With the approval of the City of New York, deconstructivist architects Daniel Libeskind and David Childs are set to construct a 9/11 memorial. This memorial, the Freedom Tower, will be 1,776 feet of spiked glass surrounded by a half moon of slanted, dwarf skyscrapers. In all, a poor fit in New York's skyline. Even Donald Trump, whose tastes encompass the tasteless Trump Taj Mahal and Trump toupee, thinks the plan is a \pile of crap architecture."" The Donald has a point. Regardless of one's taste, there are two basic questions here: What exactly is New York, and by extension the nation, memorializing? And what does a real monument look like?
The pro forma answer is that the Freedom Tower will simultaneously memorialize 9/11's dead and celebrate America's liberty. The tower's exact height (1,776 feet) is itself a secondary monument to July 4. Where the Declaration of Independence gave us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the Freedom Tower, according to Libeskind's master plan, will give us ""life-affirming gardens"" in its upper reaches. None of this is to say that a legitimate monument cannot be a giant spike. We have one of those already, after all: the Washington Monument.
But consider the Gettysburg national monument. A memorial graveyard, each plot covered in its own little ""life-affirming garden"" of grass. Yet the real memorial lives in Lincoln's eloquent address.
""We can not dedicate-we can not consecrate'?-we can not hallow-this ground,"" the sixteenth president said. ""The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.""
Those brave men consecrated Gettysburg because they knew what they were fighting for-to keep the Union intact, which meant the abolishment of slavery. Lincoln realized there was no great way to memorialize the loss and said so in his Gettysburg address-a short speech that ranks among man's greatest memorials.
Now consider, again, the tall post-modern spike of the Freedom Tower, with its much different ""life-affirming gardens.""The Freedom Tower will not consecrate the meaningful death of those lost in civil struggle for the nation's soul. Nor (like the Washington Monument) does it consecrate the creation of the union. Rather, the Freedom Tower will consecrate 3,000 murder victims who sadly had no idea why they died. For neither Ward Churchill's rant nor the Oval Office's homogenized nonsense explains the tragedy. ""They hate our freedoms,"" President Bush shrugs.
Maybe, as Donald Trump senses, it ain't right to erect a 1,776 monument to a tragedy. Maybe, remembering the Vietnam Memorial (a monument to young men who also, ultimately, did not know why they died), Libeskind and Childs should have opted for something more subtle and appropriate.
But that would not fit the spirit of the Freedom Tower. For the Freedom Tower is the final act in the affected drama of September 11; from the giant, unreal orange fireballs with which the terrorists began the drama to the jingoistic mummery with which the oval office has exploited it, 9/11 is (understandably) an unhealed wound. Libeskind's sentimental deconstructivism won't heal the wounds and loss which that terrorist act perpetrated upon the American people.
Instead, a Freedom Tower memorial might pointlessly mark the wounds of such meaningless homicide, like 1,776 poorly threaded sutures over New York City's skyline.
Teddy O'Reilly is a senior majoring in history. His column will run every Wednesday this fall in The Daily Cardinal.
