The Tear

France gave the USA the Statue of Liberty. Now Russia has given them “To the Struggle against World Terrorism,” another, in-a-class-of-its-own monument.
For those coming in from the Atlantic, through the Narrows, the Russian gift now heaves into view well before Lady Liberty. That is intentional, according to Zurab Tsereteli, the Moscow-based sculptor who created the monument. “To the Struggle against World Terrorism” stands at the end of a long, man-made peninsula in Bayonne, New Jersey, and it looks from a distance like a giant tea biscuit. As you get closer, however, you will begin to make out an immense, stainless-steel teardrop—the Tear of Grief—hanging in a jagged crack that runs down the middle of the main slab.
Today, a large banner hangs on a warehouse alongside the monument, with portraits of Putin and President George W. Bush facing one another across the battle cry “To the Struggle against World Terrorism.” Inscribed on the monument’s base are the names of the 9/11 victims, along with the names of those who died in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The base has eleven sides. Nine pathways lead to it. The Tear of Grief is aligned; it is said, with the missing towers, across the water.



American Justice


Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr.,
The conservative agenda has remained largely unchanged in the last few decades: Expand executive power. End racial preferences intended to assist African-Americans. Speed executions. Welcome religion into the public sphere. And, above all, allow states to ban abortion.
In Alito’s first major opinion as a justice, earlier this year, he sharply restricted the ability of victims of employment discrimination to file lawsuits. The Court said that plaintiffs in such cases must bring their suits within a hundred and eighty days of, say, an unfair raise. But, because it generally takes employees longer than that to establish that they have been cheated, the effect of the ruling will be to foreclose many lawsuits. In a similar vein, the Court upheld a death sentence in Washington by lessening the scrutiny applied to jury selection in such cases. Last week, the justices rejected an appeal by a prisoner who had filed his case before a deadline set by a federal district judge. Because the judge had misread the law and given the prisoner too much time—three extra days—the Court said that the case had to be thrown out.
Most notoriously, the Court, for the first time in its history, upheld a categorical ban on an abortion procedure. The case dealt with so-called partial-birth abortion—a procedure performed rarely, often when there are extraordinary risks to the mother, the fetus, or both. But more important than the ruling were the implications of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion. The Court all but abandoned the reasoning of Roe v. Wade (and its reaffirmation in the 1992 Casey decision) and adopted instead the assumptions and the rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement. To the Court, it was the partial-birth-abortion procedure, not the risks posed to the women who seek it, that was “laden with the power to devalue human life.”
“While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.”
The decision to have an abortion is never a simple one, but until this year the Court has said that the women affected, not the state, had the last word.