It’s hard to recall a more abject show of weakness in city government in recent years than the decision of the Bloomberg administration to apologize for closing an “art” exhibit of pornographicalistic political commentary against our wartime leaders that Brooklyn College students had mounted inside the city’s war memorial in Cadman Plaza park. The exhibit consisted of images and constructions — sculptures, in some cases — of the coarsest kind, including one of an imaginary sexual encounter with the sitting vice president of the United States complete with a pun on the vice president’s name. At the time this was discovered inside a memorial to our war dead, the then provost of Brooklyn College, one Roberta Matthews, announced that she was “proud” to display the student work and interpreted the issue as a matter of “freedom of expression.”

Whatever does or doesn’t pass for art at Brooklyn College, mounting such an exhibition inside a sacred memorial to our war dead was so inappropriate that the city locked the doors to the exhibition space and the college eventually took the art down. Like mushrooms after a rain, the First Amendment lawyers popped up, and yesterday the Brooklyn commissioner of New York City’s parks department, who was among the defendants in the case, issued a statement saying he had no role in the removal and damage of the art work but acknowledged his “responsibility for ordering the closing” of the exhibit. The city agreed not only to the apology but to a financial settlement, paying a mind-boggling $750 apiece to the 19 aggrieved “artists” and $42,500 to their lawyers, for a total of $56,750.

No doubt there is going to be a good bit of gloating over this among the leftists at Brooklyn College and in the left wing salons. But someone should say a word for the ordinary, hard-working New York taxpayers who underwrite the education given at Brooklyn College, who send their sons and daughters off to war to protect them, and who, when they walk by that memorial and others like it, say a silent prayer, or just stop and reflect, or plant an American flag, or occasionally snap a salute. They are the real objects of the mockery that has been made here. They live in a constitutional democracy that will, over the long haul, give them ways to assert the decency, art, and patriotism that our war-dead deserve. They are the ones who are owed the apology.