I considered tackling the WTC "sacred ground" meme the other day, but thought it wiser to leave it alone because, well, it's a dicey subject and my particular take on it won't make me a lot of new friends on Facebook. However, this fella at Slate has dared to mention the unmentionable (and props to him for it), so I'll riff off his remarks below.
Does the hallowedness of the WTC site derive from the fact that so many died there? Or does it derive from the way they died? I say neither. There is no getting around the fact that hallowedness is a religious concept. Something can't become hallowed all by itself—not even a cemetery. It takes a religious rite to render something sacred and holy, and no such consecrating words were spoken over the WTC site. But even if one had been conducted, would it be binding on nonbelievers? I think not. Seeing as we don't live in a religious state, all protestations about WTC hallowedness are just loopy poetry and bad metaphor. The Pentagon, also struck by the 9/11 jihadists, has its memorial, but almost nobody calls that crash site hallowed.
Charles Krauthammer used the hallowed dodge in his Washington Post op-ed as a way to argue against the construction of the Islamic center.
"When we speak of Ground Zero as hallowed ground, what we mean is that it belongs to those who suffered and died there—and that such ownership obliges us, the living, to preserve the dignity and memory of the place, never allowing it to be forgotten, trivialized or misappropriated," Krauthammer wrote.
But if Ground Zero belongs to those who suffered and died there, why is Larry Silverstein building on it? Because he acquired the site. The place is not sacred. It's profane. Just look at the property records. All of this talk about hallowed ground is a lame attempt to leverage ownership of 9/11—--something that can't be owned, I've already insisted—--and to commandeer the collective memory of the attacks. Don't the people who can't stop talking about hallowed ground realize that they're the ones who are needlessly politicizing the slaughter?
I'm all for remembering the murdered, preserving dignity and memory, and even building memorials. I don't defile graveyards. I don't desecrate churches, synagogues, mosques, or Buddhist temples. I don't burn Qurans. I respectfully observe funeral motorcades. I blaspheme, but that's my own business. But I draw the line at spiritualizing the WTC site and its vicinity. We honor the dead not by fetishizing the memory of their gruesome death but by respecting the living.
One of the things that's been a constant source of amazement to me over the last nine years has been our stubborn unwillingness to answer one of 9/11's most glaringly obvious questions: why, exactly, did Osama and Al Qaida target those particular buildings---and not once, but twice? Was it simply because they were both really tall buildings that would kill a lot of people if you could bring them down? There are many other tall buildings in America that would kill a lot of people if they collapsed, too---the Hancock Tower in Chicago, the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco, the Bank of America Tower in Los Angeles, and even the Empire State Building, right up the street from the World Trade Center. So why weren't any of those other skyscrapers targeted? They're temples of American commerce, too.
The answer, I think, has been staring us in the face for the last nine years, but we, as a nation and as a culture, have been loath to face the inescapable reality that the towers of the World Trade Center can only be properly viewed, by virtue of their geography, their orientation and their "purposeless giantism" (Lewis Mumford), as the hulking twin sentries at the gateway to Wall Street, fortress-like protectors and guarantors of American-style capitalism and all of its enshrined values. Yet these seemingly impregnable buildings were brought crashing down in a matter of minutes using only the crudest of incendiary devices. You'd have thought that by now we'd have reached a fuller appreciation of the metaphorical significance of what happened that day, but we are apparently still too busy feeling sorry for ourselves, and pissed off at others, over a tragedy whose deeper meaning we don't remotely understand. Our homegrown financiers have finished what Bin Laden intended to start---crashing America's economy in flames---and we're worked up in a lather over citizenship rights for Muslims and Mexicans.
