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Stalinist Russia, they used to airbrush out officials once they
became politically inconvenient. Something similar is now happening
to the famous Sept. 11 photo of three white firefighters hoisting
the flag at Ground Zero.
Of course,
no one would have thought to call them "white firefighters"
until just a few days ago. Prior to that, they were just "firefighters,"
or "heroes," or "the bravest."
But last week
it became clear that the city wanted a statue commemorating the
event to include a black and Hispanic firefighter along with one
(acceptable) white one.
Now, as a matter
of bean counting this is just wrong — less than 3 percent of
firefighters are black, and less than 4 percent are Hispanic.
As matter of
art, it seems dubious. As Jonah Goldberg asks, how actually do you
depict a Hispanic firefighter in a bronze statue?
And as an exercise
in plain truthfulness, it seems an outrage. Why take something that
was real, true, and unstaged, and make it something false, contrived,
and political?
There must be plenty of ways to honor those black and Hispanic firefighters
who fell on Sept. 11. But doing it by quota-mongering one of the
most stunning and well-known images of Sept. 11 is a mistake.
Everyone who
knows the famous picture and sees the new statue will now think
about race. It will become a monument to political correctness,
rather than to duty and sacrifice, the two virtues to which all
firefighters on Sept. 11 gave their lives.
The statue
controversy is another indication that "diversity" isn't
what it's cracked up to be. In fact, the mantra of diversity is
a bit of a ruse.
As John Fonte
of the Hudson Institute and James Caesar of the University of Virginia
have pointed out, the Left isn't "multicultural" so much
as "bi-cultural": it divides the world into victims and
victimizers, and systematically tries to favor the former and punish
the latter.
So, when three
representative men from a department of government that happens
to be overwhelmingly dominated by white ethnics (Irish and Italians)
are involved in a celebrated act, it isn't enough to marvel at it
and extol it as an example of New York City's great diversity.
Irish and Italians,
after all, are an increasingly small slice of New York City (all
white non-Hispanics are 35% of the city's population).
No, the image
has to be changed, because Irish and Italians are considered members
of the victimizing group and as such are symbols of oppression in
the struggle for racial power that the Left imagines carries on
without end.
This poisonous
line of thought should be left for seminar rooms in Ann Arbor and
the upper echelon of the New York Times, and shouldn't be
allowed to ruin that image from Sept. 11.
Please, just
leave it alone.
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