In Brief: The "Ground Zero Mosque" and Victim Worship:
Here's one of the stupidest things said so far about the whole big ball of stupid that is the "controversy" over the Muslim community center being built two blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center: "Everything Bloomberg and Barack Obama say about this sounds right. But if the only constituency that matters here - the ones left behind by the victims of Sept. 11 - think they're wrong, they are." That bit of solipsism masked as empathy is from New York Daily News writer Mike Lupica.

Really? How much of the architecture of Lower Manhattan needs to meet with the approval of the families of 9/11 victims? Did they vote? Because of fears of offending their apparently delicate sensibilities, in 2005, the International Freedom Center was booted from the plans for construction at Ground Zero because it might not be solely devoted to fetishizing the attacks of 2001. Or, in other words, because it might have too much freedom. The fear that mean art might leap off the page and attack 9/11 survivors also got the Drawing Center to withdraw from the site's proposed Frank Gehry-designed art center, which has still not gotten off the ground.

Enough. Truly, enough. This is written with utter sympathy for people who lost loved ones or were hurt or made ill by the attack on 9/11. But it is with complete disdain and a "fuck you" to those who exploit their pain in order to spread hatred (and that includes some of the victims themselves). There is something appalling and sick about watching preening bags of fuck prance around on Fox "news" and use dead people as shields so they can say bad things about Democrats, liberals, and/or Muslims.

And, by the way, have you ever spent time in the blocks around Ground Zero? It ain't some pristine site of our American revirgination. It's a filthy downtown of a city, like every filthy city downtown. The streets are dirty; there's homeless people all around; there's discount stores, fast food joints, and other crap places in between the decent buildings and public art. Some of the people from outside the city who want to talk about "honoring the dead" or some such shit probably buy the crap Twin Tower souvenirs from the Middle Easterners selling them at grubby tables across the street, between Ground Zero and the Trinity Church, or they get street meat from Halal carts. Fuck, before the 9/11 attacks, it was a fucking wasteland at night and on the weekends down there. The Cordoba House? That's on a block that no one walks down unless they're specifically looking for a place there, not because it's dangerous, but because it's just another goddamned city block with nothing special about it.

So, really, truly, take your sudden belief in the glowing sanctity of the ground that holds the construction site of an office building that will be filled with Wall Streeters dicking over Middle America and shove it up your opportunistic and hateful asses.

(Brief blogging continues until after the Rude Pundit's new play, Heterosexuals, opens tomorrow at 6:30 p.m.)