Perusing the list of tenants of the towers that fell should provide us with some clues: AT&T, Global Crossings, Verizon, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Fuji Bank, Credit Agricole, Oppenheimer-Mass Mutual, Salomon Smith Barney, Cantor Fitzgerald, American Express, Marsh USA, AON Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. Secret Service, and yes, our old friends at the Central Intelligence Agency. In a nut, the Twin Towers can only be seen in retrospect as a crossroads of commerce, as with Wall Street, where corporate capital and government muscle intersect, a convergence of the financial institutions that fuel the engine of America's corporate commerce, the insurance companies that underwrite it, the telecom companies that provide its infrastructure, and the government agencies that sanction its activities at home and which work to ensure its dominance abroad. This corporate-government alliance has, of course, enriched many of us in the West over the last several decades with high standards of living, good salaries and affordable luxury goods. Unfortunately, this has often been accomplished not only by the simple trafficking in stocks, bonds, and commodities, but also by trafficking in a great deal of human suffering and misery, and while we may choose to ignore this fact, there are many millions of people around the world who simply can't. Ask an average resident of Nigeria (per capita income: $900) or the Congo ($700)---or even Saudi Arabia---about the bountiful blessings that our government-backed capital markets bestow upon their resource-rich communities, and you get the idea pretty quickly that our standard of living, and our access to cheap commodities and consumer goods, all too often comes at other people's expense.
Osama Bin Laden may be a murderous son of a bitch with a messiah complex, but he is not a stupid man, and I imagine he knows in a deeply fundamental way exactly how our system of zero-sum corporate capitalism works better than most Americans do. That's because it's the same system he was raised in, that made family extremely rich and which he eventually renounced: The system that leverages the wealth of the corporation and the coercive power of the state to extract resources from the impoverished in the developing world, for the enrichment of the few in the industrialized world; which imposes, often at the point of a gun, its preferred governments and laws on dispossessed and disenfranchised peoples for its own benefit; which wages a kind of perpetual war against workers and taxpayers by privatizing profits and socializing losses; and which creates a permanent underclass everywhere it establishes itself as the dominant economic model. And you don't need to travel to the Congo or Nigeria to see the dynamic at play. Just spend a few hours in Detroit, or Flint, or Toledo, or Akron, or Peoria, or Newark . . . I could go on.
Shafer's conclusion notwithstanding, it's folly to think of the site of the Trade Center attack as "sacred ground." There was nothing sacred about those buildings---or the business that was conducted in them---in the first place, and there's nothing sacred about them now. Besides being shamelessly exploitive, simply labeling a piece of real estate as "hallowed ground" because a bunch of people died there is equally self-serving and delusional if we fail to understand, or stubbornly ignore, the purpose of the building---to serve as an awesome display of America's economic might---and the system of government-backed exploitation-for-profit that the dead of 9/11 labored in service of. This is not to impugn any base motives to the people who perished that day. Far from it---the system they served is the same system that nearly all of us in this country serve every day at our private-sector jobs, whether we like it or not. It's how all of us live these days. But until we come to understand the reasons why some people in other parts of the world might wish to see the model of the American corporation-state that the Twin Towers monumentalized come crashing down on us, I fear we'll continue to be at risk of being the victims of one, two, three, many 9/11s in the future.
This is in no way an attempt to justify the killing of 3,000 people. No amount of exploitation could provide moral cover for such mass murder. But we are fooling ourselves if we continually insist on viewing the massacre as a completely unprovoked outrage from which we innocents can learn nothing of import about ourselves, our politics, our economy, and how we are viewed by the rest of the world.
One thing that's been missing from this entire discussion is a realistic assessment of what constitutes "sacred space." Now, it's emblematic of the American fundamentalist mindset that you can simply call something "sacred", whether it actually is or not, and convince yourself that it is so because it conforms to your own preconceptions of what "sacredness" is; for American fundamentalism's conception of becoming one with the Creator---that is, achieving the divine states of salvation and grace---is equally one-dimensional and process-free. In the world of modern American fundamentalism, it doesn't matter how much of a greedy little prick you've been, or how many people you've fucked over for the first 40 or 50 years of your life---all you have to do is take a knee, shout "Jesus, youdaman!", write a book about your conversion experience (best written in prison, where you're serving time for bank fraud) and all is forgiven.
