This entire redevelopment exercise has been dogged from its fiery beginning. The celebrated unity of New Yorkers and Americans has not been on display in the pit itself and the surrounding meeting rooms. It seems Obama's Curse, unimaginably successful so far, is still exerting its power. This is touched on rhetorically, now and then, but seldom analytically.
Competing interests and opinions stalled the work for the basest kinds of reasons: money and "turf" among them, and the sort-of-almost-finished fraction of the job, the memorial pools, are symbols, their designer says, of the absence of everything and everybody lost. This could be an artful statement in a purer context, but the prize value of that piece of solid-platinum real estate mobilized much of what brought on the attacks--naked greed and the decisive power of money, rank and status--the very polluting qualities of Capitalism that earned us our "Great Satan" sobriquet among the hot-tempered hosts of Islam and Arabia. They make the imposing young architect's characterization of his vision hideously ironic, instead.
Nineteen guys dared the enticements of said Great Satan, the risks of a desperate mission and the certainty of violent death for themselves and others in order to prove our vulnerability by striking our greatest imperial symbols. If you believe in spirits, you'd be tempted to say they favored this mission. It succeeded. Osama's men did indeed break our symbols and animate our belligerence to an extent that broke our bank, too--way more than Al Qaeda's Lincoln-figure leader could have hoped.
It was a crime, plain and simple, whatever claims for justice it was wrapped in. A few people said so immediately. Our Central Intelligence Agency, among others, treated it that way. In a brilliant military-intelligence-and-foreign-recruitment operation worthy of the all-time best, they went after the perpetrators and their headquarters in Afghanistan and, with only a few hundred damn good American men at the head of a larger, quickly assembled Afghan force, routed them, fast. It was an extra-legal search-and-destroy assignment, at a time that called for scrupulous attention to lawfulness, but it was effective and, in the atavistic, pre-legal, predominant part of the human mind, it was appropriate, and respect must be paid.
After that, it was all Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co., abetted by other lunatic neocons, urged on by longstanding cravings to attack Iraq, on any pretext, for revenge and oil, and the resulting chain of crimes on a scale that dwarfed 9/11, this time in my name and yours as citizens of the United States of America, with the full faith and credit of the U.S.A., which was suitably reduced when our gangsterism in the middle east and then in Wall Street and Washington left it soiled beyond recognition, no longer fit to be called "faith" or "credit."
There was a lot of tasteful activity marking this anniversary, many observances, celebrations and remembrances that were genuinely stirring. The spunk of New York, our true capital city, and its tough, bighearted inhabitants, was rightly raised high. Among these observances were quieter lest-we-forget reports and comments that measured what we've done and what we've lost since, in all the mornings after that initially scintillating Tuesday morning.
It's a lot. We made Bin Laden's deadly plot a giant success saga. Our murder of him, also violent and lawless, also convenient in shutting his mouth before it dispensed more madness and more unacceptable truth, was reminiscent of our murder, at night, in his room, of Black Panther Fred Hampton by Chicago police.
It was too late. The evocations of piercing tragedy and stunning drama from 9/11/01 cloaked the darker facts that the rough beast of late-stage American capitalism and imperialism preceded that day, shaped it, redoubled it exponentially and slouches still toward Bethlehem.
Mitch Clogg
Mendocino, California
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