"A depressing tale"

The Flight 93 Memorial has been a complete debacle. Jonathan Last reports on the latest round of foolishness:

At the end of this bridge of economic assumptions, the commission decreed that "because of the anticipated low economic benefits that would result," the impact of leaving the temporary memorial as is would be "major." Such is the logic of bureaucracy.

The Department of the Interior was satisfied by the arguments of the commission. The planning for the permanent memorial proceeds apace; the Flight 93 National Memorial Capital Campaign has been launched. It needs to raise $30 million before ground can be broken, and, as a practical matter, there seems to be no way to change course now.

Mark Steyn comments:

A true Flight 93 memorial would honor courage, action and improvisation, but reflection, healing and wetlands are the best we can manage. Go to any Civil War memorial on any New England common, and marvel at how they managed to honor their dead without wetlands and wind chimes.

The best practical outcome we can hope for is something akin to the Vietnam Wall (also considered stupid and filled with inappropriate conotations during it's design phase) with its thousands of visiters daily who come away feeling edified, design quibbles notwithstanding. But Mark and Jon are right. The bureaucratic machine is slowly killing our monuments.