The 9/11 memorial opens
Well, the 9/11 Memorial was a long time coming, but it will be opening tomorrow on the 10th anniversary of that fateful day.
Take a look, and perhaps you’ll agree with me that it’s a fitting tribute, classic and moving in its respectful and timeless simplicity. A tower or any structure erected in the WTC footpath would not have been nearly as appropriate:
Here’s a host more information about the Memorial. I especially like the thoughtful way the names were arranged, and the fact that the Pentagon and Pennsylvania victims are included as well:
As part of the 9/11 Memorial’s official names verification process completed in 2009, victims’ next-of-kin made specific requests for names to appear adjacent to their loved one’s name (“adjacency requests”). Some of these requests were for relatives, friends, and colleagues; others were for loved ones to be listed with people they may have barely known or just met, but with whom intense bonds were quickly formed as a result of shared response. Over 1,200 of these requests were made and all are reflected on the Memorial. In fact, these requests drive the ordering the groupings on around the Memorial pools, the affiliations within them, and in many places, the placement of the names themselves.
[NOTE: I’m not sure of the best way to categorize this post. My initial impulse was to put it under “terrorism and terrorists,” and it certainly is that. But it’s so much more; after ten years it really does seem as though we have transcended that category, although it still is a huge part of it. Well, “history” will just have to do, as well as “painting and sculpture.”]
[ADDENDUM: I was thinking that the trend in monuments ever since the Vietnam memorial has been anti-vertical. They are still monumental, but not in an upward direction. Rather, the emphasis is horizontal or even downward.
Maya Lin’s groundbreaking—in more ways than one—design to commemorate the Vietnam conflict began the trend. It was actually set in a depression in the earth, very controversial at first but later accepted as a properly somber tribute. Its beauty, majesty, and mystery are not apparent in photos; its impact is best seen in person.
People may criticize this trend as anti-heroic, and they may be correct. But I cannot help but think it is fitting for the 9/11 Memorial. The original towers soared to the sky, as did the airplanes that took them down. Water soothes and heals, and the depression calls attention to the terrible absence, which is the point of the Memorial. As the poet Edwin Markham once wrote of a different traumatic national loss, that of Abraham Lincoln:
And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.
The new WTC towers that are still being built will retain the upward thrust of the old ones, reasserting the country’s desire to soar again. But the 9/11 Memorial retains the grief of that “lonesome place against the sky.”]
Very well said, neo.
I watched the 9/11 Shanksville Flight 93 Memorial dedication this morning. Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton gave moving speeches.
Bush’s speech is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=488PgNH4IuM
Clinton’s speeech was mercifully short, and hit a perfect note by comparing the heroes of Flight 93 to the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.
The speech is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIbIUGHk1a4
First impression: I don’t like it. It’s post-modern self-absorption and defeatism.
Holes in the ground that look like puddles from above.
Yuck.
Towers to the skies would have been a statement that we are still alive.
This says (to me) we are dead and buried and lets hang our heads in remembrance of a place that is historically over.
I don’t like it.
9/11 was the first news story that ever moved me to tears. Which is odd, as I am English, I had never been to America at that time, and I was living in Spain. Still, it felt like an attack on me and my way of life and it filled me with empathy for the victims and rage at the perpetrators. This memorial is the first memorial to ever move me to tears, so I think they did a good job.
Memorials should be built after the war is won.
“.. it felt like an attack on me and my way of life.. ”
It was such an attack, an attack on western civilization.
“Memorials should be built after the war is won.”
I agree, but a majority lack the intestinal fortitude to win it. We’ve been fighting a half assed war for 10 years and its time to admit it and bring the boys & girls* back home.
*I will never be comfortable with the idea that women should fight overseas. Here at home if necessary of course, but off shore, my moral compass does not approve.
People may criticize this trend as anti-heroic, and they may be correct. But I cannot help but think it is fitting for the 9/11 Memorial. The original towers soared to the sky, as did the airplanes that took them down. Water soothes and heals, and the depression calls attention to the terrible absence, which is the point of the Memorial.
I completely agree. Towering memorials are built in honor of momentous achievements and sacrificed lives given in pursuit of victory. 9/11 was a horrific, brutal murder of thousands. I find the reflecting pools to be both a striking reminder of the place where the towers once stood, and an elegant yet simple memorial to the lives lost.
