I Shit You Not

That's "Freedom Rolls" to you, Islamo-Fascist!


Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, and Powerline are among those losing their godforsaken minds over the new Flight 93 memorial design, to be constructed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Right Blogistan is incensed, evidently, that part of the memorial has been designed in the shape of a crescent. As the Pittsbugh Post-Gazette describes it, the

"Crescent of Embrace" will feature a Tower of Voices, containing 40 wind chimes -- one for each passenger and crew member who died -- and two stands of red maple trees that will line a walkway caressing the natural bowl shape of the land. Forty separate groves of red and sugar maples will be planted behind the crescent, and a black slate wall will mark the edge of the crash site, where the remains of those who died now rest.

Images of the memorial may be found at the website of the architect Paul Murdoch, whose sinister intent Malkin and friends have alone discerned. On their view, the memorial demonstrates nothing less than the capitulation of all Christendom to the Saracen hordes -- a "sick joke" that (in the words of Powerline's Scott Johnson), illustrates "profound self-loathing that results in homage to our enemies."

The interpretive techniques at work here were last seen transcribing Satanic messages backwardly masked into Judas Priest albums. (Then again, what else might we expect from someone who looks at the World War II internment camps and finds a "how-to" manual buried within?) The proprietor of this site, for instance, takes a map of the entire memorial grounds (which, examined with a different conspiratorial eye, might be seen to resemble the territory of Israel), excises the "crescent of embrace," inverts it 180 degrees and matches it against the red crescent of the Tunisian flag. And this image, created by someone named "Etaoin Shrdlu," has "generated an azimuthal equidistant world map centered on the location of the Flight 93 Memorial which seems to indicate that the crescent is oriented toward Mecca."

What the fuck is wrong with these people? Are we supposed to assume that visitors to the site, embraced by a semicircle of maple trees, will somehow experience an unusual sense of affiliation with Islam? That by unwittingly orienting themselves toward Mecca, they will invite Jesus' purging wrath? Will this bring us more hurricanes, tornadoes, smog and anal sex? There's no need to spend much time demolishing the arguments against the memorial. It should be pointed out, however, that it becomes possible to "see" the site as an homage to Islam only by doing what bloggers do best -- by observing a three-dimensional world from an archimedian, flattened perspective that can be cut apart, pasted upside down, and scaled to fit whatever opiate dreams pass for political agency these days. Unable to imagine the experience of actually visiting the memorial site -- as the panel of artists, citizens and Flight 93 families who selected the design most certainly have done -- Malkin and friends satisfy themselves with the kind of fly-over analysis that George W. Bush inexplicably found sufficient in surveying another, more recent catastrophe.