Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (review)

With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 looming in 2011, those who seek some perspective on America's attempts to come to grips with the events of that September morning would do well to consult Marita Sturken's insightful Tourists of History. Sturken, the author of a previous study on Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Memory, here looks at "the complex intersection of cultural memory, tourism, consumerism, paranoia, security, and kitsch that has defined American culture over the past two decades and the ways that these cultural practices are related to the deep cultural investment in the concept of innocence in American culture" (4).

Focusing on the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center Twin Towers, Sturken examines the factors that have produced both similarities and differences in the cultural responses to these events and the efforts at their memorialization. While a community-based effort in Oklahoma City led to a fairly rapid construction of a memorial (dedicated in 2000) and a museum (dedicated in 2001), nearly ten years after the 9/11 attacks the Ground Zero memorial and museum are still discussed in the future tense, their development hampered by lengthy and virulent battles among politicians, developers, architects, and critics as well as survivors and the families of the victims, all of whom have competing visions for the site. Sturken reviews the processes in both cases, helping the reader to understand why Ground Zero still remains a construction site where one is invited to visit the "memorial preview site" while the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum has transformed that city's downtown and been an essential factor in the city's revitalization. The book does an excellent job of covering the aesthetic as well as the political dimensions of the memorials. The more than 100 black-and-white illustrations add visual support to her arguments.

Investigating the nexus between paranoia and consumerism, Sturken points out the role of kitsch in providing prepackaged comfort (for instance, the ubiquitous teddy bears that emerge like mushrooms after rain at every disaster site. The Oklahoma City National Memorial sends some of these bears on to children in Afghanistan and Iraq under the I Am Hope project) and of the selling of the security state manifested in the spread of for-profit prisons in rural communities and the appearance of Hummers in suburban garages. Her discussion of the anti-government paranoia of the rightwing militias of the 1980s and '90s reminds readers that the angry, white male of the 2010 Tea Party is anything but a new phenomenon.

Drawing the threads between Oklahoma City and Ground Zero and their deeper ties to U.S. history and culture, Sturken illuminates the dangers in being tourists of history.