The Christian Science Monitor has a good piece here (http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2011/0910/9-11-Memorial-At-site-of-terror-a-site-of-grace-video) wherein the architect, Michael Arad, explains the thoughts he put into creating this design.
Does anyone know if they kept the Islamic crescent design of the Shanksville memorial (the “Crescent of Remembrance”), or were the patriots able to prevail?
I couldn’t watch the Pennsylvania memorial service. I’ll be at the one in New York tomorrow, though, the Freedom Rally that will feature, not exclude, first responders and family survivors (3 pm, at W. Broadway and Park Row). Not the anodyne, PC version with President Hussein presiding. I still can’t believe we elected a muslim sympathizer named Hussein just 7 years after this mass murder.
What Mike Mc said.
I think it’s beautiful even if somehow incomplete. Mike Mc hits on what it is. What we have here is too much Yin (female) and not enough Yang (male). We’ve been out of balance in this way for three or four decades now and history will note it.
I agree with Mike Mc – I hate that we’ve allowed the hole that the terrorists made to remain. I would have preferred a memorial on the top floor of the two towers built to replace the WTC towers, at least one story higher than the originals. Looking down on the victims’ names is too literal(as if looking onto a grave), I’d rather be looking up to the sky, towards heaven.
I’m with Mike Mc.
Looking DOWN into the watery pits, and to read the names symbolizes dhimmitude; an act of submission. Linking names via personal relationships blurs lines.
The video link provided by Neo distresses me with the pomposity of the designer: “the world’s largest manmade waterfalls”, etc.
This is all victimhood. Victims as noble, victims as good. Where is “Guernica” in this? Nowhere.
Where is anger? Non-existent.
I expect the museum, to open in one year, to be more of the same–the perpetrators will be minimized, victimhood maximized, grieving is noble but revenge is baad, closure is good. There will be no photos of the jumpers, whose last act of mini-defiance was to cheat islam of their extended suffering.
Don Carlos: I saw a program on the museum. It said the museum directors have decided (after some discussion) that it will feature photos of the jumpers. Of course that might change, I suppose. But it is my understanding that having the photos is the decision at present, and you can be sure that the directors were pressured to do otherwise.
I don’t think the memorial to 9/11 is about victimhood only, but it certainly focuses on the loss and is designed to be mostly non-political, which I think is correct for a memorial. I think the emotions felt when looking it (including the political reactions) are in the eye of the beholder—including anger, outrage, and pride.
The “relationships” mentioned are hardly just personal relationships, and I don’t see why you say grouping them that way blurs lines. For example, the Flight 93 people (and each other flight) are grouped together, and it’s my impression that the people who rushed the cockpit in Flight 93’s final moments are also listed together; that’s their “relationship.” The police and firefighters who lost their lives are grouped together by professional relationships; in other words, the precinct and the company members are each listed together.
DOWN.
Since I last posted, have learned the museum will be subterranean, under the sunken water-filled holes.
What a wretched way to show anger, outrage, and pride: a museum as bunker.
Libby: The victims’ names are not particularly far down, just very slightly. They are more or less at eye level, around the border of the waterfall, which then goes downward into the footprint of the buildings (a metaphor, to me, of both absence and grief).
And to those who think the new buildings should have been placed in the footprint of the old, part of the reason that was not done is that the footprints are not just the place where it happened, but a burial ground. I have read that 40% of the victims have never had anything recovered of their bodies, not even slight DNA evidence. So this is, among other things, a graveyard for them and a gravesite for the families.
The victims’ names are placed where they are so that people (especially the families, or people who knew the victims) can touch the names, as on the Vietnam Memorial in DC. See, for example, these photos of victims’ family members at the memorial (scroll down a bit; there are quite a few).
Don Carlos: I suppose that, once again, it symbolizes what you want it to. I don’t see the underground site at all the way you do.
The museum is built around (and incorporates as part of the exhibit) the original underground slurry wall for the towers, which (somewhat astoundingly) survived the collapse of the buildings and managed to remain intact enough to perform one of its original functions, that of holding back the waters of the Hudson. It kept them from inundating the site. To me and to many others it is a symbol of perseverance and strength.
This is an article describing it in greater detail, and some other elements that are an integral part of the underground site.
In addition, the museum is not completely underground. One enters through an above-ground pavilion, pictured and described here:
You are certainly within your rights to have preferred the construction of a more typical, completely aboveground design. When I read about the design of this museum, however, and what will actually be in it, I am struck by how much care and thought were taken, and as I picture it I think it is an excellent, creative, and deeply respectful solution to a design task that was very challenging.
