Soccer Dad: How not to/ how to remember 911

September 11, 2005

How not to/ how to remember 911

How Not to remember 9/11
Painting a controversy

Among artworks on display:

Chicago artist Al Brandtner's "Patriot Act" features 42 mock postage stamps with Bush's image - and a 9-mm. handgun leveled at his head. When exhibited in Chicago in April, Secret Service agents photographed it and launched a probe of the artist.
"It was a show of intimidation," Brandtner told the Daily News yesterday. "The work was done tongue and cheek. The idea was for people who didn't like George Bush to look at it and laugh."

Also hanging at the Seaport will be his "Flag: Study in White No. 1," an upside-down and whitewashed U.S. flag. "The colors have been washed out," he said. "It shows the eroding of civil liberties in America."

North Carolina artist Lisa Charde echoes that theme in "The (un)Patriotic(ic) Act," in which a straitjacket patterned after the flag portrays the supposed shackles on America's freedoms.

Baltimore artist Christina Nguyen Hung's "Experiments in Resistance With Bleach" portrays insidious bacteria in a petri dish eating away at sections of the First Amendment.

New Jersey artist Grace Graupe-Pillard's "Interventions" takes images from the war in Iraq - car bombings, erupting flames, puddles of blood - and puts them on the streets of Manhattan to portray the "politics of fear" in "our own backyard."

By the way the exhibit is called "A Knock on the door."

How not to remember 911?
Paul Murdoch Associates submitted the winning design for the Flight 93 memorial in Pennsylvania. One element of that memorial has rubbed people the wrong way is the "Crescent of embrace" that seems to be an Islamic symbol. Real Clear Politics, for one, questions this choice:

The red crescent moon is the symbol of the The Red Crescent Society, the arm of the International Federation of The Red Cross dedicated to serving Islamic countries and the crescent moon with a star is the internationally-recognized symbol of the faith of Islam. It is featured prominently in some variation on the flags of most Islamic states:
Is this really the sort of symbol we want commemorating the crash of UAL Flight 93?

Michelle Malkin offers a list of other dissenters.
How to remember 911
Images of Ground Zero
Faces of Ground Zero (preview of a book)

UPDATE: Other commemorations:
The Avalon Project
Kesher Talk
Yourish
Instapundit
Pillage Idiot
Elie's Expositions
And this is no time to forget Elder of Ziyon's photo montage of lower Manhattan to recall what is missing from Manhattan's southern skyline.
Cox & Forkum and they have a sobering ongoing cartoon reminding us that we're slowly unlearning the lessons of 9/11.
My wife highly recommended Orthomom's recounting of her husband's escape from the North Tower. She conveyed the feeling that my wife felt and still feels when she thinks of her brother's escape.
While I can't relate to the Christianity of Alan Jackson's "Where were you (when the world stopped turning)" many of the lyrics recall how I felt.

Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)
Where were you when the world stopped turning on that September day?

I was at work when my wife called to tell me that there was a fire at the World Trade Center (where her brother worked) and she was quite concerned. I did as much research as I could and was pretty certain that Jon was OK as the fire was at least 30 floors higher than where he worked. But the internet didn't work too well that day as servers were no doubt overloaded by people trying to do what I was trying to do.

Were you in the yard with your wife and children

That's what I came home to. On another day it would have been beautiful. My wife with our new daughter sitting out in the sunny front yard. But the idyllic appearance would be deceiving for we were filled with worry.

Did you burst out with pride for the red, white and blue
And the heroes who died just doin' what they do?

This line is still the most poignant. The path down the emergency exits was quite hot. The firemen used their axes to break open soda machines to provide the evacuees with water on the way down. Jon said that he was sure that not too long after a firefighter handed him a bottle of water on the 21st floor, that that firefighter almost certainly died. Died, while saving others. Just doing what he did.

Or driving down some cold interstate?

The interstate I went home on was not cold. Though it was, as I recall, empty. As a federal employee in the DC area, I would have been sent home anyway, but I had to take leave a little earlier to support my wife.
One other thing I remember is that throughout the day there were no reports about Donald Rumsfeld. I had assumed that he had been killed since just about every other senior member of the government had been accounted for much earlier. My conclusion was wrong: