Freedom's never free. It's $3.1 billion.

The new World Trade Center got its first commercial tenant today: Beijing Vantone, a Chinese foreign trade group, agreed to lease 5 floors of the flagship tower, whose skeleton is only now beginning to protrude above street level. Interestingly – as pointed out this morning on WNYC, the local NPR affiliate – the contract refers to the building as “1 World Trade Center”, and not as the “Freedom Tower”. (See an NY Times article cryptically referring to it as “once called the Freedom Tower”. And, released even while I’ve been writing, here is confirmation of the official name change. )

Evidently there’s been some decision to let the “Freedom Tower” name gradually dissipate. I have mixed views about this change.

It would seem to be a good thing. The name was always a bit embarrassing, appearing to merely recapitulate America’s disturbingly possessive attitude toward the concept (if not the practice) of freedom. Wasn’t it enough that the building’s forcedly symbolic height was already a 1,776 foot long stick in the eye of America’s enemies? (Incidentally, is preservation of this purported symbolic measure going to end up another argument against converting to the metric system?)

Worse yet, the name carried certain vague yet unmistakable links to the Bush administration’s ideology of promiscuously vengeful victimhood. Why did the terrorists attack us? Because they hate our freedom! You know who else hated freedom? Saddam Hussein! Alongside the eyes-wide-shut moral permissiveness endowed on American policy by that slippery sentiment, the semiotic presence of undefeated ‘Freedom’ at Ground Zero doubtlessly also helped salve wounded national pride. Comforting and perhaps understandable in the attack’s aftermath, the whole thing is a bit awkward eight years, two wars, and one Abu Ghraib later.

And, for goodness sake, this is commercial real estate. Hey, I think that capitalism is the least-bad socio-economic system ever invented by our species. But even I wonder if the ‘Freedom’ logo is a bit tarnished attached so prominently to a shiny robber baron encampment. (Not to mention that the artist’s conception depicts an enormous jagged blue phallus rudely erupting from graceful lower Manhattan.)

Now, to be fair, there’s nothing new about embarrassingly sentimental public nomenclature. Indeed, Liberty Street, which lines the southern boundary of the Trade Center site, was known as King Street until, in a fit of fraternal regicidal pride, New Yorkers celebrated the French Revolution. But haven’t we as a society moved beyond unselfaware triumphalist civic dubbing?

Yet. A part of me – presumably the same part that secretly enjoys Disney World – wonders if maybe the old name was a good name. Us postmoderns are all so ironic, detached, sensitive and self-conscious. We’re bred to greet heart-on-sleeve expressiveness with nary but an awkward cringe-snicker. Couldn’t it be healthy, just sometimes, to indulge in a bit of old timey earnest naïve glorious romanticism? The Freedom Tower, for all its sleek lines and energy-efficient ventilation, might have borne a name, a mere name, radiating fuzzy proud American can-do-ism, the spirit of our grandparents’ generation, out over the Hudson River and into the jaded fallow countryside beyond.

No? Well, dear friends and countrymen, we’ll always have One World Trade.

image from Wikipedia

America the aesthetically unobjectionable

Today we Americans celebrated our common heritage by charring the entrails of hoofed mammals and blowing up quadrants of the sky. As ritual sacrifice goes, it’s all a bit solipsistic and gluttonous, but then so is the nation thus aptly signified.

On Monday, Barack Obama gave his ‘what patriotism means to me’ speech, cleverly completing his long-delayed 4th grade social studies project while simultaneously reassuring heartland America that he is neither a black separatist nor John Kerry. The precise content of this speech wasn’t particularly important, provided the audience understood that Barack Obama loves apple pie, his grandma, puppy dogs, and you, my fellow Americans, you. So put down the pitchfork.

Patriotism, somewhat trivially, means love and loyalty to one’s nation. But this is often far from trivial in the individual case. Is a patriotic citizen of Montreal loyal to Quebec, to Canada – or even to the global Francophony? Where belong the loyalties of refugees in the permanent camps across the river from the West Bank? To the perpetually zygotic Palestinian state? The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan? The Dar al-Islam?

Most Americans enjoy the conceptual luxury of having been born, raised, and indoctrinated within and by the same fairly discrete political entity. But even this doesn’t quite solve the problem. To what, exactly, is a patriotic American loyal? To the government? To a myriad of federal bureaucrats, to a clutch of vain ephemeral politicians, to some monstrously scenic granite forewalls in Washington DC? Or to the history? To George Washington’s wooden teeth, to the pocket contents of Lincoln’s fatal theater jacket, to the hot tub where Franklin Delano Roosevelt expired in a most agreeably patrician manner?

The certified correct answer, of course, is that a patriotic American is loyal to American ideals, just as a patriotic __________ is loyal to __________ ideals. So said Obama on Monday: “patriotism is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it's also loyalty to America's ideals, ideals for which anyone can sacrifice, or defend, or give their last full measure of devotion.”

The mildly Socratic among you have already formulated the next step: what, exactly, are American ideals? Celebrity worship? Cheap gasoline? Equal rights for all, so long as it doesn’t mean that I have to live next door to those people? At this point in the dialectic, serious politicians bleat safely vacant platitudes about freedom, family, and fortune.

And this is all we really expect of our candidates; except for the tin foil hat constituency, none of us really worry that the next president will decide, free-agent style, to go home with the other team at the big diplomatic summit. In political practice, affirmations of patriotism are ultimately about non-weirdness. Obama’s patriotic avowals aren’t promises to avoid defecting to Pakistan or Sweden. They are signals to Middle America that he won’t personally officiate at gay marriages in San Francisco or gleefully pass out bricks at the next big-city race riot.

So for politicians, patriotism actually has little to do with love of country, and everything to do with exhibiting the dispositional profile of your standard Midwestern bank teller. But what about the rest of us? We whose aspirations do not necessitate the adulation of throngs or the sweaty-palmed groping of the levers of power, might patriotism mean anything more to us? Should it? Those are difficult questions. Let’s go have a beer and watch the public shaming of the stars’ obsolete monochromatic twinkle.

no dandies please, we're american

Well, at least we know that Homeland Security has its priorities in order. If Osama bin Laden shows up in Newark wearing a top hat, he will not be permitted to enter the country!

Last month Sebastian Horsley, a British "dandy" attempting to promote his drugs-and-prostitutes memoir, was denied entry to the United States on grounds of "moral turpitude". Evidently his self-confessed past drug abuse disqualifies him from participation in the visa-less entry program between the United States and United Kingdom.



Or perhaps it's because he says things like this: "Add the platform shoes I sometimes wear, and I’m well over 7 feet tall. I figure most people are born to be talked down to.” (NYT)

Or maybe it's because he decided to commemorate the 2000th anniversary of Christ's death on the cross by travelling to the Philippines and having himself crucified - without anesthetic - and then posting the video on youtube.

Or, possibly, it's because when explaining the difference between himself and Oscar Wilde, he says, "Wilde was an aesthete. Unlike dandies, aesthetes care about food and wine. And they breed. The only place a dandy would push a pram is into the river." (globe and mail)

Whatever the reason, the entire thing is quite ridiculous. To me, he sounds like an irritatingly self-absorbed and useless person. (Which, so far as I can tell, is precisely how he wants to be perceived.) But this hardly seems a reason to deny him entry to the United States. Americans allow Silvio Berlusconi to come and go all the time!

Whatever you think of Horsley, you have to acknowledge the supreme Wildean wit in this, his declaration to Customs officials while being directed to his deportation flight: "I am the only thing of value in your country, and I am removing myself immediately!"