Tuesday December 02, 2003

MAKE WAY, CRYBABIES! The New York Post's op-ed editor, Mark Cunningham, has for the first time I can recall (and I religiously read the piece of shit) pushed his way into the spotlight with an op-ed of his own. Don't know how his underlings felt about it, but I note with interest that Cunningham calls the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Maus "Ted Spiegelman," and it is hard to imagine that none of his colleagues noticed the mistake before it went to press.

Cunningham's theme is the pride of place to be given the 9/11 Memorial component of the new World Trade Center. This has been a bugbear of the Post's editorial pages for many months, and getting the top guy involved shows just how pissed they are about it; maybe next week Old Man Murdoch himself will pen a few stanzas, retaining some of his stateside lackeys to lard Americanisms into his text. ("'Don't go there!' By jingo, Smithers, what a corking turn of phrase!")

"The worst thing about putting the memorial first," says Cunningham, "is that it is choosing as the site's core identity -- as a definition of our city, our collective self -- the loss and grief."

One may agree, in principle, that it is no good to let the attacks overwhelm and define our lives. But one wonders: isn't Cunningham the same editor in whose Post pages 9/11 is regularly used as a bloody shirt to be flailed at all opponents, foreign and domestic, at all times and regardless of merit?

Just a few days ago the Post devoted its front page to a "dirty little secret" involving FDNY employees who fell in love with the 9/11 widows they had been assigned to comfort. As the Post will apparently wring dollars from 9/11-related stories no matter how petty and disgusting they are, where do they get room to talk down anyone else's take on it?

In the end, it's about one thing with Cunningham and his whole rag:

"Let us acknowledge that, insofar as we rebuild anything commercial at Ground Zero -- offices or stores -- we tread hard on genuine feeling. Yet rebuild we will, for other needs for that site and its future are more compelling: The need to forge an answer of life...

And the nation and the city must deny that evil its triumph... by reviving the symbol they set out to destroy, honoring the good of commerce - a good that was a central part of so many of the lives snuffed out that day."

Money, in other words. In order to commemorate the fallen properly, we must not in any way cut into the valuable square footage of retail and parking space, rights to which will be shoveled in sweetheart deals to the same moguls who made money on the old World Trade Center. So stuff your "floating trees," cry-babies, and make way for another Gap.