Richard Tofel, President and COO of the International Freedom Center, defends his organization's plans for the World Trade Center site in today's WSJ. I agree with Mr. Jarvis: there's a lot of fluff, and little substance, surrounding Mr. Tofel's transparent use of quotes from the President.
But here's something else. How does this:
Then there will be the Memorial Center, a museum devoted to the events of September 11 itself, with exhibit space roughly equal in size to that at the International Freedom Center.
... square with what Ms. Burlingame wrote yesterday?
While the IFC is getting 300,000 square feet of space to teach us how to think about liberty, the actual Memorial Center on the opposite corner of the site will get a meager 50,000 square feet to exhibit its 9/11 artifacts, all out of sight and underground.
Either someone has a unique definition of "equal," or someone is fudging numbers.
Which is it? Some poking around reveals this comment, dated May 25, from a site offering bits of news related to 9/11 memorials:
The Center takes up virtually every square inch of available space on the northeast corner of the site literally bumping up against the memorial and separated only by a row of trees. The sketches show it dominating the block and even dwarfing the the train station.The emphasis on placing a drawing center on the spot adds insult to injury. We have always thought that the mistakes at Ground Zero arose by the handing off of the design plan to artists rather than the logical engineers and historians. Adding salt to the wound is that not only is an art gallery planned at the site but also a location for an organization that doesn’t even exist yet except on paper.
So in essence the Freedom Center in a nutshell exhibits everything that’s wrong about the current plan: it’s too big, it’s built for an organization that doesn’t exist and it celebrates something that has nothing to do with what happened on 911. It’s the ultimate triumph for a plan designed by artists rather than engineers and historians.
The IFC does have a website now, but there's nothing about the Center's square footage there. Oddly enough, I couldn't locate a single mention of the IFC on the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's site.
However, I did discover that the LMDC has a Mission Statement, like all good corporations.
MEMORIAL MISSION STATEMENT FOR THE WORLD TRADE CENTER SITE
- REMEMBER AND HONOR THE THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN MURDERED BY TERRORISTS IN THE HORRIFIC ATTACKS OF FEBRUARY 26, 1993 AND SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.
- RESPECT THIS PLACE MADE SACRED THROUGH TRAGIC LOSS.
- RECOGNIZE THE ENDURANCE OF THOSE WHO SURVIVED, THE COURAGE OF THOSE WHO RISKED THEIR LIVES TO SAVE OTHERS, AND THE COMPASSION OF ALL WHO SUPPORTED US IN OUR DARKEST HOURS.
- MAY THE LIVES REMEMBERED, THE DEEDS RECOGNIZED, AND THE SPIRIT REAWAKENED BE ETERNAL BEACONS, WHICH REAFFIRM RESPECT FOR LIFE, STRENGTHEN OUR RESOLVE TO PRESERVE FREEDOM, AND INSPIRE AN END TO HATRED, IGNORANCE AND INTOLERANCE.
Humanity has produced manifold conceptions of "sacred" over the millennia. But they all share the idea that a sacred space - - whether it's the Ark behind the curtain or the entire earth - - is occupied by, or is in and of itself, something numinous. There's no room room for anything else. That's one of the essential differences between the sacred and the profane: whatever is sacred takes up all of the space it is given, so that to cross the boundary and enter into its presence one must also become sacred. Hence, the purification rituals undertaken by the Israelite priests who entered the Holy of Holies, or the pantheistic insistence that everything is sacred.
Everthing in the LMDC's Mission Statement is focused on the numinous presence of those who died and those who survived... right up until the end: AND INSPIRE AN END TO HATRED, IGNORANCE AND INTOLERANCE. Did the dead hate? Were they ignorant, or intolerant? Maybe some of them were, in life, but not now, in sacred death.
But we know who hated, who was ignorant, and who was intolerant, don't we? That's right: the psychopathic Jihadists who killed 3,000 people on that clear September morning.
By injecting the characteristics of the murderers into what is supposed to be a place sacred to the memory of the murdered, the IFC and the LMDC have injected profanity into a sacred space.
Ultimately, the square footage doesn't matter. Even a square inch of the IFC's pedantic exhibit would offend in that place.
There is no room for it there. None at all.
