The billion-dollar gravestone

Instead of being a testament to the dead, the hubristic 9/11 memorial will remind viewers of the arrogant folly of Bush's America.

By Tom Engelhardt

Read more: George W. Bush, Iraq, Opinion

May 20, 2006 | Recently, a number -- 1 billion -- in the New York Times stopped me in my tracks. According to a report commissioned by the foundation charged with building Reflecting Absence, the memorial to the dead in the attack on the World Trade Center, its projected cost is now estimated at about a billion dollars and still rising. According to Oliver Burkeman of the British Guardian, "Taking inflation into account, $1bn would be more than a quarter of the original cost of the twin towers that were destroyed in 2001."

For that billion, Reflecting Absence is to have two huge "reflecting pools" -- "two voids that reside in the original footprints of the Twin Towers" -- fed by waterfalls "from all sides" and surrounded by a "forest" of oak trees; a visitor will then be able to descend 30 feet to galleries under the falls "inscribed with the names of those who died." There is to be an adjacent, 100,000-square-foot underground memorial museum to "retell the events of the day, display powerful artifacts, and celebrate the lives of those who died." All of this, as the Web site for the memorial states, will be meant to vividly convey "the enormity of the buildings and the enormity of the loss." Not surprisingly, the near billion-dollar figure does not even include $80 million for a planned visitor's center or the estimated $50 million to $60 million annual cost of running such an elaborate memorial and museum.

So what is Reflecting Absence going to reflect? For one thing, it will mirror its gargantuan twin, the building that is to symbolically replace the World Trade Center -- the Freedom Tower. As the memorial is to be driven deep into the scarred earth of ground zero, so the Freedom Tower is to soar above it, scaling the imperial heights. To be precise, it is to reach exactly 1,776 feet into the heavens, a numerical tribute to the founding spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the nation that emerged from it; its spire will even emit light -- "a new beacon of freedom" -- for all the world to see and admire. Its observation deck will rise a carefully planned 7 feet above that of the old World Trade Center; and with spire and antennae, it is meant to be the tallest office building on the planet (though the Burj Dubai Tower, whose builders are holding its future height a tightly guarded secret, may quickly surpass it).

The revelation of that staggering billion-dollar price tag for a memorial whose design, in recent years, has grown ever larger and more complex, caused consternation in my city, led Mayor Michael Bloomberg to suggest capping its cost at $500 million, caused the Times to editorialize, "The only thing a $1 billion memorial would memorialize is a complete collapse of political and private leadership in Lower Manhattan," and became a nationwide media story. Because the subject is such a touchy one, however, no one went further and explored the obvious: that, even in victimhood, Americans have in recent years exhibited an unseemly imperial hubris. Whether the price tag proves to be half a billion or a billion dollars, one thing can be predicted. The memorial will prove less a reminder of how many Americans happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on that September day, or how many -- firemen, policemen, bystanders who stayed to aid others -- sacrificed their lives, than of the terrible path this country ventured down in the wake of 9/11.

If the latest opinion polls are to be believed, Americans have grown desperately tired of that path and, as a result, the whole construction project at New York's ground zero is likely to become emotionally obsolete long before either Reflecting Absence or the Freedom Tower make it onto the scene.

Memorials Built and Unbuilt

Let me offer a few framing comparisons:

1) Sometime in the coming week or two, the number of American soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will exceed the 2,752 people who died in or around the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 (including those on the two hijacked jets that rammed into the towers). With a combined death toll of 2,739, the war dead have already crept within 13 of that day's casualties in New York. Here's a question then: Who thinks that the United States will ever spend $500 million, no less $1 billion, on a memorial to the ever-growing numbers of war dead from those two wars?

2) Or consider the prospective 9/11 memorial in this context:

The National World War II Memorial (405,000 American dead): $182 million for all costs.

The Vietnam Memorial (56,000 American dead): $4.2 million for construction.

The Korean War Veterans Memorial (54,000 American dead): $6 million.

The USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor (2,390 American dead, 1,177 from the Arizona): $532,000.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial (168 American dead): $29 million.

The 1915 USS Maine Mast Memorial at Arlington Cemetery (260 American dead): $56,147.94

The Holocaust Museum in Washington (approximately 6 million dead): $90 million for construction/$78 million for exhibitions

The WTC Memorial (2,752 dead): $494 million-$1 billion.

3) Or imagine a listing of global ground zeros that might go something like this:

Amount spent on a memorial for the Vietnamese dead of their Vietnam Wars (approximately 3 million): $0.

Amount spent on a memorial to the Afghan dead in the civil war between competing warlords over who would control the capital of Kabul in the mid-1990s (unknown numbers of dead, a city reduced to rubble): $0.

Amount spent on a memorial to the victims of the Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific and Indian Oceans (at least 188,000 dead): $0.

Amount spent on a memorial to Iraqis confirmed dead, many with signs of execution and torture marks, just in the month of April in Baghdad alone (almost 1,100), or the Iraqis confirmed killed countrywide "in war-related violence" from January through April of this year (3,525) -- and both of these figures are certainly significant undercounts: $0.

The WTC Memorial (2,752 dead): $494 million-$1 billion.

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