Memorial Madness

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>from SLATE on-line magazine, 7/21/00: >The Washington Post fronts 
>yesterday's public meeting of a government commission that decided 
>to go forward with a proposed World War II memorial to be located 
>between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The paper 
>implies the project is destined for final approval even though it 
>also observes that at yesterday's hearing there were more people 
>speaking out against it than for it. But it's hard to tell from the 
>Post account what the opposition is all about. For that you have to 
>turn to the NY Times' inside effort, which high up says that some 
>critics think the proposed architecture is in the words of one, 
>"unacceptably reminiscent of Fascist and Nazi regimes," and some 
>think the placement of the thing fouls the aesthetics of the space 
>between the Washington and Lincoln monuments. The coverage takes no 
>account of the idea that the WW II generation, God bless it, has not 
>exactly been overlooked. Why for instance, doesn't Saving Private 
>Ryan count? Or if bricks and mortar are required, isn't the Iwo Jima 
>memorial perfect? It's the forgotten heroes of doomed and unpopular 
>causes that need monuments. And if deserved national recognition 
>equals a monument in Washington, then we're already well on our way 
>to paving the streets there with nothing but. There'll be the Pueblo 
>obelisk, the Grenada arch, not to mention the logically inevitable 
>and equally logically impossible The Monument to All American 
>Soldiers Who Don't Have One. <
>
>I'm looking forward to the monuments honoring the US victories over 
>Panama, Iraq, and Serbia.
>
>Jim Devine jdevine at lmu.edu &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine