Empire State of Mind

Well, we've finally built our 9/11 memorial, and it's.....a warship.

There are many things about America that Americans seem to accept as being logical which in any other Western society would be considered scandalous. Things like health being for sale, minors being executed, and so forth. This week we witnessed another of those things.

9/11 was the most murderous assault perpetrated on this continent since the 1860's, and the worst attack upon this country by outsiders in our entire history. Such trauma is worthy of memorial. Such trauma BEGS for a memorial, for an official iteration of what it is that makes us human beings: memory.

There were two probable ways to physically memorialize that dark day, two ways to rebuild at ground zero.

The first way would have been to erect a big middle finger at the terrorists by building an even bigger shrine to American capitalism where the World Trade Center had stood, to signify our defiance by building essentially the same thing as had been destroyed.

The second way would have been to construct a memorial not to the World Trade Center but to the thousands of souls killed there. This iteration would have involved not an office tower, but some sort of somber, serene, and defiantly optimistic shrine, involving fountains or eternal flames or somesuch.

We did neither. Indeed, to this day Ground Zero, the mass grave of our lost innocence, is just an empty pit. In any other culture which treasures its dead and its history, this would be a scandal. Here it is not.

But perhaps worse than the calcified scar that remains in Manhattan, worse that what we have NOT built, is what we HAVE built. We have built a warship with the steel salvaged from Ground Zero.

What does this say about the lessons learned that day? That one more warship would have averted the tragedy? In fact, the lesson should have been that warships and similar hardware were utterly useless in defending against terrorism.

How is it that we have built an instrument of destruction to honor our dead when we have failed to do so much as plant a fucking tree at Ground Zero? Is this what the dead would have wanted?

This is a time for building. And, more importantly, this is a time for building things which are not intended to destroy but which are intended to honor and preserve.