gargle.org - respect the uvula

Relatives representing 14 family groups rallied at the site Monday to condemn plans for the International Freedom Center, which officials said would place the 2001 terror attacks in a historical context.

It was the right thing because an overburdened museum commemorating virtually every human rights infraction known to man takes away from the significance of what happened at this particular site. The Freedom Center is a triumph of political ideology (not to mention American self-hatred) over common sense.

"Part of the way we celebrate freedom is to acknowledge that even the greatest societies in the world and those that have made the greatest contribution to freedom are not perfect," said Freedom Center President Richard J. Tofel. Well, Ground Zero is not about "celebrating freedom." It is about understanding the great threat to freedom posed by a growing totalitarian religious ideology that many still defend as legitimate.

An American Indian exhibit is not appropriate for the Holocaust Museum, and neither is a Holocaust memorial appropriate for the Museum of the American Indian. And neither is appropriate for Ground Zero.

So on Monday the families did the right thing. But for the wrong reason. This is just another chapter in the ongoing turf battle the families have been waging, to expropriate the site for themselves as if it were their own private property.

And the way they have gone about it is obscene. Fights over which victims' names should be displayed most prominently, not building over the footprints, who gets what piece of it and the bigger the better, are abhorrent. An article in the Sunday Times architecture section put it most eloquently:

In Mr. Arad's design, the victims' names are arranged randomly to avoid creating a sense of hierarchy. Almost immediately after he won the design competition, firefighters said that they wanted their names listed separately. Since then, some family members have argued that they want the dead grouped by the companies they worked for, or floor by floor.

That would mean segregating the victims who were killed outside the buildings. What to do, for example, with the names of those who died at the Pentagon? On the planes? Having breakfast at Windows on the World? Which footprint do you locate them in? These are not just practical questions. Any such segregation reinforces the idea that we are bent on making distinctions between the value of individual human lives - a message that seems particularly perverse in such a charged political atmosphere.

What the families have done is to confirm every single greedy stereotype of the ugly American held by people who have said that on 9/11 we got what we deserved. In addition, their insistence that the "sacred space" not be used for commercial purposes but for something symbolic has mushroomed into a circus, with all kinds of political interests now demanding representation and crowding out the 9/11 victims. The WTC families are reaping what they have sown.

Not only the Freedom Center, but the WTC families are a disgrace to this country. They have already been paid off. Now they should quietly go home. New York City would be better off without a memorial at all, certainly not one that expresses the families' greed, contentiousness, and one-upping each other. We're talking about the most valuable piece of real estate in the country. New York City needs it for its economic revival, not for petty squabbling that makes all of us look loathsome to the world.