So said Michael Shulan, creative director of the museum at Ground Zero when he wanted to exclude the iconic Tom Franklin photograph.
Too kitschy and “rah-rah America.”
Eventually, chief curator Jan Ramirez proposed a compromise, Greenspan writes. The Franklin shot was minimized in favor of three different photos via three different angles of the flag-raising scene.
“Several images undercut the myth of ‘one iconic moment,’ Ramirez said, and suggest instead an event from multiple points of view, like the attacks more broadly,” the book says.
“Shulan didn’t like three photographs more than he liked one, but he went along with it.” […]
“My concern, as it always was, is that we not reduce [9/11] down to something that was too simple, and in its simplicity would actually distort the complexity of the event, the meaning of the event,” [Shulan] said.
I’m bone weary of the “We are above such petty things as national identity” faux-sophistication. I don’t know what Shulan finds all that complicated about a group of Islamists hijacking planes and trying to kill as many infidel Americans as possible.
He probably has the same nuanced and complexity-is-what-is-meaningful view of Nidal Hasan, regardless of Hasan’s professed motivation.
I’m not ashamed to be an American no matter how much Obama and the Left want to denigrate the brand.
I would be ashamed if the characteristic of being an American had been reduced to a brand though. I mean, that’s just all fucked up.
– From a simpler time when a fucking communist was called a fucking communist, and we didn’t have a racist divider for president. The “other” man of steel.
Greetings:
Me, I’m guessing that never in his life has Mr. Shulan been as dirty as the three firemen in that photograph.
My concern is that complexity and nuance are enervatin., Enervation becomes vacillation, which is seen as cowardice, which in turn is a sign of weakness, resulting in another event, the meaning of which is complex.
Steve Hayes: Al Qaeda Reborn?
These are the kinds of people that make sure you know about our oil embargo on Japan, but not about the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, when contextualizing Pearl Harbor, but have nothing to say about Okinawa when they talk about A-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
sdferr … obviously, Shulman & ilk do believe American is a brand, a kitschy one that all the cool kids should eschew.
Hollywood’s finally making that Stalin bio-pic they first dreamed of back when Lillian Hellman was writing The North Star?
Shazaam!
I remember those days of patriotism, when the left claimed it’s greatest expression was dissent.
I miss those days, when I disagreed with that…
Have you ever kicked apart an ant mound just to watch the orderly community react? (I have.)
Well, twelve years after the 9/11 attacks, it’s looking more and more like a couple spoilt, rich kids kicked open America just to fascinate at our Nation’s reflexive reactions.
When ants react to a catastrophe, they send up militias of fighter-ants, spitting acid and biting pell-mell anything they can attach to. Meanwhile, and almost immediately, worker ants set to work repairing the damage. Come back in a day, and the mound’s fixed and the colony is back to gathering food and raising babies.
Contrast that coordinated defense with America’s reaction to 9/11, and then pause to worry. Instead of an unalloyed militant response, America subjected its citizens to a media-coordinated self-flagellation. Bush attempted some brave campaigns to reform distant antagonists, but at every step he was heckled by our nation’s political pundits allied and a wierd cult of “rights” advocates with media companies.
Also, notice that our “workers” in no way rushed to repair the damage and set the colony back on the path to recovery and growth. No, in so far as labor unions represent America’s workers, the workers exacerbated every internal trauma they could – not in an effort to correct the damages wrought, but in order to score political concessions and promises on the nation’s purse. This opportunism occured when the tax-paying citizen was tapped out by the ’08 crash, inflation and certain increases in local and state tax increases.
This is the story of the American ant mound’s response to the bratty kid who dragged his size 13-wides through our colony’s fragile towers. And this is why, almost 13 years after the towers came down, we are still litigating the minutiae of the commemorative photos which might grace the memorial’s tight halls. With any luck, we’ll get around to choosing the curtain rods and tile-patterns sometime in 2050.
I, for one, am disgusted by the tacky theater of humanists’ responses to terror in America. And I think we might want to take cues from communal arthropods’ reflexive defenses in the future.
BBH
Ah, the days when even the criminals wore suits, ties and hats and nary a tattoo in sight. ;-)
This debate suggests that no one really wanted that image displayed, be they realized there would be public outcry if they didn’t. These people disgust me.
Ernst,
I imagine Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima flag raising photo gives them the vapors.
Darleen,
OT: but a read a funny thing about tattoos the other day. Tattoos used to say “go away”, now they say “ask me about my tattoo.”
Leigh
Tattoos used to say “go away”, now they say “ask me about my tattoo.”
And sometimes that braggadocio leads to conviction.
heh.
I saw that, Darleen. Nothing says “Hey! I’m a dumbass!” like tattooing a crime scene you’re implicated in on your chest.
When I hear crap like that from the curator I think maybe it would have been better to skip the museum altogether. No one should have to pay for this jerk or his carefully nuanced- into-meaninglessness museum.
Should have either have rebuilt the twin towers (but taller) or left the giant hole in the ground to let us simpletons draw our own conclusions on the meaning of 9-11.
At least they can photoshop the M-1 carbine out of the Lowery photo.
I imagine Mr. Curator is an MFA and steeped in the passive-aggressive intolerance of patriotism.
MFA? As in, “I’m getting tired of these MFAs on this MF plane!”?
Heh. Master of Fine Arts which is sort of the same thing when you think about it.
REMFA.
I confess to being unhip, charles and unable to find a translation.
Rear Echelon MFA?
Rear Echelon Mother Effers.
Military personnel who do their jobs away from the front and with little to no chance of contact with a hostile enemy.
Ah! Those in the White House and his retainers.
In the marine corps there is a similar concept for people with tasks other than being an infantryman. POG -> pronounced “Pogue” -> People Other than Grunts.
It’s a bit like armchair general in civilian use. It’s people with no stake and no risk who still want to take control or offer advice because they think they “get” what it is you do.
It’s tempting to say this is what happens when you put academics in charge of museums, but it’s more accurate to say this is what happens when you let Long Marchers take over academia.
I’m starting to lean toward the “random name picked from a phone book” theory as a default response.
Fire his dumb ass. Move on. The job was “curating a 9/11 museum” not” furnishing a downtown loft space for a new media-firm’s newest executive to throw parties in”.
To which he replies, palaeo: “Is there a difference?”
Then the glass lobby door hits him in the ass.
Rah-rah? Perhaps if we were talking about a sports team. But when a group, whether a family or a community, has been truly hurt in some way, it is natural for that group to bond more closely together, drawing strength from the spirit of unity. It is also natural to express this spirit. Mocking such behavior is not objectively perceptive but insensitive and fatuous.
i don’t wanna go to this stupid museum and if I don’t wanna go you can’t make me go
Somebody should strap his dumb-ass to a chair in Mark Levin’s studio then play a 24-hour looped recording of Ray Charles singing ‘America the Beautiful.’
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Too kitschy and “rah-rah America.”
Sorry Mr. Shulman. but 9/11 didn’t just happen to New York city. It happened to Whitefish Montana, to Mt Prospect Illinois, to Redwing Minnesota. Those were OUR buildings. Those were OUR people. That is OUR flag. Those are OUR firemen.
So go fuck yourself Mr. Shulman. We’ll take the kitsch because at least it’s genuine. Unlike you, putz.
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