Rhetoric of the New York 9/11 Memorial

Here is a phenomenal piece about the failed rhetoric of the World Trade Center Memorial.  The author argues that the memorial is unlike those commemorating other significant events, like the Vietnam War.  Ultimately it atomizes, rather than individualizes, the deceased.  Its final message is nihilistic rather than rather than transformative, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of the exigence.  (That last bit is the contextual connection to the analysis, and why it could work for this assignment.)  A brief excerpt follows, but the whole thing is worth a read.  (It's an editorial piece, so he moves on to other topics beginning in the second heading; feel free to stop there.)

Men do not erect public monuments and memorials to serve as objective, dispassionate records of historical events. At their best they shape our consciousness of the past for the sake of our common life in the future. Therein lies the failure of the 9/11 Memorial. A quiet, peaceful place of repose amidst a busy city—it will be cherished by future Wall Street workers as a nice place for lunch on a sunny day. But its design serves no future, conjuring instead the blank, perpetual, unchanging power of death, and encouraging the atomizing particularity of personal memory.