Ground
Zero Guilt
Ground
Zero Guilt
By Joe Bob Briggs
July 15, 2003
When you live in New York, for example, you always have friends saying, "I want to come to New York, but I don't want to do anything touristy."
"Touristy" is always spat out of the mouth, like a slur, like you're holding a dirty sock you've scraped up off a sidewalk grate and you can't wait to fling it into a Dempster Dumpster.
A visitor from Europe, on the other hand, is right up front about what he wants: "Empire State Building. Statue of Liberty. Times Square. And Ground Zero."
By mentioning Ground Zero, he's committed the cardinal offense to American tourism hipness. An American would never admit he wanted to go to Ground Zero. In fact, he's more likely to say, "I just don't think it's a place people should go."
This means that, eight hours after landing at JFK, he'll be standing on Church Street, peering through the fence at the lone girder they left up in the giant hole in the ground.
And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that..
I don't know when the idea became popular to pretend that we don't like to visit sites of massive death, because we've always flocked to scenes of carnage. We go to Pearl Harbor. We go to Gettysburg. We go to the OK Corral. We go to Waterloo. Hell, we even go to Dachau. The polite way to refer to it is "hallowed ground." And Ground Zero is no different. After all, nobody's suggesting you should go there to tapdance or quaff a brew. It's a place of reverence and sadness. It's okay to go someplace full of sadness.
A hundred years ago, the number one tourist attraction in New York was Grant's Tomb. I don't think anybody, even once, has asked me how to get to Grant's Tomb. But that's a massive gloomy mausoleum with two people in it. (They had to include the wife.) You don't get much more morbid than that.
And the number one New York tourist attraction today is Ground Zero, despite the city's apparent denial of that fact. (It's not shown on official tourist maps.) But how blind can they be? After all, it's just two blocks from City Hall itself. Just head downtown on a weekend and look at the throngs around St. Paul's Chapel, searching for something, anything, that will give them some way to grasp the site. There's one piddly little sign on a chain link fence on Church Street, and there's St. Paul's itself, which used to be known as the place where George Washington attended church while President but is now known as the place that fed and comforted the Ground Zero workers. Mostly people are just wandering around down there, trying to find someone who can tell them just exactly where the Twin Towers stood.
And, of course, wherever there are crowds in New York, there are souvenir vendors. I think the first one appeared 48 hours after the terrorist attack. It was a Chinatown gift shop owner who put in a rush order on miniature American flags and Twin Towers paperweights. Today there's a vast array of Ground Zero merchandise, from framed color photographs of the towers on fire to book-length photo essays to NYPD caps to all kinds of Twin Towers paperweights, crystal sculptures and knick-knacks. (What seemed like worthless inventory one week after the attack is now the most valuable stock in town.)
And that bothers the city fathers. It bothers them so much that they've actually sent a bill to the legislature in Albany asking the state to make sidewalk peddling illegal at Ground Zero. The reason? "In recognition of the sanctity of the site." They don't even want hot dog carts or pretzel vendors in the area. (Let them eat deli food!) The city that practically makes a religion of having freedom of expression in open spaces is agitating for the kind of street-life crackdown you usually find in, say, Dallas or Cincinnati.
But what's the harm in it? In order for a vendor to make a living down there, he's got to be selling something that the tourists already want. And in the absence of any National Parks Department Guide to Ground Zero, they're going to buy copies of either "Day of Terror" or "Day of Tragedy." (I asked the guy what's the difference between "Day of Terror" and "Day of Tragedy." For your information, his answer was, "No difference. Same book." Now that is some impressive sidewalk demographic profiling. He had apparently noted that the men like the idea of a day of terror, but the women think of it as a day of tragedy.)
In other words, people want an object to touch and look at when they get home. Let's not judge them for that, and let's not judge the people who make the objects. I've seen the faces of these people when they stand at Ground Zero. The site itself is not much to look at, but the faces are hollow-eyed and tearful. They feel something. They can't just walk away. They feel guilty about going there and they feel guilty about buying "Day of Terror," but they shouldn't. We should look at those pictures. We should always remember those images.
It's only the brahmins at City Hall who think it should be otherwise, that we should return to the New York of 9/10. Somebody who zips into town to see "Mamma Mia" and then gets drunk at ESPN Zone--now that's what we call an all-American tourist. That's a guy who understands the sanctity of New York City sites.
© 2003 Joe Bob Briggs All Rights Reserved