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Headage Six Months Century 21, the department store on Church Street that has been closed since September 11, reopened on February 28. So, too, have the streets running west off of Broadway. The small park near my office between Broadway and Church Streets remains fenced off, the trees and benches gone. Folks used to eat lunch there, and play chess at folding card tables. It’s now home to Porta-Potties and the mobile offices of Tully Construction. Ground Zero, once so immense at 16 acres, has gotten smaller, and more discrete—if a six-story hole in the ground can be called discrete. The piles of smoking wreckage have been trucked away, and the loaders and diggers are slowly propelling the site back through time to 1970, when all that existed of the World Trade Center was the vast, empty foundation. The shattered windows of the World Financial Center, the pyramid- and dome-topped skyscrapers across the West Side Highway from the Twin Towers, have long since been boarded up. The corner of the northern building, raked and mangled by tons of falling debris, is being rebuilt: girders outline the healthy lines of the structure, and white plastic sheets serve as fragile new skin over the girders slowly reknitting beneath them. The skeleton of the Wintergarden, the multi-story glass atrium between the Financial Center towers, is clearly visible now. My girlfriend and I once took shelter in the Wintergarden when a sudden rainstorm swept over us as we walked along the promenade near the boat basin. It leaked. Water dripped through the hundreds of glass panes that formed the high curved ceiling. That glass is mostly gone now, crushed, and I’m sure that the tall, carefully tended palm trees that it sheltered are dead. The skyway that connected the atrium to the Trade Center towers leads nowhere. There are reminders everywhere. The Burger King and the pizzeria at the corner of Church and Liberty Streets are closed, all of their windows boarded up, marked with spray-painted symbols of that day. “NYPD TEMPORARY HQ,” reads the Burger King. An alley wall next to the pizzeria still bears directions to medical triage. And always, always, the empty space…the hole in the sky. The newly visible buildings that I never knew were there, because the bulk of the towers hid them from view. The view from the southeastern corner of my office building has changed, as the site has shrunk and become a neat-walled hole in the ground, rather than a pile of shattered skyscraper. Somehow, the hole is sadder than the pile, perhaps because it is all void, all absence, and because, daily, less and less of what was remains. It is on its way to becoming an expanse of earth, which will be the virgin ground for the building of whatever comes next. Even the Cortland Street subway station—my station, before September 11—is returning to normal. The massive wooden shoring beams are gone, now, although the signs warning DO NOT STOP remain. Riding the subway through the station on the way to Rector Street is no longer a moment of unavoidable remembrance. If I want to, I can pretend that the station is simply closed for routine maintenance. Two days after the attacks, with the smell of dust and burnt metal still in my nostrils, I wrote about my experience of that day. I combined the narrative with sentiments of moral outrage, directed not so much at the perpetrators as at my own government. I wrote about the nature of America’s presence and actions in the world, and how those actions so often have fallen short of the abstract virtues of Justice, and Truth. Readers in Europe and Australia seemed to agree. Readers in America, by and large, did not. It was too soon to be raising such ephemeral notions. Too soon for me to write in such a vein, without the long-term benefit of the harsh jolt of reality that came crashing down upon us all. I feel I came close to being one of the “moral idiots,” to borrow James Nuechterlein’s phrase, who can find no distinction between the destruction of the World Trade Center and the American bombing in Afghanistan. So now, as I watch the daily progress of rebuilding downtown, I feel the need to clarify and expand some of my broadly drawn statements from six months ago. What first comes to my mind is a distinction made by theologian James F. Keenan: “The distinction between goodness and rightness is a simple one. Goodness describes a person who acting out of love strives to live rightly. Rightness describes behavior that promotes value in the world. Goodness asks whether a person strives to answer the call of Jesus to love God and neighbor. Rightness asks whether certain actions actually make the world a better place.” Now, I have a bit of a problem with all of that Jesus talk, but Keenan was writing about moral theology and therefore probably needed to work God in there somehow. But, even in the absence of a theological perspective, the distinction between what is good and what is right can be made, and I think that it’s a valuable one. It is useful when considering moral arguments made about September 11 and about the causal soup from which the terrorists emerged. If one can draw added benefit from it by applying principles held by faith, so much the better. Noam Chomsky draws his moral parallels, endlessly parading American foul-ups and atrocities with detailed gusto, as he makes passing reference to the attacks of September 11 as “horrendous.” Yet those acts, he maintains, are not really significant when compared