It reminds me of the memorial over the sunken USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, a hole in the water so to speak. But there is this difference which to me is everything. Before we mourned, we avenged, most thoroughly. Had we not done so then, as we haven’t yet not by a long shot, that monument too would have been a cringing abomination.
I don’t think the comparison to the USS Arizona is fair nor truly apt; like apples and oranges, both fruit but there the similarity ends. The Arizona was a military ship, the loss was a military loss, and while the attack was cruel and unanticipated, the military had to fight back first, mourn after. Fighting back was literally their job.
With the WTC, it was a slaughter of civilians using our own non-military resources. The citizens of NYC aren’t going to mount a retaliatory attack upon the enemy, except insofar as some join the military and serve in the subsequent military reprisals. At “Ground Zero,” life must go on. The most healing thing, the most healthy thing, the strongest way to affirm that Americans are not defeated or diminished by 9/11 is to clear away the damage, build a magnificent office building, and construct a memorial to honor the dead and mark their very gravesite. Putting some kind of edifice atop their graves (much less a new office building) is distasteful to many of the survivors, and while anger is a part of the grieving process, expressing it in a memorial to the dead is hardly representative of the nature of the lives that were lost. The need to punish the people behind the attacks is, I believe, entirely separate from the need to memorialize the dead.
Looking DOWN into the watery pits, and to read the names symbolizes dhimmitude; an act of submission.
I don’t get that at all. For what it’s worth, I’m a card-carrying NRA member with a son in the Air Force. Nobody who knows me would call me submissive in attitude or action, and yet when I think of the loss of innocent life on 9/11, I find the image of cascading water, and simple etched names comforting. Water, to me, is a cleansing, healing thing. The simple geometry of the recessed fountains in the footprints of the buildings is a permanent reminder of what once was there; it will be impossible to forget, and we are apt to forget all too easily.
In the end though, as Neo said, the memorial symbolizes whatever you want it to. Some will appreciate it, some loathe it. Which probably explains in part why it took so long to come up with an agreed upon design and execute it in the first place.
I cannot let this go.
“A memorial that symbolizes whatever you want it to” does not make a unitary statement. Those who loathe it, like me, are left seething, in part at those who like it. Because we are not on the same page. What occurred on 9/11/01 was evil, pure and simple. It was grotesque in its eviltry. I say again, where is our ‘Guerenica’?
We should be calmed by synthetic waterfalls? This is akin to mass denial. Calmness engendered by a memorial to an evil event? Not for me. The memorial is pap.
Don Carlos: the Memorial is for everyone regardless of politics. The 9/11 families are of all political persuasions. The Memorial should not be a monument to rage. Rage is appropriate, IMHO, but not as part of the Memorial itself.
As far as Guernica goes, the painting (I assume you’re referring to the Picasso painting) is basically a statement of the human cost of war—that is, destruction, and the suffering and death of innocents. It partakes of the same impulse as the museum. In the museum, reading about the lives of the people who died and the tributes to them, and seeing the twisted wreckage, I cannot imagine that anger at the huge human cost of the attacks (and anger at the perpetrators) would not be part of the response of most people on viewing the exhibits.
Those who loathe it, like me, are left seething, in part at those who like it.
*sigh*
There is a difference between feeling anger toward evil, and finding comfort after loss. If it’s impossible for you, Don Carlos, to fathom that both emotions can exist at the same time in the same person, well, that’s just you. No need to hate the rest of us because we want a sense of comfort in the absence of loved ones even as we want retribution for that which cut short their lives. The two are not mutually exclusive.
“. . . the Memorial is for everyone regardless of politics. The 9/11 families are of all political persuasions. The Memorial should not be a monument to rage. Rage is appropriate, IMHO, but not as part of the Memorial itself.the Memorial is for everyone regardless of politics. The 9/11 families are of all political persuasions. The Memorial should not be a monument to rage. Rage is appropriate, IMHO, but not as part of the Memorial itself.’
This. Thank you, Neo. My cousin’s name is on those walls, and what this memorial is about for those who lost him is his absence. The beauty of those two reflecting absences surrounded by names and the sound of water is the space left in the voids for true reflection: for contemplation and remembrance as well as thoughts of what must come next. It’s a design of true liberty, evoking response in the hearts and minds of observers, rather than demanding it in some form pre-determined by a designer.
