responsibility to the human race. We remove ourselves from the human race. If we lack the courage to ask ourselves hard questions about what reactions our actions cause, we are saying that we are nothing but animals who act without thought. And if we do that, those people who died at Ground Zero don't deserve any memorial.

Where we choose to examine our role in the world's suffering is just as important as when and how and if we do it. Who better to speak of that tragedy than the dead? Who better to soften the hearts of world leaders, ordinary citizens, zealots, and fanatics than the spiritual presence of 3,000 innocents? Keep the Freedom Center at the World Trade Center Memorial site. And keep its message free, too.

A Prophet in his Own Land

Tom Waits: "I wish New Orleans was dry and Washington was underwater."

To which I say, yea, verily. (With the exception of my friends Jen, Rich, Bob & Carlos, of course.)

Another Good-Bye

My cousin Diane Allam died today of congestive heart failure; she was only in her early 60s but hadn't been well for some time. I'm going to miss her tremendously. I don't often have regrets about what I have or haven't done, but I do regret I didn't get down to see her in Florida before she died. We emailed back and forth a lot and talked for hours when we called each other, but I haven't actually seen her for almost five years. And now I won't.

Diane, or DeeDee, as Mom and I called her, was majorly cool.

She was one of my favorite cousins and I have a lot of things to thank her for. She was one of the first to go to college in our family and blazed that trail for me. She taught high school history and she, along with my parents, also inspired my interest in that subject. I still remember the graduation present she gave me, which turned out to be more practical than I imagined at the time: a Chloe shower set with its own carrying tray to haul back and forth to the dorm showers. I used it all four years at Chatham. Along with that was a copy of Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, which was deemed essential reading for her generation of college students. Thanks to her, I also got interested in Rumi and haiku.

When I was a teenager, she helped fuel my desire to come to New York with her love of theatre. I loved the fast little red Italian sports cars she always bought; I loved driving down the road singing show tunes at the top of my voice with her, or sitting at her player piano and singing Liza Minnelli and Barbra Streisand songs with her. When she went to Europe after college and came back with boxes and boxes of the most fabulous slides, that spurred my desire to go there, too.

And I have her to thank for my Tolkien addiction. I was in Junior High when she gave me a copy of The Hobbit, and sent me down the rabbit hole of fantasy literature.

DeeDee always seemed fearless to me and I always remember her personality filling a room with laughter and fun without sucking all the air out of it, at least when we were both younger. As we got older, she got sadder and quieter and more conservative and we argued about politics a lot, being a polar ends of the spectrum. That didn't change my feelings for her at all and it was nice to be old enough to be on some kind of equal footing with her as an adult. When I came back from my own first jaunt to England, she invited me to do a presentation on the historical King Arthur for her classes and that helped confirm my love of teaching, too. It was also interesting to be treated like an adult by her.

As a teacher, DeeDee gave a lot of time and attention to her students and I know from her stories that many of them remembered her fondly. With me, she was encouraging and demanding that I make the most of my education, keep writing, keep thinking, keep learning. She was tough and demanding with her own students and didn't cut them much slack, but she was never mean and always encouraging. In that way she was also a role model for my own classroom methodology. When I was teaching, we shared many of the same frustrations with the educational system and she taught me to care passionately about imparting knowledge. If I was a good teacher as a grad student and after, it was in part because of her example.

She was a generous person, too, sometimes to a fault. When my mother had cancer and heart surgery, I stayed with her and she ran me back and forth to the hospital every day to see her. We talked about our families on those long drives and I think that cemented our friendship as adults probably more than anything else. More than ever, she felt like a kindred soul, and her sadness with her life made me sad too.

Rest in Peace, DeeDee. I hope what comes next for you gives you the joy you were missing.

Another Year Gone By

On High

A flock of white birds
wheeling against a grey sky
calls for towers—
not the flat brick rooftops of Bronx projects
on view from my window,
their cisterns like prison blockhouses.
In that concerted, graceful turning
I see a London skyline
daggered with steeples,
and somewhere a man watching, too, like me,
across the ages: Pepys at his diary pages
perhaps, following the motion
of mourning doves through his window, or
contemplating the smoke of the Great Fire
that brought down Old St. Paul’s soaring spire.

Here in this new city named and renamed
for two in the old world,
migrating birds lost their way
and their lives among our towers,
confused by the glass, the lights at night,
the sheer height and wind shear
and their own reflections.
Another fire toppled those pillars too,
brought to them on wings
meant for other destinations.
In their own intercontinental flights, the birds
pass lightly through that empty space now
without memory of what once hindered them,
while on the ground, we squabble and peck
about what to build in the towers’ place
to raise us high enough to meet
the same uplifting wind.

