[Dean's World] Ron Coleman: Intrepid

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Posted by Ron Coleman:
Intrepid
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1165339442.shtml


   What better name for the great pile of steel and wood that just this
   morning, not far from the sliver of Hudson River I can see out my
   window all the way across 53rd Street, was [1]dislodged from the muck
   and mud of that silty old stream and began its trek to Bayonne, on my
   side of the water, for rehabilitation and overhaul.

                             [The_Intrepid.jpg]

   The great aircraft carrier turned museum "survived five Japanese
   kamikaze suicide plane attacks and lost 270 crew members in the last
   two years of the Pacific war. It later served off Korea and Vietnam
   and as a recovery ship for NASA astronauts," as the AP says. The
   Intrepid isn't being put back into service, of course; it would fit
   nicely into one of the below decks of today's floating-city carriers
   and is hopelessly obsolete. But they're going to spruce it up, turn
   around some of the internal rot and open up some previously sealed-off
   spaces to the public.

   The [2]Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum is one of those great day
   trips for anyone who wants his family to understand in some small way
   the nature of the sacrifices that people make for their country in
   war, and that war is not a Nintendo game. When the museum floats back
   to town in two years, come view the exhibits, watch the presentations
   and see where men lived and died to make your life as a free person
   possible. If you don't get at least a golf-ball-sized lump in your
   throat, you have no right to an opinion on foreign policy and frankly
   I wouldn't want to know what you think of much else, either.

   The Intrepid's unlikely regular location is a dock on the West Side of
   Manhattan, just north of the commercial center and somewhat south of
   the fictional but quite real world of Seinfeld and Columbia, those
   twin icons of liberal Upper West Side self-satisfaction. This happy
   and rather incongruous circumstance is a blessing that probably shines
   some degree of grace on a city whose inhabitants and institutions
   sometimes forgets that freedom, as they say, isn't free. This is no
   small irony for the metropolis where everything, even after it was the
   target of attacks more brutal than the ones that set the Intrepid into
   action in the Pacific over half a century ago, seems to have its
   price.

References

   1. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061205/ap_on_re_us/uss_intrepid_16
   2. http://www.intrepidmuseum.org/