RE: Memorial Madness

["Brown, Martin (NCI)" <brownm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The remark about it being reminiscent of Fasism is absolutely correct.
There is a picture of it in the Washington Post and the thing looks exactly
like the backdrop of the Nuremburg Rally.  What is interesting is that the
Post pointed this out in earlier coverage but now only quotes people who
think the "revised" design is just marvelous. Maybe next they will run the
confederate battle flag up on top of the Lincoln Memorial.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Devine [mailto:jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2000 11:59 AM
To: FranGoldfarb@xxxxxx; pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: [PEN-L:22083] Memorial Madness


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@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine