A Mosque For Your City
by Tony Chavira
In case she hasn't told you, Sarah Palin's trying to keep a mosque in New York City from being built. Here's the video to prove it:
Aside from the automatic assumption that there's some sort of war for racial supremacy brewin', this video does a great job at dropping loving jabs with lines like "the audacity of jihad." But who the fuck is Sarah Palin to tell you what to build in your city, New York? Do you go to Wasilla and tell the Palin family to build a skyscraper in their backyard? Maybe you're just trying to get a better view of Russia from the 50th floor.
Newsweek recently featured an article where highly-paid architects in New York and Los Angeles re-envision New York and Los Angeles for the year 2030 by steam-rolling city spaces and rendering monuments to their egos. There are some good ideas mixed into some of the schemes, but overall these projections only serve two purposes:
1) To make bright-eyed urban advocates out there viscerally approval of the pretty pictures and themes
2) To promote the firms who were chosen to submit their "visions."
Sarah Palin, in harping on this supposed Ground Zero Mosque, is basically doing the same thing. She's making her audience react viscerally with approval to her comments, and marketing herself as "that woman who sees impending the religion wars). But just like how these future visions of these cities are only just ideas which may be terrible wastes of resources of money to boost the firms' egos, the idea that there's going to be a religious war is just some imposing ideal that people who care more about their religion than humanity itself want to promote. They do, after all, plan on killing other people once the war starts up.
But back to the main point here, it's your city New York. If you want to put a replica of the Hagia Sophia where the twin towers once stood, do it. Don't let someone hundreds or thousands of miles away bully you into developing the way you want, especially since the actual plan for the Cordoba House is a few blocks away from Ground Zero and is primarily a community center.
The world needs more community centers, and fewer "Target Towns" (check out that shameless proposal for Los Angeles developed by cityLAB-UCLA in the Newsweek article).
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