new york’s obsession with relics from the world trade center attacks is borderline insane.
the “Survivor’s Staircase” is being moved, with predictable fanfare, offsite for the first time until it is installed in the future WTC museum. another passageway is not being moved, for the simple reason that it wasn’t destroyed and thousands of commuters use it every day, but now it is adorned with plaques that say “These signs and floors below are are part of the surviving structure of the World Trade Center” — i can see it already, gaggles of fat midwestern tourists jockeying one another in the middle of rush hour to snap pictures of the signage. The signage informing them that OTHER signage is original signage, non-terrorized signage, signs that people who used to work in the World Trade Center actually used to see every single day on their way to work! And then a lot of them died!
seems to me if everyone spent as much time pondering the reasons this country was targeted for attack as they spend sentimentalizing the fact that it happened, maybe bin laden wouldn’t still be posting YouTube videos from his cave.
it’s as if no comparable tragedy has ever happened anywhere. “but she just GOT that job!” or “the guy was only making a delivery” or “he was just about to retire” or “if only she took vacation a week later” and on and on. as if such extraordinarily importune deaths never took place before 9.11.01.
yet this tragedy, among tragedies, was not such a very big one, was it? how many people were bombed out of their homes in london during WWII? the only notable difference between the two is that londoners (at least after the first round) knew that bombs would be coming, while only a handful of Washington incompetents with top security clearances expected planes to crash into the towers.
how many people winked out in a flash at hiroshima, at nagasaki? yet the only country that’s ever used full-scale atomic weapons sits weeping over its 3,500-casualty band-aid almost seven years after the fact.
it’s front page news today, the fact that this famous staircase is moving. AMNY, a free NYC daily paper, even has an entire news section on its site devoted to WTC memorial updates. here’s their list of categories, in order:
- New York City
- Transit
- Ground Zero
- Politics
- Nation/World
- Health
presumably the war in iraq has space in Nation/World and the presidential primaries may be found in Politics. why, then, isn’t Ground Zero (i hate that term) a subset of New York City?
i believe the answer lies in this moronic comment from Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy (which at least doesn’t have a special WTC section on its site map) who said this about the underground plaques:
“When you walk along that corridor, you understand you are walking along a path that millions of people took every day, some of whom are no longer with us. It gives you pause.”
i see. we need the WTC memorial machine to remind us that people die, so that we might take a refreshing mortality pause. well, peg, just where in this city could you walk where that would NOT be true? nobody who took the Myrtle Avenue J train to work every morning ever got shot? plaque opportunities abound:
Rita washed her clothes at this laundry every Saturday before her brains got blown out in Iraq
Teens who borrowed books from this library were later gunned down by a classmate
Lee played on this stage three times before he drowned in New Orleans
Kiki done got his crack here alla time till a billdin scaffole fell on his haid
it’s become impossible not to wonder how much race has to do with the WTC
memorial frenzy and its astonishing failure to abate over time. but,
really, just how much have you heard about katrina lately (or, for that matter, darfur)?
front-page seven-year-old non-news. and they haven’t even built the museum yet.
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I was thinking of a bizarre conflation of this article and the prior one which had something to do with memorials to abandoned babies…
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