A Hole in Which Hopes Are Buried

Aviva's father forwarded this Washington Post article and I though it was worth sharing. Cohen certainly presents a very astute critique of the Bush administration's handling of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq. You can visit the Post's website to read the full article, though it will require you complete their free registration process.

A Hole in Which Hopes Are Buried
By Richard Cohen
Washington Post, Tuesday, April 4, 2006

NEW YORK -- President Bush is starting to look beyond his presidency. His focus is on his legacy, which he is sure will vindicate his decision to go to war in Iraq. But his most fitting memorial is likely to be where I was Sunday: the immense gash in Lower Manhattan known as Ground Zero. More than 4 1/2 years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the hole has yet to be filled.

Tourists come and look. The selling of souvenirs is prohibited at the site itself, but around the corner, on Vesey Street, peddlers hug the shadows. The proper souvenir to take away from this place, though, is the memory of its immense emptiness. It's a hole filled with broken promises and silly rhetoric, an inverted monument to the Bush administration's unfathomable failure even to capture Osama bin Laden.

. . .

This hallowed ground, this pitiless pit, has become Exhibit A on the inability of government to function. Plans get announced, news conferences held, breathtaking models shown of buildings reaching for the sky -- and nothing happens. George Pataki, the governor of New York, supposedly fashions himself a presidential candidate, yet he cannot even get this development underway. He is at loggerheads with the site's developer, and so nothing happens. In a city where developers are king -- this is Donald Trump's home town, after all -- you can still go to Ground Zero and see zero. This is 16 acres of Katrina and all it taught us about feeble political leaders.

Maybe we should leave Ground Zero as it is. The imagination can provide a fitting memorial to those who died. "We dig a grave in the breezes," Paul Celan wrote in his Holocaust poem "Death Fugue." We can dig ours as deep as the World Trade Center once was tall. The ugly emptiness will remind us always to be wary of the grand schemes of politicians. They can't build a building. They cannot capture a mass murderer. They cannot wage war in Iraq. This is their hole. It is, by dint of failure, George Bush's presidential library. His proper legacy is a void.