Podhoretz: The Real Shame at Ground Zero
John Podhoretz argues that the true tragedy at Ground Zero is that New York's political leaders have failed to rebuild at the World Trade Center site:
The real story of the Ground Zero mosque is that the project only became feasible because of the appalling and astonishing fecklessness of the officials who were charged with the reconstruction of the site and the neighborhood all the way back in 2001.
We're just three weeks shy of the moment, nine years ago, when the landing-gear assembly from the plane that hit the South Tower smashed through the roof and two floors of 45 Park Place, which housed a Burlington Coat Factory.
Imagine that, in the weeks following, you had expressed the opinion that in nine years' time, that building would sit abandoned only 560 feet from Ground Zero -- and there would be no memorial, no museum, no nothing on the 16 acres on which the towers themselves sat.
Forget the whole question of whether there would be a mosque (or Islamic cultural center) in its place. Just imagine that you'd delivered the view that New York would so completely fail to maintain a sense of purpose regarding the salvation of Ground Zero. Imagine the scorn to which you'd have been subjected at the suggestion.
Yet here we are. Memories of the last nine years have turned Ground Zero from a site of horror, to a reminder of grief, to an occasion for ludicrous artistic posturing -- and now to something very close to parody.
Grand and grandiose schemes floated in the immediate aftermath of the attacks -- opera houses, museums, exact replacements of the Twin Towers, the tunneling of West Street, the memorial inside the "slurry walls," the 1,776-foot building, the $2 billion PATH station -- have vanished or shrunk to meaninglessness or transmuted into nothing.
In retrospect, with the exception of finding the precious remains of the victims, maybe Ground Zero shouldn't have been cleared at all. Maybe those 80-foot piles of twisted steel -- which seemed to go on forever, and filled everyone who saw them with a kind of horrified rage almost impossible to put into words -- should've stayed in place as a reminder of the evil, just as the hull of the USS Arizona sits in the waters of Pearl Harbor and always will.
It seems certain now that the clearance of the horror led directly to the shameful dereliction of leadership that allowed the most important building site in American history to become a ludicrous testament to the ability of postmodern Americans to hamstring themselves and lose sight of what is most important.
