Political wind

A comment about Arizona’s 9/11 memorial

We received the following comment from a family member today about Arizona’s 9/11 memorial that a blame-America-first commission placed its political views upon:

It is a shame that a Memorial has turned into this mess. I stop by every now and then and look at it. I go, get annoyed and wind up feeling sad that a place where I thought I could go and think about my brother has become an insult to all that were lost.

The names of all the fools on the “Commission” are listed on the Memorial but the victims’ names are nowhere to be found [emphasis added mine].

I asked to be on the Commission and was turned down. I asked if I could do something when it was dedicated and never got a response back. It has become a political fight over the power and control. I hope they remove the steel from the WTC. It does not belong with this so called Memorial. If it is to remain, I would like to see it renamed to the 9-11 talking point display. A Memorial it is not.

Gary, I’m sorry. I’m still trying to do what I can to change things. There are 2986 souls that the commission will have to answer to. When you get to meet then, tell them how you feel!

John Herold
brother of Gary Herold

Update: If you looked at the article I linked to in the first paragraph of this post and are hopeful that the legislation will now pass the Arizona Senate, Governor Janet Napolitano must then sign it into law. This is what she said on the subject to a caller into an Arizona radio station, in September 2006:

I’m going to look up Gov. Napolitano’s office number and make an otherwise respectful phone call … here they are.

Telephone (602) 542-4331
Toll Free 1-(800) 253-0883 (available only to those in Arizona)
Fax (602) 542-1381

One playwright’s perspective of cultural revolutions

Sir Tom Stoppard is a British Academy Award winning screenwriter and Tony Award winning playwright. In the TimesOnline, he recently described his 1968 view of the cultural revolution in England:

A small incident which must have confirmed some people’s worst suspicions about me occurred when I was asked to sign a protest against “censorship” after a newspaper declined to publish somebody’s manifesto. “But that isn’t censorship,” I said. “That’s editing. In Russia you go to prison for possessing a copy of Animal Farm. That’s censorship.”

In that same piece, Stoppard added:

In 2005 I interviewed a film-maker in Belarus who had been beaten up by state security for the usual reasons and he said a few things which were remarkably like a speech I had just written for a Czech Anglophile in Rock’n’Roll. What the film-maker in Minsk told me was this: “The fact that you can call your prime minister a liar and a criminal is not [an attack on] his virtue, it is your virtue.”

Editor’s note: ‘Rock’n’Roll’ is a play by Stoppard about the significance of rock and roll in the emergence of the democratic movement in Eastern Bloc Czechoslovakia.