To which I say, no it's not. That's not what original church scholars like St. Augustine or the Apostle Paul had in mind, and it certainly isn't what the Jews of the Old Testament thought. To them, salvation was something that could not be purchased absent acts of atonement, and the state of grace that is a dispensation of salvation could not be entered into without expressions of humility and supplication. This, of course, is anathema to most of our modern-day fundamentalists because it involves a lot of hard work, introspection, meditation, self-examination, and other reflective activities that don't necessarily proceed neatly along doctrinal lines, and which therefore run the risk of confounding the believer's received wisdom. That's why you'll never hear Glenn Beck include "Humble yourself" among his admonitions to the faithful at one of his Anglo God rallies; to put his faith into practice, he'd have to quit his job.
I think Obama basically gets the concept of humility in his own way---his weekly speech yesterday, asking us to honor the dead of 9/11 by performing tender acts of mercy for the benefit of others, to devote the day to helping other people who are less fortunate, was a very nice touch, though I imagine that's about as far as he can carry the argument. And it's true that charitable acts are among the cornerstone gestures that a pilgrim seeking grace can perform.
But it's still true all the same that atonement and humility are the very acts that America as a collective body has resolutely refused to perform since September 11. We're still bemoaning our victimization while puffing out our chests and touting our glorious American exceptionalism---which I guess means our right to declare war against a billion and a half people whose God goes by a different name than ours, so long as we tell ourselves that we're spreading the blessings of liberty while we're doing it.
A far better example to follow, it seems to me, would be the example set by the postwar Japanese---who awoke one day to the traumatic news that thousands of their countrymen had been the victims of a sudden mass killing. Of course, I'm referring to the bombing of Hiroshima, and while I don't want to draw a direct parallel between Hiroshima and 9/11---because it it's not fully warranted---it's instructive to see how the Japanese reacted to a cataclysmic "wake-up call" and compare it to how we Americans reacted to 9/11. Any way you look at it, it's pretty apparent that the Japanese realized quickly after the bombing that everything that they had been taught about their culture, their politics and their government was wrong, that they would need to re-invent their society along more civil lines, and that they would need to profoundly alter the way that they treated other nations and other peoples of the world while retaining those cultural values that were worth saving. And, sixty-five years later, I think it's safe to say that they've done a pretty good job of that: a once-belligerent, narrow-minded and xenophobic society is now more open, more outward-looking and more socially tolerant than it was in the time of the emperors. They could never have become the global economic and cultural power that they have become in the postwar period if they had clung to all of their parochial and militaristic ways.
One reflection of the cultural paradigm shift that occurred in Japan post-Hiroshima can be found at the site of the bombing itself. Rather than constructing some gaudy war memorial with names engraved in granite of all of those who had died in the service of a society that didn't really deserve to be memorialized, or instead of rebuilding the city to make it appear as though nothing of historical significance had ever happened there---as we are proposing to do right now, at "hallowed" Ground Zero, by erecting a 1,776-foot-tall skyscraper that might as well have a bull's eye painted on it---the people of Hiroshima set aside the property as an international peace park, with museums, libraries and lecture halls and open green spaces where people could come to sit and pray, and reflect and meditate, and listen and learn to study war no more. In other words, they re-dedicated that ground to a more sacred cause---the promotion of peace and nuclear non-proliferation among nations---and it's that act of consecration that has transformed Ground Zero at Hiroshima into something we can at least consider "hallowed." It didn't happen because some right-wing dojo Tweeted it. It happened because a lot of people realized that they could no longer keep doing business they way they had in the past, and that they would need to re-think their culture and how it expressed itself to the outside world. Now, the Japanese are not a perfect people, and their particular strain of capitalist excess is also capable of wreaking a certain amount of devastation upon the planet---and on their own economy, as we have done with ours. But I think it's safe to say that they've also engaged in a great deal of collective self-examination and course correction over the last 60 years in their rush to join the community of civilized nations---far more than we have in the same period---and they've largely refrained from gratuitous public displays of hubris and arrogance in the process. Whatever the reason for this, we would be well advised to learn from their experience---and try to re-dedicate our nation, and our own lives, to some higher, more consecrated purpose than an orgiastic projection of American Power™---instead of rending our garments over the Muslims in our midst and looking for fresh enemies to conquer.
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