New York’s iconic Empire State Building is to be lit up green from Friday in honor of the Muslim holiday of Eid, the biggest festival in the Muslim calendar marking the end of Ramadan, officials said.
“This is the first time that the Empire State Building will be illuminated for Eid, and the lighting will become an annual event in the same tradition of the yearly lightings for Christmas and Hannukah,” according to a statement. — from this news article
Et Tu, Empire State Building?
It is not going green to express the sympathy of well-off skyward-thrusting scrapers lording it over the less fortunate — the trees, the rivers and brooks, the meadows — everywhere. Instead, the Empire State Building is going green to express sympathy or solidarity or respect or some goddam thing like that for Islam, wonderful Islam, some of whose most sincere adherents just a few years ago laid low a whole group of fellow skyscrapers, and murdered 3,000 Americans while they were at their desks, on their phones, in the conference room, sipping a quick cup of coffee, or merely shooting the breeze, or flirting or perhaps even giving a co-worker a furtive glance, or a furtive kiss, or showing pictures to a sympathetic supervisor of their daughter’s wedding or their son’s camping trip with the Boy Scouts.
The Empire State Building, green for Islam?
There are all sorts of problems with this, problems of the too-numerous-to-mention variety.
But let’s start with the obvious. None of us will be able to think of the Empire State Building in the same way again. It will lose whatever appeal it once had. We will think of it as, somehow, a collaborator with the enemy, just as we would had it been thrown open by its owners and managers to a meeting of Fritz Kuhn’s Bund back in 1939 or 1940. Madison Square Garden was at that time their meeting place of choice. The Fifth Columnists on the Home Front were still holding pro-Hitler rallies in Madison Square Garden in 1939 or later, including not only the Bund of Fritz Kuhn but also William Pelley’s Silver Shirts, “the Little Flower” of Michigan Father Coughlin, and all the rest, from society ladies who put one in mind, physically, of Margaret Dumont who was the cinematic foil for Groucho, and morally put one in mind of — well, you know. The assorted America-Firsters were mostly antisemites with a few of the “White-Race” only brigades, and the odd White Russian fascist (Boris Brasol) — well, for all this do pick up in a used book store that great and largely unremembered book which deserves to be brought back and remembered by everyone (it went through 20-30-40 editions in 1942 alone): Under Cover by John Roy Carlson. His real name was Garabedian; he was an Armenian-American, a tremendous patriot, whose family had managed to survive the Muslim murders in Turkey.
I suspect that this Meccatropic turn on the part of the Empire State Building is simply the result of naivete, ignorance, and sheer laziness. Did those who thought it would be a swell idea to do this think of the symbolic value to Muslims worldwide, as they are told that the American Infidels, even after 9/11/2001, are going to have their other famously tall building in New York pay tribute to Islam itself in the only way it can? And do they understand how this news will be received? Of course they don’t. How could they? But from here on out, they might consult with those who can tell them — Barkis, by the way, is willin’.
And finally, a personal, quasi-romantic note.
Who among us, sitting alone in the darkened theatre of the living room, as the credits roll, who has been once upon a time unable to contain those quiet tears that roll down our cheeks, involuntarily, prompted by that last scene in An Affair To Remember, the version with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, will now so readily let drop those once-ready tears? As you know, it takes place on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building, where they are supposed to meet, but do not. From now on, there won’t be a wet eye in my house. What about in yours?