The problem of post-modernism...

Another terrific essay by Robert Sibley in the Ottawa Citizen.

But then you don't need to look to the left to detect the confusions of the post-modern consciousness. Consider the five-year debate among New Yorkers about what to rebuild on Ground Zero, and how to memorialize those who died.

At one point, Myron Magnet relates in City Journal magazine, New York City Fire Department officials proposed the idea of a bronze statue based on the famous Bergen Record photograph of three firefighters raising the Stars and Stripes at Ground Zero as the recovery effort began. Sounds good, but then the officials wanted the heads of two of the firefighters to be replaced with those of a black and a Hispanic. It didn't matter that that's not what happened.

As Mr. Magnet, editor of the New York-based magazine, says, "This monument's readiness to falsify gives an especially bleak and revealing glimpse into the cynical mendacity that is political correctness, always ready to elevate ideology over ideals."

Another "post-modern" politically correct proposal came from the board of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Board members pumped for an International Freedom Center. The centre, as journalist Stefan Kafner wrote recently in City Journal, would have addressed slavery and other human rights issues not directly related to the terrorist attack. The board members "could not make themselves acknowledge what almost all Americans know in their bones. Roman Catholics did not perpetrate the attacks; neither did Hindus, Klan members, Greek Orthodox Christians, Jews, Seventh-day Adventists, evangelicals, animists, Shintoists, Buddhists, or secular humanists. Radical Muslims did."