How we spend resources

Yesterday my wife and I took in the Newseum, which is an example of my thesis that creation of museums marks the acme of power.  This extraordinarily lavish tribute to the news media dates from 2000, when the land for the half-billion dollar project was acquired (ground was broken in 2003).   Oh, how the mighty newspapers and networks have fallen since then!  Voting in the Newseum shows almost half its visitors get their news online, not on paper.  Home delivery of the Times and Post is definitely an anachronism, but my spouse insists on it.

This is nonetheless a thoughtful and interesting museum (it had better be at the $21.95 admission price, $17.95 for oldsters).  Its display of paper artifacts (mainly front pages) may be figuratively (and literally) dated, but it is really more interesting than the frequent and distracting videos showing hilarious episodes of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart (both of whom I enjoy watching, but why not at home?).  Who knew that W.E.B. Dubois died in the same week as the 1963 March on Washington?  Nor did I know that the first two amendments to the U.S. constitution (on the size of Congress and its pay) were not approved by the states.  I would not have been able to name the five freedoms specified in the first amendment that did pass:  speech, press, religion, assembly and petition (Roosevelt’s four kept the first two but added freedom from want and freedom from fear).

When it comes to war and peace, the Newseum minces few words and presents a lot of pictures, without however quite capturing the horror of the enterprise.  The memorial wall to slain journalists is tucked away outside the main flow of museum traffic, as is the introductory film that presents the “war and peace” theme quickly but well (along with life and death, love and hate and some others I can’t remember).   You would know from this museum what bullets do to a Toyota pickup truck or a road sign but relatively little about what they do to human flesh. I suppose the Newseum knows its audience (me included).

There is a good deal more focus on human tragedy in the section devoted to 9/11.  Its focus–part of the antenna on top of one of the World Trade Center buildings–is odd but somehow works, its twisted metal symbolizing the incredible physical, psychological and human toll of the event.  The dramatic photography and film of that dreadful day heightens the impact, as does the timeline that surrounds the antenna.

The question is whether the nation that can afford such a spectacular tribute to freedom of expression still has the edge required to help others enjoy its benefits?  The part of the Berlin wall that adorns the lower level with pastel graffiti is a stark reminder of the human costs that have been paid:  5000 Germans died trying to escape its confines.  We rightly celebrate freedom and the wall’s fall, but could the process have been accelerated?  How many of those 5000 might have been saved?  How many more suffered without trying to escape, trapped in a system that ruined countless lives?

The questions are still with us:  how many Syrians will die fighting the Asad dictatorship?  We are up to something like 20,000.  I am among those who doubt that intervention would improve the situation, but I never stop wondering.  The privilege of living in a country that sports the Newseum comes with the responsibility to worry about how we expend our resources and what we might do better than we have done in the past.