Dissent at Ground Zero

Dissent at Ground Zero Sunday, July 31, 2005 By MIKE KELLY

THINK AHEAD.It's 2011, 10 years after that terrible September day when four jetliners were hijacked and the world changed. You decide to make a pilgrimage to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. Here is what you might find:
A dance performance. Poetry readings. A multi-media exhibit on the horrors of slavery. Paintings by Zen monks. Children's drawings about bigotry.
And 9/11?
Well, yes, there may be a memorial and a museum by 2011. But to find it, you'll have to go below ground. Get the picture?
Ground Zero is a mess right now. Almost four years after the Twin Towers fell, there is still no agreement on what the place should look like. If there is a modern Tower of Babel, this may be it.
There are too many agendas, too many egos - probably too many planners, architects, artists, organizers, lawyers, PR flacks and politicians, too. But there is something else now, something as undeniable as the memory of what happened there. There is bitterness at Ground Zero.
We saw this coming, didn't we? The Twin Towers were still smoking when pols and planners started imagining what to do.
A memorial to the dead? Of course. That was an easy call. Everybody wanted a memorial. Some parts of the memorial plan still need fine tuning, but the deepening bitterness now clouding Ground Zero comes from an unexpected source - the cultural center.
Cultural center?
Maybe you missed it. Don't be shocked if you did.
The idea to integrate art, music and dance into the plans for a revived Ground Zero seemed to slip under the political and social radar. But by spring, names of organizers and concepts emerged and it didn't take long for the skirmishing to begin.
At the core of the fight are two components of the cultural center, the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center. The IFC would showcase exhibits highlighting the search for freedom; the drawing center would display artwork.
That seemed like a fine idea until the IFC revealed that some exhibits might focus on slavery and genocide, and art patrons happened to notice that the Drawing Center's gallery in SoHo was showing paintings denigrating President Bush.
"To IFC's organizers, it is not only history's triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures," wrote Debra Burlingame, sister of a pilot on the hijacked jetliner that struck the Pentagon on 9/11 and a board member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation. She suggested that the "public will come to see 9/11" at Ground Zero, but "will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond."
Burlingame's charges set off a series of political explosions that threaten to evolve into a full-blown culture war. Critics suggested there was nothing wrong with studying history. But at Ground Zero?
It turns lot that IFC Chairman Tom Bernstein may have once been a partner with President Bush in running the Texas Rangers baseball team. But Bernstein's affiliation with Human Rights First, which is now suing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for abuses of detained suspected terrorists, has turned him into a lighting rod.
But Burlingame was hardly neutral either. Besides her vocal support for the Iraq war, she spoke last year at the Republican National Convention, and campaigned with President Bush.
Burlingame's politics have made her a favorite target of liberals. Likewise, conservatives took aim at Bernstein, the IFC and the Drawing Center. Within weeks, New York's Gov. George Pataki demanded that the Drawing Center and IFC give "an absolute guarantee" that exhibits and lectures will not be anti-American.
Bernstein responded with a 6-page letter, promising that IFC programs "will not blame America or attack champions of freedom." The Drawing Center drew a line in the artistic sand, proclaiming that it "would never be able to accept censorship."
And there it stands. A noble notion of a cultural center has become a fight over anti-Americanism, partisan politics and censorship.
Pataki and others are trying desperately to work out a peaceful compromise. But the poisonous seeds are already scattered.
Ground Zero is now just like the rest of America. People are fighting over hearts and minds and souls. And what was supposed to be a memorial to a tragedy has become just another tragedy.
Record Columnist Mike Kelly can be contacted at kellym@northjersey.com. Send comments about this column to oped@northjersey.com.