The great restaurateur promises a “soothing” experience, modeled on the “contemplative” spirit of a tea room.At some point the taking of offense itself becomes offensive.
Whew!
But the brains behind the museum apparently regard their cathartic masterpiece as just another cultural venue like MoMA or the Whitney, where [Danny] Meyer also runs restaurants.
I can go for tomato soup and grilled cheese after staring at Picassos for a few hours. My appetite isn’t the same after a tour through hell.
Maybe out of respect for the dead, no one who still walks the face of the earth should ever laugh or take pleasure in anything ever again. More than 100 billion human beings have died, perhaps right where you are standing/sitting/reclining right now. How dare you ever do anything? Look out your window and visualize the ghosts of all the human beings who, over the course of history and prehistory, died within that view. Will you mourn for them... ceaselessly... until you are one of them? If they could look back and see you mourning for them... ceaselessly... until the day you join them, what would they think of you? If they saw you enjoying a grilled cheese sandwich, would they think: How dare you!?
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73 comments:
The best memorial to the victims of 9/11 is to live life normally.
People enjoy grandstanding and being offended these days. Cottage industry.
The place was set aside as memorial.
We don't go have a beer on the Arizona.
I though question the original decision to make a bloated museum at the site: once they went beyond a simple dignified memorial it inevitably becomes just another tourist disneyland.
If they saw you eating a grilled cheese sandwich, would they think: How dare you!?
Of course! If I was an incorporeal entity I know I'd get very upset watching a stupid fleshbag ingest all that tasty grilled cheese matter. It's not fair.
Well when you go to the museum, its not like there aren't a million places to eat within a short distance, being its NYC.
I feel too much appreciation for Althouse to comment with my usual, unsurpassed, authority.
Visit Virtika and watch the Next Friday vid.
For reals yo.
My kids used to have the custom of holding their breath when driving by a cemetery. They explained "Well, they can't breathe so we shouldn't either."
A while ago I stumbled upon a web site that had two pictures of the same scene, one from the present and one during World War II, superimposed over each other.
It really made me appreciate that suffering is almost everywhere, just beneath the surface of the present.
I'm outraged at the museum-industrial complex.
Of all the gin joints....
From TNC's case for reparations:
"Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage."
Althouse on this 9/11 museum post:
Maybe out of respect for the dead, no one who still walks the face of the earth should ever laugh or take pleasure in anything every again.
I like today's theme.
It's soap opera, and then meta soap opera on top of it, so as to hook sophisticated viewers as well.
Soon all the completely clueless will be watching.
Some people want society to stand at attention indefinitely for whatever tragedy or issue is important to them. It's a mental disease
Perhaps they should use the National Holocaust Museum as a guide. I visited that many years ago, but offhand I don't recall a gift shop or cafe inside. Perhaps I'm wrong, but there are some places there crass commercialism is uncalled for.
People will go to the restroom at the site of Ground Zero.
Some will smoke.
Some will have sex.
If one wishes to take offense, knock people out.
Sounds like another "trigger."
I don't know. I do find it pretty tacky. A 9/11 gift shop? Reall?
Why is there no college course in "Taking Offense"?
This is the site I mentioned earlier.
But, 9/11!!!!
I hear their '5-Alarm Chili' is amazing.
What Gahrie said.
(Is the idea that nobody should eat there?
That anyone who gets hungry normally after seeing pictures of the collapse is some sort of monster?
Come off it.
Close the restaurant and people will simply eat elsewhere ... making it that much more of a burden on the public to run the damned museum.)
What we need to resist is the continuing attempt by the religious and superstitious to define what's "sacred" and thus deserving of respect.
They are polluting the world with their cemeteries, their oaths of allegiance and their moments of silence. We know they'd like us all to start genuflecting, making the sign of the cross, putting crucifixes over doors and blessing automobiles.
There is no such thing as "desecrating" a cemetery, much less a building site, since there's no such thing as sacred or holy in the first place, outside the imagination of the religious.
I'm so tired of people. Perpetually offended must be a terrible way to live.
As I recall, there is a book store at the Arizona Memorial (Pearl Harbor) in Hawaii. The link above seems to indicate there is also a snack bar. I was there the day my 27-year-old son turned 1, so this is evidently not a new thing. Plenty of people were killed and went missing there, including the innocence of the American people.
I also visited Dachau and bought a book in their book shop. I daresay more people died at Dachau than on 9/11.
I don't know if it's right or wrong to have a shop there, but I think the WTC's should have been rebuilt on their own footprints, maybe a bit higher. And they should have been finished in a year or two.
“New York-made draft beers and American wines on tap,”
I'll have a Brooklyn Lager, and a grilled cheese on rye.
