Ground Zero - Still Crazy After All These Years

Americans still aren’t sure of how to mark the passing of September 11. Getting drunk and grilling meat seems inappropriate, and besides, we do that almost every day in the summer anyway. Fireworks would be even less appropriate. President Obama’s idea to treat 9/11 as a “day of service” is nice, and volunteering is always good, but doesn’t seem specific enough to the occasion. How do you create a tradition around an event that made everyone sad, angry, and kind of confused?

In lower Manhattan, 9/11 was honored by the presence of a lot of American flags and even more cops. The streets were cordoned off by metal barriers leading to massive bottlenecks of people trying to get to the massive construction site where the World Trade Center used to be. It was like Disney World on a summer day, or how I imagine Mecca to be during the Hajj.

Crowds in every town attract freaks, but this is especially true in New York City. If you were one of the thousands of people unable to move forward or back, you probably saw these conservatively-dressed young people handing out nasty evangelical Jack Chick tracts:

This Eastern European guy was really into the USA:

And this guy:

The official ceremony, during which the names of people who died on 9/11 were read, was already over, but the ritual of protests and counter-protests that accompany any even slightly political event in America was just beginning. In the People with AIDS Plaza, the oddly-named strip of trees and concrete on Broadway, there was a motley gathering of communists, liberals, Muslims, and lefty activists of all sorts. People were handing out copies of the China Daily and the Industrial Worker, which is published by the International Workers of the World, and some pamphlets in Arabic. One of the speakers tried to start a “Close Guantanamo Bay!” chant, but not many people took it up. There were about as many Palestinian flags as American ones.

A few blocks away, people were gathering for a rally sponsored by the American Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, two linked organizations run by Pamela Geller, a right-wing blogger who believes that the US is going to be overrun by jihadists any day now. She was one of the first people to denounce Cordoba House, the Muslim community center that was going to be built a few blocks away from Ground Zero, on a street that includes a bunch of restaurants and a strip club. In the world inhabited by her and her fellow anti-jihadist crusaders, a bombing in occupied Afghanistan is part of a “war on the West” and the one percent of Americans who are Muslim are a serious threat. Not surprisingly, the Tea Party was there, from as far away as Fort Lauderdale, Florida:

One explicit motivation behind the right-wing rally was to include members of the clergy, who weren’t invited to the official ceremony. Prayers were given by a Sikh, three Hindus, and a Christian (a rabbi was invited, but no one could find him in the crowd), but even though everyone said that they were totally, 100 percent OK with Muslims, no Imam was in attendance.

That’s the odd thing about Geller and her cohorts—they constantly remind you they aren’t anti-Muslim while hinting at secret jihad movements and finding reasons to oppose mosques. The sister of a dead firefighter, for example, held up a photo of the burned-out wreckage of the WTC and informed the crowd that the problem with Cordoba House is that it’s disrespectful to victims’ families. Similarly, the problem with the mosque planned in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, is that it’s a residential area that couldn’t deal with the traffic, according to Victor, pictured here:

He told me he’d oppose a large store or a church as well, but in the same breath he criticized the group building the mosque as being associated with terrorists. It’s slippery logic: “We don’t care that they’re Muslims, it’s purely a zoning issue, but also, these guys are evil fundamentalists, but don’t call us racists because it’s not about them being Muslims.”

Mosque issues aside, the rally wasn’t explicitly political. It was about emotion, not policy. Before the speakers began, the crowd spontaneously sung the national anthem and “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore,” and occasionally chanted “USA! USA! USA!” The official ceremony put on by the city was all about somber, non-denominational grief, and that wasn’t good enough for the few hundred people waving flags. They were angry, not just at the terrorists but also at what they thought was a “whitewashing” of 9/11. When a speaker mentioned that Obama had referred to it as a “man-made disaster,” a chorus of boos went up. That language was too bloodless for them. Every mention of 9/11 must refer to terrorism, and not just terrorism but Islamic terrorism. An old police officer who was in the lobby of the towers during the attacks, and who was so filled with emotion onstage he kept dropping the mic, quoted Lord of the Rings: “There are some wounds that cannot be healed!” he shouted.

Healing wounds wasn’t the goal here though—this was an annual ripping off of scabs, a rubbing of salt into emotional scars. The Sikh and Hindu prayers early in the event were pleas for peace, but the other speakers were there to remind us that we were at war, and for good reason. The events of 9/11—the fires, the people jumping out of windows, the rescue workers running into collapsing buildings that would become their graves—were recounted in visceral detail. The deaths of the firefighters and cops were linked to the current deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, and there was no blame laid on the US for being in those countries in the first place. Back in 2001, when America had the moral clarity of the rightfully pissed off, things were simple. Pausing to talk complex geopolitics would have been impossible, and accusing America of being wrong about anything—as the leftists were doing a few blocks away—would have been offensive. That’s the national mood that the Geller rally was happy to resurrect for a few hours. It was emotional time travel just as much as it was catharsis. Osama bin Laden is dead, and Ground Zero is now a construction site and a memorial—you could say that maybe it’s time to let go of anger and move on to another stage of grief. To which these people would say, Goddamit! That’s just what the jihadists want you to think!