“Freedom Center” is now “Do As We Say Center”
ABOVE: detail from Al Brandtner’s Patriot Act (see ADD, April 13). New York Governor Al Pataki told the papers this week that artworks slated to be included in the increasingly inaccurately named Freedom Center at Ground Zero will include no such expressions of “America-bashing.”
We know, we know, it’s the New York Daily News, and nothing the Murdoch Mouthpiece says can be taken with the slightest bit of seriousness by right-thinking people such as ADD’s discerning readers. But it’s simply too hilarious, and we’re still recovering from that week off inoculating orphans in Tanzania. We must pick the low-hanging fruit where it hangs.
We find ourselves perversely concurring with the Daily Snooze on their labelling of 9/11 art as “kooky.” Though we’re coming up on four years since that fateful morning, the events of September 11th, 2001 have yet to be addressed seriously and satsifactorily by any artwork that we have come across. What we see is trite in its politics, uninspired in its execution, and limp in its emotional resonance.
But that’s beside the point. The 9/11 angst of today is what kind of groups are going to be allowed to contribute art to the “Freedom Center,” the museum-monument planned for Ground Zero. Apparently some of the involved groups “hate America” and are therefore not free to contribute any more. Apparently Gov. Pataki, who is a leading voice for the shocked and appalled, feels no cognitive dissonance whatsoever vis-a-vis dictating what may and may not be said at the Freedom Center. In a world where “Orwellian” is misused and abused so often in overheated rhetoric, we wish to point out that this is in fact a textbook definition of the term. Discuss.