‘Battle at Ground Zero’

I wanted to thank Michael Burke for his thoughtful and courageous op-ed on the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s awkward programmatic choices for its “International Cultural Summit” [“Battle at Ground Zero,” Opinion, September 8, 2005]. The issue is additionally important because the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has been angling to transform the 9/11 site into a base for ideological assaults on the memory of 9/11 by using left-wing dominated universities to manage its proposed International Freedom Center.

In general, public arts funding is difficult because the innovative and imaginative are likely to offend those most powerful in the arts. An example is the cliche of the left wing or radical artist, a cliche tired and worn enough that those who bandy it would seem to lack any claim to creativity. Groups like the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council truck in such cliches. Yet, the best alternatives, today’s creative minds that will be remembered in centuries hence, are difficult to ascertain. The hackneyed and dull are not what arts funding should support, but what arts groups like the LMCC inevitably support.

Perhaps the LMCC’s awkward exercise ought to be an opportunity to reconsider governmental funding for the arts in general and for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s proposed International Freedom Center. Governments and the referees whom they appoint lack the imagination to know what kind of art is worthy of public support, and mistakes such as the funding of the LMCC are the rule rather than the exception. Ideologues who truck in tired cliches are the likely beneficiaries of all public arts programs.

MITCHELL LANGBERT
Brooklyn

‘“Oasis” of a School’

The last paragraphs of “Weingarten Opens ‘Oasis’ of a School,” [Deborah Kolben, Page 1, September 9, 2005], made my skin crawl. Ms. Kolben describes New York City school chancellor, Joel Klein, as “really hitting his stride” at a new state-run high school in Staten Island. The report continues, “When asked where they [the students] would have enrolled if the new school had not opened, many ninth-graders ticked off names of parochial and private schools, which caused Mr. Klein to grin. ‘We’re taking everybody from the private schools into the public schools,’ the chancellor said.”

To fully understand this, it is necessary to remember that Mr. Klein was the assistant attorney general in charge of the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice during the Clinton administration. Among other matters, he headed the case by the U.S. government against Microsoft for abuse of monopoly power. After leaving that position, Mr. Klein, with a full professional appreciation of the power of government and the power of monopoly, took control of the New York City state-run school system, where he apparently takes delight in using the monopoly power of the state to entice students away from a troubled Catholic school system.

Unlike the state-run schools, parochial and private schools cannot use the power to tax and to put people in jail to compel people to give them money. Without students and their accompanying tuition, Catholic schools will die. Mr. Klein’s pleasure at taking students away from parochial and other private schools is not the pleasure of someone competing fairly and succeeding. His pleasure is that of the secular statist who uses the power to tax and regulate to subvert private religious education. For this we elected a Republican mayor?

MARK GARBOWSKI
Manhattan

‘The U.N. Drama’

The New York Sun editorial “The U.N. Drama” [September 2, 2005] does much to remind us of the failure of this unworthy organization whose chief accomplishment has been to defame “Zionism” in the hope of destroying the Israeli state, at the behest of the Muslim membership. Kofi Annan has been there too long. Naturally, he wants to retain his distinguished title and luxurious lifestyle at Sutton Place. But involvement in the oil-for-food scandal alone, as well as the failure to lead the U.N. in mitigating the African genocide, are enough to discredit his leadership. Let Congress repudiate American membership in the U.N. and appropriate the millions saved to rescue efforts on the Gulf Coast.

JEROME L. STARR
Manhattan

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