Plowshares into swords into stirrups into scissors into rifles into scalpels into bells

[avram]

Steel salvaged from the World Trade Center wreckage will (if it’s up to spec) be used in the bow of the USS New York, a new San Antonio-class amphibious assault ship currently being built in Mississippi. I read about this a couple days ago, I think, but forgot about it till I read this commentary by Jeanne D’Arc echoing this one by Elayne Riggs:

What makes the wreckage more than ordinary scrap metal is the fact that it's mixed in with the remains of actual people, much of it powderized by the intense heat to the point where it's probably inseparable. Now, it's one thing for Mark Gruenwald's ashes to be mixed into a special edition of Squadron Supreme, that was a request made in his will. But I can pretty much surmise that few if any of these 3000 people would consent to having their ashes be used as part of an instrument of war. That's what I find, in August's words, utterly obscene.

And that’s what I have a hard time swallowing. Did the WTC dead consent to having their ashes dumped in Fresh Kills landfill to begin with? Or sold as scrap? Surely not. Why balk at a warship, then? And if we can’t do anything with the steel that the dead didn’t consent to, then what do we do with it? And why limit this attitude just to this steel, and not to everything else the ashes bonded to?

Look, I was there in Brooklyn on 9/11. I saw that plume of smoke arcing up over me, and eastward. I breathed that air, and smelled that smoke, as did millions of other people. Those ashes travelled far and wide. They got everywhere, and into everything. They’re part of me now, and part of lots of other people too. The WTC dead were part of every rape, every kiss, every fight, every sneeze, every lie, every truth, every fart, every laugh in the New York area in the past fifteen months, no matter what the dead would have wanted. (And what they’d most want, I’m guessing, is not to be dead.) And every one of us has atoms in his or her body that spent some time as part of Genghis Kahn, or Charlemagne, or Aristotle, or Washington.

The other day Chris and I were talking about the current plans for rebuilding the WTC, all of which seem to involve leaving the actual footprints of the original buildings undeveloped, as if to build there would be disrespectful to the dead. Chris pointed out that there probably isn’t so much as a single square foot of land on all of Manhattan Island that hasn’t had somebody die on it at some point. And yet life goes on, and we keep on building.

I’m all for respecting the dead, but not to the point where the graveyard walls become a prison for the living.

Comments

well, yes, but

[jmhm.livejournal.com]

the idea (which seemed fairly inescapable to me) that this was probably the carrot/stick that kept Lott from resigning made me a little wretched.

Hrm. The dead. I always wonder when I hear pundits and politicians talk about the dead - they saw pictures or (what impressed them most, I think) destroyed buildings - we breathed them in for weeks.

I'm actually for cremation for myself, but this thing has a creepy feeling, like repurposing a camp.

I know that's not rational.