Is Brooklyn Lager made in Brooklyn? ???
I guess I was wrong. I went to the National Holocaust Museum website and there is a cafe in the adjacent building. There's an online gift shop but I don't know if there's a physical one.
"I can go for tomato soup and grilled cheese after staring at Picassos for a few hours. My appetite isn’t the same after a tour through hell."
So order something lighter, or skip the cafe entirely.
Problem solved.
So we beat on, boats against the current . . . .
Let's set up a hot-dog stand at the site of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Think of the income.
@realalthouse
Being offended is the easiest thing in the world, and American culture these days rewards it way too much.
9/11 was an important day in America, thus the museum. But the people who were lost were no more loved by their families and friends than those who died on the same day in a traffic accident on a highway that reopened a few hours later. It's sad to say, but I think there are maybe some people who feel important because their loved ones were lost in a national tragedy, rather than in simply a personal one.
Ace wrote a really great post about this yesterday.
Meh, if this guy really cared, he'd demand that they remove bathrooms from the site. You think eating at a memorial is bad? Some heartless bastards are actually crapping and pissing there!
"MathMom said...
As I recall, there is a book store at the Arizona Memorial (Pearl Harbor) in Hawaii. "
The book store is at the memorial on the mainland, which is quite a different place than to memorial on the water over the Arizona. Going out there is an intensely emotional experience. The ride to the memorial is on a US navy boat, which observes all the protocols. Arizona is still an active commission ship in the US Navy, and also a national cemetery. The ship, where over 1100 people are entombed, is clearly visible under the water. You see many visitors in tears. I was one of them.
There is no snack or gift shop at the memorial in the harbor. It is a solemn experience. The memorial on the mainland is a more conventional museum arrangement.
Are they selling t-shirts that say "3,000 people died and all I got was this lousy t-shirt?" If not, then let the museum have a gift shop.
I agree with MathMom, and I think that the Department of Defense had the right idea in rebuilding the Pentagon just the way it was, except stronger and more resistant to attack. An Orthodox Jewish friend tried to explain why rebuilding the WTC in the same footprints would be an affront to observant Jews given he great many Jews who died there that day, and I think I got his point. Still, rebuilding just the way it was, but stronger and more resistant and with better ways to exit in case of fire would have been a wonderful one-fingered salute to the Arab world.
But the 9/11 museum is not actually in those footprints from what I can see. so if you're bound and determined to be offended then how about you just don't go?
(N.B., as luck would have it, the side of the Pentagon where the 757 crashed had been strengthed and made "bomb proof" prior to the attack. Thus the Pentagon designers had additional lessons learned they could apply to the rebuild and to strengthing the rest of the building's facade.)
Grilled cheese and soup sounds like what a mom would fix for lunch. Food from your childhood is comfort food, so at least the name of the place is appropriate. Maybe his mom never fixed him lunch.
I don't have a problem with there being a gift shop either. People say to never forget 9/11. Having something tangible will help people do that.
Can I get ham on my grilled cheese sandwich?
"America has only one truly permanent underclass: The perennially indignant." - P.J. O'Rourke
Agree with MayBee as usual.
I would add that that people who have not lost anyone to a national terror attack seem to over-empathize. Think of the politicians and planners and builders who let their emotions run wild.
Similarly,Carolyn McCarthy the last-term congressman devoted her entire career to gun control after her husband was gunned down by a madman. Her efforts to date have borne little fruit or even attention. A life of grief but sadly out of balance.
Even the worst losses have redemption.
The existence of a "museum" on the site is offensive to me. I would tear it down and replace it with a plaque and some seats. Maybe a public bathroom. The "museum" is agitprop.
At the USS Arizona Memorial there is a clear distinction between the visitors center/bookstore/food than the actual Memorial itself, which is obviously offshore. If there was a bookstore right on the structure above the sunken ship that would be tacky.
Comparisons to the Holocaust museum aren't really good because the Holocaust didn't occur at that site. Although that whole museum is an absolutely first rate example of a museum that takes its very somber and brutal subject matter thoughtfully and seriously.
I agree that our culture is going overboard with the outrage meter, but at the same time, I find myself uneasy with the restaurant thing. Selling cheap NYC trinkets too? If the museum were just that, a museum, at another location, then fine. But if this is a memorial, shouldn't there be a separation of that from the commercial interests of a museum?
This is what should have been built at the site after 9/11/2001, immediately:
http://www.kiggityca.com/images/WTC/fubin.jpg
No memorial.
Having a restaurant seems kind of unnecessary. I don't like the offense-industrial complex, but the eatery seems in rather poor taste, pardon the pun.