with centuries of American genocide and conquest. The only difference, he maintains, is the target. Thus he attempts to create moral equivalence where there is none, and in the process demonstrates his utter lack of moral compass. It is as though he lives in an eternal present where, in the space of a few minutes, America has simultaneously enslaved Africans, annihilated the Native Americans, fire-bombed Dresden, and irradiated the Japanese while massacring Guatemalans, East Timorese, Vietnamese, and Iraqis. It is as though the values that we strive and often fail to apply universally have always existed as he defines them today, and are applicable in that exact sense to the ephemeral past. For him, our government’s sins accumulate in some vast ledger, to be read out to us as damning evidence of its perpetual moral destitution. His view permits no growth, allows for no repentance, no reconciliation, and no forgiveness. To borrow from J. Bottum, Chomsky’s utopian pacifism, and that of those who parrot him, “[facilitates and recreates] the conditions for the rebirth in the world of the old, forgotten logic of sacrifice, scapegoats, and slaughter.” While he totes up the evils of the American past, ignoring our national cultural struggle to reconcile ourselves to that past and to gain true moral authority in the present, very real evil confronts us. When the founders of the American experiment decided, after much debate and intellectual effort, to rebel against the authority of their English masters, they produced an eloquent document explaining the reasons for and the moral motivation that underlay their actions. They did this, they wrote, to maintain a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” And though they and those who came after them may not have fully executed the noble ideals set forth in that Declaration; though oftentimes their heirs shamelessly abandoned the Enlightened universal ideals of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; yet do those ideals still remain as the explicit cornerstones of our founding, and yet do we struggle to apply them as a people and as a nation. Shame and a sense of moral failure compel us to hide our faces from the evils that we have committed. Where is the declaration of the ‘oppressed peoples’ who took control of four civilian aircraft, with the mindful intent of killing all aboard? Where is the decent respect to the opinion of mankind, by which all may know their moral motivation, and comprehend the intention underlying the choices that they made? There was nothing from them. No words, no writings, no statements of purpose; no eloquence, no learned discourse, no reasoning. All that they gave to humanity was death and destruction, murderous fire and burning blood. We must therefore conclude that this is their Declaration. This is what they want us to know: that they are willing to die, and that they are willing to kill, and that their deaths and the deaths of the innocent are necessary for their purpose, whatever that may be. The God that they serve demands blood sacrifice, and that sacrifice is not to be made in the service of anything but adherence to the fiqh of Muhammad. Of the attacks, Bin Laden himself said: “This event made people think about true Islam which benefited Islam greatly.” Thus, we must conclude that for these people, all of this death is not regrettable, is not something to be avoided if possible, is not a source of shame, is not even a sin. It is at the very core of their faith. The explicit cornerstone of their intended culture is death. When Chomsky spews his indictment of the eternally present imperial crimes of America, he apes a part of our national conscience. When he struggles against the ‘memory hole’ into which war crimes like the American destruction of the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant at Khartoum vanish, he distorts the reality of national shame and the attendant reluctance to face the truth of our misdeeds. When he indicts the greed and exploitation inherent in the American corporate ethos, he exploits the national failure to achieve the perfect realization of the self-evident truths of our founding. But it is the very presence of these truths that allows him to speak. It is our national striving to fulfill these ideals that makes us good, however often we may fail to hit the mark. And it is the absence of these ideals that makes our enemies evil. It is possible for good people to make bad choices and to act wrongly. It is possible for a good nation to commit acts that do not uphold the principles that make it so. But what happened on September 11, 2001 was not the result of faulty reasoning, or bad choices made by people of good character with sound moral motivation. To claim that there is equivalence between a culture that celebrates death and rejoices in spilled blood and a culture that is founded upon principles of life and is ashamed when it discovers that it has deviated from those principles is to demonstrate a peculiar moral vacuity. To make such a claim is to focus solely on bad acts, and to ignore the human moral agents that commit those acts. It is, in short, to live mostly in a world other than this one, among Ideals, in an eternal present. A person who lives in that world has little of relevance to say to the rest of us, here on the ground. And nothing at all to say about that empty space…that hole in the sky that yawns above the still-open grave of 3,000 people.
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