Osama is gone, but he’s certainly not forgotten. He’s remembered every day in New York City (if he couldn’t make it there, he couldn’t make it anywhere) in the seven-story hole in the ground where the World Trade Center used to be.
Presided over, presumably, by the National Association of Grief Counselors, as James Lileks put it in Mark Steyn’s unsettling new book After America: Get Ready for Armageddon:
“9/11 was something America’s enemies did to us. The hole in the ground a decade later is something we did to ourselves…a gaping, multi-story, multi-billion-dollar pit, profound and eloquent in its nullity.”
With its waterfall and stone recitation of the names of the dead, the pit has become a site of presidential pilgrimage each anniversary of the destruction. Not to mention the Islamic mosque soon to rise nearby. As such it’s a tribute to Osama Bin Laden and the jihadists of al-Queda.
It’s also a monument, as Steyn puts it, to our growing can’t-do spirit, the attitude that has US headed right where Osama predicted: the dust bin of history. Hard to argue with that.