FWIW, there is certainly no snack bar on the Arizona Memorial itself, which is essentially a very nice barge. That memorial is part of the larger Pearl Harbour museums complex, which does inlude eateries and gift shops.
I recall reading a sci-fi story many years ago, I think Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer, which takes place 1 million years in the future where a religious order wears boot with ridiculously high soles, something like 1 foot I think, so they won't trample on the dust of their ancestors.
Math Mom: The bookstore is not on the Arizona, where deceased are still intearned. That seems to be the issue the family members have, that the museum has remains, thus is cemetery. I understand the intent behind what they were trying to do, but I don't think they thought it through.
More than any other "senseless tragedy", 9/11 was exploited by pols, special interest groups, media, and cultural appropriators to become a near-endless Mournathon.
We got the Hero Victims, the Hero Rescuers, then the Hero Victim Families, then the Hero Neocons and other Advisors telling America how to act and how much money NY groups needed and what should be done about Islamist enemy inc. Hero Opportunistic Muslims.
In the 12 1/2 years since then, 31 million Americans have died. Many tragically.
Two failed wars. 4 trillion largely pissed away on the wars and on "special entitlements" to the "special heroes and victims" of NYC.
Unlike what other victims and heroes received after crime or enemy attack in the rest of US history (or world history).
I predict in another decade, the museum will be of low interest to tourists and will eventually fold. And eventually be replaced by better use of the property 60-80 years hence.
Nothing that special about it. Compared to what other nations have suffered, even at the hands of Americans, 9/11 was a very small enemy attack that inflicted a small number of casualties.
The Ace post: Stop With all the 9/11 Museum Hypersensitivity
I'm so tired of people.
Addenda superfluous.
Sam L. said...Why is there no college course in "Taking Offense"?
There are plenty of them; they're called "X Studies", where X=some group that wants other peoples' stuff. Because they're offended.
There is no such thing as "desecrating" a cemetery, much less a building site, since there's no such thing as sacred or holy in the first place, outside the imagination of the religious.
Are you for real? Because I come from a super religious (albeit Mexican) family. We visit family members graves every Christmas Eve and have hot chocolate and snacks around the gravestone, sing some songs, say a few words, and generally have a wonderful time. The cemeteries are actually quite busy with other families (very Catholic by the looks of the headstones) basically doing the same thing. I would imagine the most offended by this kind of "disrespectful" behavior are the unreligious who imagine their family members will spend forever trapped six feet under. For us believers, the grave is merely a short resting place.
LA's Museum Of Tolerance has both a cafeteria and a gift shop, for what that's worth.
While I agree that the professional grievance crowd will find even navel lint an outrage, I do believe there is a place for old fashioned principles like respect, reverence and honor. Why can't we just say no to commercializing sites of mass casualties ?
I have more qualms about the self-congratulatory get-together by the elites two days ago than the idea that the museum is going to serve food. Presumably, we're talking about the usual dull museum style food area, as opposed to a mall food court (which will be across the street in the Sergio Calatrava money pit of a subway station), and the food will be limited to that area, so people aren't dropping chicken salad on the exhibits.
A low-key food area and barring food or drink in the main part of the museum is all that's needed here. Eight of the 16 acres at Ground Zero is dedicated to the memorial, but the other eight, and several more acres around it, are designed to replace the Twin Towers' office space. You're not going to be able to return the area to some sense of normalcy if you're going to demand it be the saddest place in the world forever.
When nearly 3,000 people are killed in a coordinated set of attacks, just about everyone knows someone who knows someone who was affected. I worked with a fellow in Atlanta who later went to work for a Canadian firm in a related finance sector. He was a good guy and was very dedicated to his work, which meant that for sure, he wouldn't miss the breakfast meeting at Windows on the World on the morning of 9/11, associated with a trade conference he was attending, and... well, you can guess the rest. Knowing of someone who died in the attacks makes it a bit easier to visualize the horror of it, but it does not give me some special privilege to veto this or that aspect of the aftermath. These folks need to back off and focus their attention elsewhere.
Some people are offended and other people are ostentatiously blase about commercialization of the 9/11 site, but both are motivated by the same realization: It's not over.
Yes, yes, I know "Osama bin Laden is dead and GM is alive." But extremist Islamist violence is still alive and right now looks like it will outlast GM. We know we haven't succeeded in dealing with this threat, and we feel guilty about it.
I'm not sure the guilt is justified. Maybe the era of "Western civilization" is over, and we should just get used to it.
Simon Danger - " Why can't we just say no to commercializing sites of mass casualties ?"
