On Pataki's Decision Not to Allow Any Dissenting Views at Ground Zero

Also from The Times:

Gov. George Pataki's decision to side with increasingly vocal critics of the cultural plans for the World Trade Center site is not surprising, but it is alarming. The governor has been deeply and rightly sensitive to the concerns of the families of the victims of 9/11. Like all of us, he honors their loss and their grief. But by bowing to some of the survivors' growing hostility to any version of 9/11 except their own, Mr. Pataki is doing a disservice to history and to the very idea of freedom.

[snip]

What those lives stand for now is American freedom, in its full implication and all its contradictions. That is what has gone missing in the governor's remarks, in which he demanded that the cultural organizations promise never to display art that might "denigrate" the victims of 9/11 or America in general. Mr. Pataki has accepted at face value the tenor of the protests at ground zero, which are, frankly, a call for censorship, indeed for censorship in advance - for political oversight of an artistic process that has only begun to evolve.

It is no contradiction to hope that ground zero will become a place that commemorates death and reaffirms life at the same time. But it will be the worst of bad beginnings to turn it into a place where only grief is acceptable, where the vital impulses represented by the arts are handcuffed in the name of freedom.

Sure, Pataki welcomes Karl Rove to use an event at the doorstep of Ground Zero to call more than half of the US population traitors to the cause, but God forbid anyone opposing the Bush wars have a voice there, even if the voice is coming from survivors and 9/11 families.