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. . . .
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.
Read the whole, smelly thing.
Un-American? Please.
The fine folks at Take Back The Memorial aren't un-American. Calling them that is about as stupid as a war supporter calling an anti-war person "un-American" or "unpatriotic" based solely on their position with regard to the war. Which is practice that has routinely been roundly criticized in the pages of the Times (and elsewhere) in the past. And rightfully so. Its an idiotic thing to do. But, apparently, when it comes to the Times editors attacking those they disagree with the questioning of patriotism is just fine and dandy.
Debra Burlingame and those who agree with her on this issue do not want to put a stop to controversial artwork or display pieces pertaining to 9/11. Rather, they simply want to see such things displayed in a more appropriate venue. The 9/11 memorial should be about remembering the tragic events of that day, and that's it. The memorial should spark sorrow for the events, remembrance for those killed and harmed by it and contemplation for what the attack has meant for our country. It should not be a memorial for everything America has done wrong in its history, which is what Burlingame's opponents would like it to be.
There is a time and a place for airing such things, but the 9/11 memorial is not it. Its not a question of should they be aired (because I don't think anyone involved in this debate is saying the shouldn't) but rather a question of appropriateness.
Putting "blame America first" rhetoric in the faces of those who came to remember their countrymen lost in a foreign attack on one of our cities is simply not appropriate. Unfortunately, when a group of people have a political axe to grind questions of propriety tend to go by the wayside.
Update:
More:
Banning controversial speech all together would certainly be un-American, but as I've argued before, that doesn't mean we must build a special shrine to institutionalize such speech at the site of a solemn memorial. Keeping America-bashing away from the gravesite of victims of the worst terrorist attack in our nation's history would be no less appropriate, and no less necessary, than keeping hecklers away from a funeral.
Exactly.