Because like Nancy Reagan's original usage of the chant against drugs and the "zero tolerance" movements - it's trite and stupid.
I worked for a few years in a building that was commercial and built on the site of the former city hospital 1836-1974, which was razed so the hospital had more room to grow on it's relocated "campus". Some wag noted we worked where over a 100,000 people had died, many tragically, with 100s of gallons of tears no doubt spilled on the ground by the victims grieving families over 140 years of being a hospital.
Now we were there talking about sex, pursuing sex, pursuing making a buck, telling jokes...and a couple dozen other things you might say were disrespectful - given the mass deaths and the Victim Families. Because we treated the place as just another workplace 99.999% of the time without a 2nd thought to Reverence.....(For All the Dead who Passed Before...)
I ate at a small restaurant on the beach in Haifa where years earlier an Arab terrorist opened fire and murdered a number of innocent people. I believe there was a small memorial on the site, but life goes on.
Knock knock!
Who's there?
9/11.
9/11 who?
I thought you said you'd never forget?
Thanks to all who made the distinction between the on-land part of the Arizona memorial where the book store is, and the offshore portion, right over the Missouri.
Larry J. - The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a cafe and it does have a gift shop. 9-11 was bad but I really think the systematic killing of 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews is a lot worse.
Sam L.,
"Why is there no college course in 'Taking Offense'?"
Because in the relevant departments, that's the higher-level focus of the entire curriculum. Consider one of the typical legitimate departments, such as music or engineering. They do not have classes titled simply "Music" or "Engineering".
The place was set aside as memorial. We don't go have a beer on the Arizona.
No, we don't. But I think Battleship Arizona (only commissioned warship in the USN with a dead compliment) is not a good comparison. The memorial chapel which is build on but is not part of the ship's quarterdeck, is a sacred site where respectful behavior is both expected and required by law, but nearby are other museum ships which have "comfort food service" aboard.
Americans died at many venues in and around Pearl Harbor, not just on Arizona or Battleship Row, but that didn't stop the Navy from clearing the wreckage and using the port, just a very small part was reserved for reverent observance. The rest of the place returned to being a naval base with all the attendant eating, smoking, laboring, laughing, and cussing.
Maybe we should set aside a small, quite space of mourning and reflection at the 911 site, somewhat bigger than the Arizona's memorial since more Americans died there, and let it be a beer-free zone, and loosen up about the rest of the site. People need to eat, drink, and shit.
I am actually all for happy endings to funerals - I doubt they played "When the Saints Go Marching In" down in New Orleans at too many funerals without following up with great food and plenty of drinks flowing.
In any case, I would assume most individual victims of 9-11 had their funerals or memorials as most people do, individually, and supervised by loved ones. I don't really see this site and the museum as being for the individual victims alone. The site is for what was done there to all of us. I began contemplating that the morning of 9-11-01, and do not believe I skipped a meal even that day. So I am fine if they serve food. As for museum shops, I normally get bored with museums after the first hour or so, and wind up at the shop where I usually do not get bored. I just hope they have books by Phyliss Chesler and Aayan Hirsi Ali there. Unfortunately, I doubt that will be so. Talk about triggering "I am offended" triggers. Better duck.
It's nothing more than a weird conceit of the religious and superstitious that somebody important died and left them the right and the obligation to determine for the rest of us what those sites are holy and sacred.
They even make water holy, for Chrissake, and turn bread into flesh and wine into blood--all without approval of the FDA.
What do we rationalists have to do to wall off these religious idiots?
Ugh. Is there no kind of commercialism besides "crass" commercialism to these people? (The folks who append "crass" onto commercialism are piling on, as they already find any kind of "commercialism" to be mighty crass. I suppose they're doing it for the dumb among us.) It occurs to me that I can't even come up with an antonym for "crass."
I'm not Jewish, just a polite Methodist from Milwaukee. I was in the Quad Cities on business several decades ago and the staff took me to lunch at a local BBQ spot where they graded their sauces from mild to something at the top end called "Holocaust Sauce." I remember thinking "Oh."
The real memorial is called USS New York.
Righteous indignation is a particularly comforting food.
The Holocaust museum does have a gift shop. I was curious as to what they could be selling, so I went in and saw it was mostly books like the Diary of Anne Frank. From the pictures I saw the 911 museum was modeled off the Holocaust museum with escape exits and a very somber look. The exits aren't for show, my oldest daughter left when she began having an anxiety attack while we were walking through.
jimbino: "What do we rationalists have to do to wall off these religious idiots?"
Move to a truly enlightened nation, like the former Soviet Union, or Mao's china, or Castro's Cuba, or the Kim's N Korea.
You know, someplace where only "rationalists" live.
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