Most of us are all but resigned to losing New York's Ground Zero memorial to a pile of non-judgmental if not explicitly anti-American pap: The minute you involve big-city politicians and foundations and funding bodies and 'artists' you're on an express chute to the default mode of the cultural elite. But surely it's not too much to hope that in Pennsylvania the very precise, specific, individual, human scale of one great act of American heroism need not be buried under another soggy dollop of generic prettified passivity. A culture that goes to such perverse lengths to disdain its heroes cannot survive and doesn't deserve to.(ht Little Green Footballs)
BTW, I'm not resigned to losing NYC's Ground Zero. New Yorkers could just rebuild the World Trade Center, as Washingtonians did with the Pentagon. No museums, no "artists". To paraphrase Christopher Wren, New Yorkers could say: "If you seek their monument, look around you." It's the same reason Churchill rebuilt the Houses of Parliament exactly as they were after the Blitz--to show that the Nazis couldn't destroy it. New Yorkers still have a chance to do the same...