–In remembrance, New York City, 2005

© Lee Kottner 2005

"Of the People, By the People, For the People"

Last night, I came as close as I ever have to an argument with one of my oldest friends about politics, specifically about what the government does and doesn't owe its citizens in a natural disaster. Fiercely independent and generous, she maintains it is up to neighbors to help each other, and up to individuals to help themselves. Under normal circumstances, I'd agree with her, but Hurricane Katrina's aftermath is not normal circumstances. In this case, especially in New Orleans, the weakest, poorest and most vulnerable citizens have been left behind to suffer. What you see in the news clips are the underclass of the country, trapped by lack of money, lack of transportation, lack of resources in general, poor health and small children. It's all very well to say neighbors should help each other, but when all of your neighbors lack the same resources you do, what then?

This is really what I pay taxes for. It's why I don't complain that I pay such exorbitant city taxes. My money goes to subsidize cops (whose attitude and methods may piss me off but who should still be applauded for doing a dangerous job), firefighters, paramedics, free clinics, garbage collectors, public utilities, safety inspectors, public transportation, and safety nets for the poor and the vulnerable. During and after 9/11, it was mostly the city's agencies that picked us up, dusted us off, and put us back together again. The cost was enormous, as was the effort; it crippled our economy for years. And we were lucky that the damage was confined to a relatively small area—unlike New Orleans.

The damage in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast is so enormous and pervasive that it's almost impossible to grasp. When have we ever had to completely evacuate an entire city, abandoning it to the forces of nature? Neither the Chicago fire nor the San Francisco earthquake required measures that drastic. And yet, this was not a surprise. Hurricane Katrina was closely tracked as it roared across Florida, into the Gulf, and picked up enough steam to become a devastating category 5 storm, with New Orleans in its gunsights. Mandatory evacuation orders did go out, but there were no mechanisms in place for evacuating—guess who?—the poor, the elderly, the sick. The people who most need help, most of whom happened to be black.

I firmly believe that the test of a good government is how it treats its weakest citizens, and the people whose votes it can't count on. Government's job is to step in and do what good neighbors can't. It's beyond the power of any small group to evacuate a neighborhood. But local agencies like school boards can provide buses to help people get out of town to refugee centers that are also beyond the capability of individuals to organize and set up. This is the purpose of first responders.

It's easy to say that neighbors should help each other, and I couldn't agree more, especially on a day to day basis. But, for instance, if I had to evacuate from where I live right now, I'm not sure how I'd do it. I don't own a car, and getting out of town on public transportation would be a huge chore with everyone else in my neighborhood who doesn't own a car trying to do the same thing. And if I had to evacuate the Northeast corridor, say, from Boston to Washington DC (roughly the same size swath that was devastated by Katrina), where would I go? Sure, I could walk out of the Bronx with a map. But to where? Now, compound this by having small children, or elderly or infirm parents with me.

And if my neighborhood, or worse, my city were flattened and nobody had any food or water or shelter, what then? Whose responsibility is it to help out then? How far does the designation "neighbor" extend in such cases? Sure, I'd share whatever I had, and no doubt many other people would too. But when what you have runs out, when you've exhausted all your own personal resources, what then? Ideally, this is where government steps it. Even according to conservatives, the government has an obligation to perform the functions that individuals or small government entities like cities or states cannot: national security, law enforcement, etc. In the wake of large-scale disasters, cities and states may not have the resources to cope. Even private relief agencies like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army often don't have immediate funds available for large scale disasters like this one. That's where the federal government kicks in.

And in a case like Katrina, an ounce of prevention would have been worth a pound of medicine.

Instead, the government cut funds for Army Corps of Engineers projects like re-engineering and repairing New Orleans' levees (it's too late to say it was stupid to build below sea-level, though it is; the city's location is already a fact) to—dare I say it?—fight an unnecessary war in Iraq. If, as President Lincoln maintained in the Gettysburg address, government is "of the people, by the people, and for the people," it certainly has an obligation to help those people, especially those in dire need, rather than letting them slip through the cracks as was done in neglecting to help the poorest and neediest and weakest evacuate the New Orleans area. This is especially true of a government that led by a man who claims to be not just Christian, but chosen by God to lead the country. Remember "You must love your neighbor as yourself" and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"?

If this is compassionate conservatism, I'd hate to see the cold-hearted kind.

Lucky

Once again, I'm reminded that no matter how bad you think your life is, someone somewhere else almost always has it worse. In the normal course of things, I've lost both elderly parents in less than a year. One was ill and in a lot of pain and ready to go, the other went before he knew what hit him. So, while I'm the last of this part of the family, I still have lots of friends, two homes, a job, my health, and a bit of a windfall. There's nothing extraordinary about my situation. People go through this all the time and I'll get through it eventually too.

