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Newspaper accounts of the debate have routinely misreported that the chief argument advanced by memorial opponents is that it will disrupt the clean line of sight between these two existing monuments. Frequently these same accounts then helpfully direct the reader to the official memorial website, which features artists' renderings demonstrating that the vista will remain more or less unobstructed (from certain angles at least), and thus that the "arguments" of "the opponents" have no merit. Hogwash. An obstructed view is the least of the objections to the memorial. The most compelling objection to the project is not aesthetic but symbolic. And in a battle that is about nothing if not symbolism, opponents of the memorial should have taken the field years ago.
But no serious opposition has arisen from a desire to stand between veterans and an additional gesture of thanks. Indeed, as any visit to the local Megabooks makes plain, we are in a period of unmitigated generosity of feeling toward veterans of the war, who are now said to be dying at a rate of approximately 1,000 per day. And if there are some stingy cranks who oppose the project for any of the aforementioned reasons, these are not the "opponents" that the media ought to be reporting on. Rather, sensible opposition to the project stems from two beliefs: The first, thoroughly heretical at the moment but nevertheless true, is that the Second World War is not worthy of a monument in the very center of the most central public space in America. The second is that the memorial itself, as currently proposed, is not a worthy tribute to the veterans and citizens who won the war. The Mall is already something of a clutter of monuments - but many of them hide in bordering trees. The two-mile-long open space extending from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol building is another matter entirely. Other than reflecting pools, which complement existing structures, and the replacement of transverse roadways with less obtrusive pedestrian paths, there has been no new monument or substantial item of construction added to this esplanade in 80 years - not since the unified National Mall was originally demarcated by the completion of the Lincoln at its western end in 1922. Put another way, one would have to go back more than a third of the age of the nation to find the last time Congress saw fit to alter this space. Surely the most ardent memorialist will allow that adding anything new is a thing to be considered carefully at the least. |
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Copyright © 2008 National Coalition to Save Our Mall Inc. All Rights Reserved |
bsent some saving miracle, then, the project will be completed by 2004. It will consist, in part, of two 41-foot-high arches and fifty-six 17-foot-high granite pillars standing in a semicircle around the Rainbow Pool, which will be shrunk and lowered several feet into the earth. There will be a contemplative area on the northwest side, and there will be a "Freedom Wall." There will be waterworks. All of which is to say a multi-acre stone plaza is to be built smack dab in the middle of the open area between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.
Citizens ought to know just how bad an idea this is, and why - firstly because Congress, if sufficiently motivated, can halt construction if it wishes (there is no granite in the ground yet); and secondly because the Supreme Court, as the saying goes, follows the election returns. That is, the Court's judgment on whether a case merits review can be influenced, even if unconsciously, by the degree of public controversy surrounding the case. (This is particularly so in an era in which justices assign much of the labor of reviewing potential cases to young and eager clerks who, conscientious as they may be, are understandably excited by the prospect of bringing "historic" cases to the Court's attention.)
t should be made clear at the outset that the debate over the memorial is not and has never been about whether the veterans of the Second World War - or the millions of citizens who threw their energies into the war effort - merit a monument in Washington, D.C. True, some curmudgeons complain that the "Iwo Jima Memorial" (the Marine Corps War Memorial, actually) has long been recognized as a de facto World War II monument. And others, correct but missing the point, observe that the real monument to war veterans is the survival and continued proliferation of democracy around the globe. 
The National Mall is the most politically significant expanse of earth in America, and one of the most elegant and celebrated public spaces in the world. Its function is almost purely symbolic - which, contrary to the easy assumptions of a rationalist age, does not make it the less important. In a nation defined by a political philosophy rather than by ethnicity - even today an oddity - the proper public employment of symbolism is crucial.