The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

Why is President Bush wearing a flag lapel pin? Is there any question to which country he owes his allegience? Does he think the American people are so insecure that they must be reminded he is pro-America? Or does "W" himself get confused in those woozy hours after lunch and forget what country he is in? Of course, he could always turn to the ever-nearby soldier holding his nuclear attache case and ask--

"Say, Colonel, is this Lichtenstein? Or are we in Paraguay?"

"Well sir, everybody around here is speaking English."

"Yeah, but what if it's New Zealand? Where the heck is my flag lapel pin! I need to know!"

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The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran an astoundingly idiotic article this week titled "The Masters' Plan: Downtown Manhattan Reimagined by a Team of Architects Daring to Think Big." The result: a post-post-Modern freak show of buildings, each one a distinct nightmare of warped planes, melting facades, fractured ramps and other semiotic devices intended to defeat anybody's expectations for how buildings ought to address the public realm.

Especially amazing is the proposal to put up two new twin towers, only torqued instead of straight "to suggest resilience." And get this: "the towers could stand simply as monuments, empty but for a museum on the ground floor." How's that for Pharaonic aspiration?

Another humdinger is the bid to restyle the New York Stock Exchange as a "Hall of Risk" offered by Paul Ryan, "a video artist and teacher." By generalizing, does he mean to include all risky activities from unsafe sex to hang-gliding from the parapet?

The grand prize winner, as usual, comes from America's leading obscurantist / charlatan Peter Eisenman, Louis Kahn professor of architecture at Yale, whose melted, sagging office tower complex attempts to out-Gehry Frank Gehry for incomprehensible surfaces (but only shows Eisenman's envy and poor abilities at mimicry).

Okay, I'll cut the sarcasm and bottom-line it: the World Trade Center site needs to be normalized, brought back into the regular grid of downtown streets, and occupied by buildings with a respectful attitude to the public realm and human neurology. Towers are a bad idea (haven't we learned anything?) and I'd go further to declare that buildings over ten stories are a bad idea for the 21st century, because we are entering an age of fossil fuel depletion and a requisite downscaling of human activity.

A monument to the tragedy of 9/11 is certainly required, but it need not take up more than a quarter-acre. It would be appropriate to place such a monument in a plaza or public square, which itself need not exceed one acre.