Then there's the citizens of New Orleans, or what was New Orleans. Hundreds dead, others stripped of homes, possessions, food, water, basic amenities and services, some of them injured and sick, some of them still waiting to be rescued, others left to wander in the wilderness by an incompetent, uncaring government which has severely fallen down on its job of helping and protecting the people who pay their salaries.

You can help by clicking here. Give what you can. Your government has already squandered the tax dollars that should be paying for this, so make a tax deductible contribution now that will actually do its job.

Some Observations on TV

Trapped up here alone in the boondocks of Middle America for three weeks with nothing but digital cable and an Internet connection to keep me company, I've discovered—or been reminded of—a few things about TV that once again reinforce my desire not to have one.  Like how racist and sexist it is. For instance:

• Lifetime Television, "Entertainment for Women"? Sure. This consists of one horror story after another of the awful things that can happen to women. I suppose the justification for this is that it helps to publicize women's problems: battering, rape, spousal abuse, kidnapping, the dangers of Internet dating, and for young women: AIDS, date rape, teenage pregnancy, homelessness and drug abuse. After catching a couple of previews for their exclusive Lifetime movies, all I wanna do is lock my doors and stay inside and be a good girl. After watching three episodes of "Strong Medicine," I'm ready to hurl, especially after the strong, beautiful, intelligent woman leaves her job to become supermom to an AIDS baby and her foster-care battered older sister. The show reads like a liberal propaganda mill, which, while certainly better than a conservative propaganda mill, is still repulsive. It's great that the show covers issues like women's health, health care for the poor, and prison issues, but it's so incredibly heavy handed, like all of Lifetime, that I feel battered just watching it. Some subtlety, please. The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that Lifetime, like Jenny Craig, is a Tool of the Man.
• Spike TV. "It's not cheating if you're asleep."  Well, no comment on that one. But how come Spike has all the shows I like, and Lifetime has none of them? Lifetime is all about feelings, ad nauseum, as though that were all women understood, while Spike, in its guy-oriented sports and truck mix, also has reruns of MacGuyver and CSI, not to mention Star Trek DS-9 and TNG, which tend to feature strong, intelligent women who don't dramatize everything. And you don't see Law & Order SVU on Lifetime. Not enough weeping on it, I suspect.
• Right Guard Xtreme Power Stripe commercials, the "Red Rover" version. Why is the deodorant side all a bunch of white guys and the stinky side all black? I get the scrawny vs. built-like-a-brick-outhouse reasoning, but the racial thing? If I were either of the two football players whose agent signed them up for this "endorsement," I'd be pissed at the way it was framed. Obviously, these guys did not have the benefit of some good English class explication of the kind Dr. Em uses in her writing courses. The ways that this little script implies master race are almost too numerous to mention. I'm not usually that sensitive when it comes to being PC, but this is so blatant and offensive that I'm surprised nobody's complained yet. Am I the only one who thinks this is weird?
• The flip side of this is the Red Stripe commercials: Cool Jamaican guy vs. uncool white boy. "Helping our white friends dance for more than XX years." This I actually find funny because the guys really are dorky and it doesn't really have anything to do with race. They'd be dorky regardless of color. I could have done without the racial qualifier though. Racism is apparently okay as long as it's evenly exploited, tit for tat. Then there's the none too subtle reference to the hoary T-shirt joke: Beer: helping ugly people get laid for thousands of years. Hooray Beer.
• The Closer, with Kyra Sedgwick, woman with the widest mouth in Hollywood playing a Steel Magnolia in the LAPD. Who thought this was a good idea?

When I'm not watching the decorating shows on HGTV, I've been watching crime dramas almost non-stop in the evenings: The various CSIs (of which I like the Las Vegas one the best, with NYC a close second and Miami only in desperation); and Law & Order SVU and CI. I'm not quite sure what I find comforting about them, because they often end ambiguously, especially Law & Order, which is one of the things I do like about it. Though tying things up in a neat package is nice, real life isn't like that. I guess I like the fact that the good guys are mostly decent people with a strong sense of personal morality. Even (and this is my trash TV guilty pleasure) "Dog the Bounty Hunter" on A&E, about which my delight in the less said the better.

Then there's "House." I wish Jen hadn't turned me on to this show. I've only seen two episodes and I'm totally hooked. Hugh Laurie is brilliant playing a complete and utter bastard of a doctor who is also a very fine diagnostician, which only goes to show his range after his roles in "Black Adder." Gone is the goofy voice and comedic turns, non-existent is the English accent. I've rarely heard an Englishman not only completely lose his native tongue but "talk American" so well. Double bonus is Robert Sean Leonard, playing something between House's foil and his walking conscience. The attraction here is the train-wreck of a character who's so cerebral and disconnected from his feelings. He's fascinating and safely distant. Jen says she'd date him. Eeek!

Otherwise, the best part about digital cable is the music channels and even they're too mainstream for my taste.