BRIC-A-BRAC: Tribute By Committee

I went to Washington, DC having watched a bad movie about memorials. I return having seen bad memorials. The fresh air makes visiting the memorials a preferable experience, but their permanence ultimately makes them more infuriating.

To be fair, the subjects of my ire are the three major memorials on and near the Mall that have blossomed since my last visit to our nation's capital two decades ago. The existing monuments, like the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Monument, still work for me. They create a satisfying, even moving experience. Of course, they're very simple. They have clear objectives, and they accomplish them. For example, Lincoln is enshrined in a temple, and yet his enormous likeness is weary, drained by years of struggle. The message is pretty straightforward: this is a real human being, and we was so great that we honor him as if he were one of the gods. It's very noble, and very powerful.

Contrast that with the trainwreck that is the new National World War II Memorial (or, as my wife insists on calling it, the Tom Hanks Memorial), which has more messages to send than a telegraph operator, tries to be all things to all people, and ends up accomplishing nothing. It's a enormous mollybang of ideas, from the two enormous towers proclaiming the two theaters of the war, to the pillars bearing the names of states and territories (and, curiously, the Phillipines) and enormous bronze wreaths, to the truncated lists of places where American soldiers fought, to the random bas-relief sculpture of generic wartime scenes, to the most idiotic of features: a tiny wall of 400 gold stars crammed close together with a cascading waterfall nearby. It's a triumphant clump; Albert Speer by way of Hollywood executives. You almost imagine that the designers got ten different ideas, and couldn't bear to tell anyone their idea didn't get picked, so they used them all.

And everything has meaning. Every element is about something. Those aren't just wreaths. They're wreaths of wheat. They symbolize the contributions of the American heartland. And those aren't just gold stars. They're our dead heroes. Each star represents 100 dead soldiers. (It isn't explained which star your great-grandfather is represented by.) And the fact that the stars are so close to each other, created a bizarre gold-leaf mishmash, is probably meaningful, too. It symbolizes our closeness, or the camaraderie of men in uniform, or the ineptitude of the designers, most likely. It's like bad poetry.

And worst of all, it never gets across the single most important message of World War II: this was a war for the soul of the human race. I will never forget Bill Clinton's words when he spoke in Normandy on the 50th anniversary of D-Day. Of the young, fresh-faced troops who stormed the beaches and initiated the liberation of Europe, he said simply, "These men saved the world." And they did. And very little about this memorial gets that point across. All it really does is cater to special interest groups. And that's what we have Tom Brokaw for.

And yet that's still preferable to the Korean War Memorial. While the World War II piece may have tried to say everything but missed the point, the Korean War Memorial somehow manages to be white noise; a long speech that never actually says anything at all. The centerpiece is a collection of 19 sculptures of soldiers on patrol. They wear ponchos, carry gigantic machine guns, and look perpetualy terrified. So perhaps the idea is to remember the emotional toll of war. But..no. No, that's not it, because they walk alongside a granite wall with smiling faces of troops etched in the surface, along with random images of battle scenes and ambulances and whatnot. They kind of seem to be trying for the effect of the Vietnam Wall, which reflects the observer back through the names of the lost, but the Korean War designers apparently didn't trust that to work, so they made the reflections for you. You can't see your reflection, because this isn't about you, you selfish bastard. Unlike the Wall, this memorial has nothing to do with you.

So it's about the soldiers, then...except for the list of the nations that participated in the conflict, which are inscribed along the walk. So it's about the UN...except that the reflecting pool takes care to separate out the American dead and wounded from the totals of all forces. As for that pool, it's next to the obligatory flagpole, and once you get to it, you have to turn around and go back to the beginning because there's nowhere else to go. Random elements thrown together because they worked somewhere else, but don't work as a whole. It's a Mad Lib Memorial.

I think what disturbed me most about the Korean War Memorial was the guns. I understand that guns and war are, kind of like, connected and all. And I don't seem to mind the M-1's being carried by the soldiers in the statue near the Wall. But those guns aren't in use. They're at rest. They've been set aside to contemplate the memorial across the way. Here, they're in use, toted by men who evidently are going to get ambushed. This is the one war memorial that actually looks like the war is still going on in front of you. That's a little disconcerting. Imagine the World War II Memorial with a running tank, complete with revolving turret. It's creepy. And nothing kills the mood of a memorial quite like creepy.

There seems little doubt that Maya Lin redefined the whole idea of memorials with her Vietnam Memorial Wall. What no one realized, I think, was that she wasn't leading the way for others, but was in a class all by herself. These new memorials are a bad sort of Lin-lite, taking elements of hers and packaging them into something more palatable for the people in charge. She's Nirvana; they're Candlebox.

It's good to know that the movies aren't the only art form lacking in new ideas.

There is one more memorial to discuss. It's possibly the most irritating of the three. That's the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, and it's a disaster. I can' barely contain myself. We'll rip that apart tomorrow.