Ground Zero as Holy Ground and Prelude to Holy War

Introduction It is now three years since the Twin Towers in New York City came roaring down. The space they once occupied has been cleared, and Daniel Libeskind's design for the site, which includes a museum and five office buildings, has won the design competition. At the center of his design is "the scorched and scoured pit in which the foundations of the Trade Center once stood, plus its surrounding concrete wall" (Lacayo 59). Richard Lacayo calls this symbolic center of the site "a Wailing Wall for the 21st century" (59). Ground Zero has become holy ground for most US citizens and provides an important backdrop for the current administration's holy wars on terrorism. The United States has now fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and both wars are consistently tied to the scorched and scoured pit that quickly received the name "Ground Zero," the name given to the central area of devastation after a nuclear blast-an apocalyptic term tied symbolically to visions of the end time initiated by a nuclear holocaust. Ground Zero exercises a powerful draw on the imagination of US citizens. Millions have visited the site in the three years since 9/11. Two months after 9/11, Verlyn Klinkenborg noted, "[i]n the sudden absence of the towers we're relearning how meaning adheres to place, even as the idea of place slips its context" (52). Klinkenborg, as a resident of New York City, notes that there has been just as strong an urge to go back to Ground Zero for local residents as there was to flee the area immediately following the destruction of the twin towers. "The exodus on foot across the bridges has been more than matched by a returning tide. The dead do call to us, and we do answer" (54). What has been created is a vacuum, and one can "feel the vacuum of the place drawing you closer and closer" (52). And this, according to Klinkenborg, is because "[pjlace is what we substitute for time as it slips past" (52). Ground Zero is a cultural text that has come to have "widely shared meanings," and now the site itself has become an object of contemplation that "manifests group identifications" for most US citizens.1 My argument is that one of the widely shared meanings with which US citizens identify is that of holy ground, in both senses of the word: a place set apart from all other places to pray and meditate, and a place possessing mysterium tremendum, the category of the "wholly other." According to Rudolph Otto, the wholly other is "that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of 'canny', and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment" (26). The first element of the holy is completely rational: an object or place is set apart by a group for people to pray and meditate. Examples include the Wailing Wall, Gettysburg, Auschwitz, and other places that memorialize scenes of great destruction and loss of life. The other element, that of the wholly other, is irrational and contains feelings of dread, horror, anxiety, and helplessness, feelings that the rational cannot contain or explain. And the contemplation of Ground Zero has produced this sense of blank wonder and astonishment for many US citizens, as well as feelings of horror, anxiety, and helplessness. And these feelings are the prelude to a holy war that both shapes and is shaped by mass media texts. Most US citizens refuse to acknowledge that the wars fought in response to 9/11 are holy wars -in the sense of Christians fighting Muslims-in spite of President Bush's early description of the United States' response to 9/11 as a "crusade." I argue that the only superpower left after the Cold War is waging a holy war on radical Islamist groups and those nation-states that "harbor" them because these groups have threatened the superpower's ultimate values and left the populace with feelings of dread, horror, anxiety, and helplessness. These feelings call for a response, and the United States has responded with force, first in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq. …