Rage does belong there, and make no mistake, it’s there. Fury inhabits those voids along with all the grief and love and memory and more — but there’s no need to insist on it. The void fills itself with the responses it evokes. To construct the memorial to demand certain reactions as the only proper ones would have been to use my cousin’s life and death one more time, just as the terrorists used him by killing him.
Mrs Whatsit: please accept my condolences, ten years later.
Random: I am not ‘hating’ those who do not see it; I am seething in frustration. Let’s bring retribution to the fore, instead of omitting it from the memorial altogether, or having it found by implication, as Neo seems to suggest the memorial accomplishes.
Mrs. Whatsit: I too am sorry. For every death there. But ‘all political persuasions’ of survivors have naught to do with the wanton obliterative murders of friends and kin. Murder is an outrage, which I have personally experienced. I reject the idea that we should be calmed, by the memorial, essentially, about it. Acceptance and calmness come, but via a memorial of soothing? Not for me, obviously.
Neo: Picasso’s Guernica is hardly calming. It is a statement of outrage, a cry for action.
Acceptance and calmness come, but via a memorial of soothing? Not for me, obviously.
Ah, yes, I think we all get that, Don Carlos.
Apparently you believe a memorial to the dead ought to include a call to retribution. By that logic, my father’s tombstone ought to bear a website address and a message encouraging passersby to donate to cancer research. That way every time I visit his grave I can be instantly reminded of what killed him and how horrible his death was. Believe me, I have no trouble remembering his death; what I need is to remember his life.
For most people (obviously not all) memorials honoring the dead are designed to comfort those left behind, not incite rage. Anger comes from viewing things like the Holocaust Museum, and in this case the museum of artifacts being constructed at Ground Zero. There will be a lot of righteous and justifiable anger upon viewing the crushed fire truck and the fragments of personal belongings that are all we have left of those killed.
I get the sense though that feeding rage is important to you, and this 9/11 monument serves as more fuel. I find it interesting that your anger toward the jihadists is spilling over onto people like me simply because we appreciate the design of something and find a purpose in it that you do not (“seething, in part at those who like it”). I’m not sure what to say to that, except that I bid you peace.
Don Carlos:
Once again—the Memorial is a memorial to the dead, and also a gravesite where the remains of the dead rest. The rage (similar to what you are describing with Guernica) would be engendered by the artifacts and information in the museum. How you interpret the waterfalls as calming someone’s rage at the loss of life (which is what you are implying) I really don’t know. The function of the Memorial is to honor the dead and to provide comfort to the grief-striken, and this comfort (which in this case comes from recognizing the magnitude of their sacrifice, and that attention is being paid to them, as well as respect for their final resting place) does not preclude anger at the perpetrators who brought them to their death. By emphasizing the huge scale and magnitude of the loss (all those names, including those who died on the airplanes and in the ’93 attack on the WTC), and the size of the footprint (the building that was taken away), the Memorial is not designed to soothe anger. It is designed to comfort the living and respect the dead.
Random: I am in no way interested in ‘feeding rage’. I am interested in justice, effectively delivered, which, in a memorial, begins by addressing the wrong of the acts and the wrong of the motives.You may say, ‘ Yes, but we all know that’. I merely wish to see that addressed, not implied, not smothered by soothing.
Your logic re your father’s cancer and tombstone is a bit off the mark, IMHO. These were human perps, not viruses or genes or tobacco.
I bid you peace as well. Thanks.
Don Carlos: I think most people—even people here, who have no shortage of anger at terrorists and what they have perpetrated—disagree with you on the function of a memorial.
Once again, the Memorial hardly stops people from asking for justice by its emphasis on the magnitude of the loss.
From a CNSNews story, on Netanyahu’s 9/11 remarks:
“Pointing to photos on display, including graphic scenes of chaos at the World Trade Center, Netanyahu said the images “cry out to us to remember – to remember those who attacked America, to remember why they attacked America, to remember the many thousands felled by terrorism on 9/11, the many thousands who were murdered since 9/11, and to remember the thousands of brave soldiers who have paid the ultimate price in fighting terrorism since then.
“On this day let us remember them, and let us recommit ourselves to do all in our power to ensure that the forces of barbarism are defeated and that the forces of progress and peace will prevail.”
Note his priorities, which are mine: remember 1)those who attacked 2) why they attacked; then 3) those who died.