Tag: monuments

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The Awful MLK Memorial

I really doubt that Martin Luther King Jr. would have enjoyed seeing $110 million spent on his memorial, especially when the design makes him look like Mao Zedong bursting out of the Great Wall of China ready to stomp out dissent and squash the nationalists.

How can a memorial that ugly cost so much? And, for $110 million, could they not have double-checked the text engraved into it: it will cost about $1 million to remove it, now that everyone seems to think it is an inappropriate misquote. Something about being a drum major.

I am opposed, as a matter of principal, to most monuments, but especially those that exaggerate the physical or historical size of the subject. The bigger the monument, the less likely the builders of the monument intend to live up to the ideals for which the subject stood. The monument is compensation. It’s a loud, bombastic assertion that the builders really care, really do stand for something, really do honor the ideals presented by the subject. It’s like hearing the Republicans talk about how great the Voting Rights Act was because it is no longer necessary, or how the courts carefully oversea the surveillance programs carried out by the NSA. We know they’re lying.

You can hear the Republicans saying to blacks: look, see how we love you? Look at how big the statue is. It’s gigantic. How can you doubt that we are on your side?

If this monument was appropriate, we would never have needed civil rights legislation or the Voting Rights Act: Dr. King would have simply stomped the racists into the ground or ripped the Washington Monument from its base and swept away the segregationists, the KKK, and the fat southern sheriffs in one stroke.

While the City of Detroit declares bankruptcy, the State of Michigan is providing $500 million to build a new arena for the millionaire players and owners of the Detroit Red Wings.

Taxpayer subsidies of major league sports stadiums remains one of the biggest scandals in American politics.

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How Dare You Not Stop Everything When I Tell You Too

When construction crews at the site of the World Trade Centre found some human remains in an abandoned manhole last week, some of the families of the victims were “outraged”. They demanded a stop to all construction. They demanded that the world stop turning and the winds stop blowing, until their grief has been adequately recognized by a monument 1150 miles high, made of pure titanium, and costing more than a billion, trillion, zillion dollars.

And all of the other suffering people in the world– your suffering is not important or significant or worthy of memorials or cash awards because, you are not me.

Nobody will publicly take on the families of victims of 9/11 because their shrieking outrage will be deafening and the media is terrified of displeasing them in any way, so they get to make demands like this with impunity, without blowback, without anybody calling them out.

And one thing the media would not dare to do is raise the question of why other victims of government malfeasance or neglect, like black families living in poor neighborhoods because of red-lining,  polluted by lead factories or dumps of asphalt shingles or leaky refineries, suffering outrageously increased rates of cancer and lung disease, — why do these families never receive even a penny of compensation for their suffering?

Yes, we do know.  And it is an outrage.

 

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Iwo Jima – the Monument

There is a statue in Washington D.C. based on Joe Rosenthal image of the men raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi. In the statue, the men are 32 feet tall. The guns are 18 feet long. The flag pole is 60 feet.

I’m sure someone thought this was a compliment to the men. More probably, that someone thought it was a compliment to war: these men are surreal, figments of fantasy, and war itself is an epic adventure of unreal proportions. That’s probably right– that’s how they sell young people– who actually have to go fight the war– on war. You will be bigger than life. You will be unreal.

The monument is an insult. The men were our size. They were us. What they accomplished was not epic or magical or unreal: they sacrificed their lives based on a perception of integrity in their leaders.

I’m pretty sure that the men who actually raised the flag on Iwo Jima would not be pleased with this monument. This monument is what we think they think we think of them. I’m not kidding. It’s a monument to the people who put up the monument, the guilty adulation of the those who did not have to actually set foot themselves on a battle field.

I haven’t seen it yet, but it sounds like “Flags of Our Fathers” is about this discrepancy too. It’s not an argument against the possibility of the necessity of war. It’s an argument against the idea that there is something noble and glorious about killing fellow human beings, for whatever reason.

But those who adore the culture of war must always retell the story so that military actions seem purposeful, honorable, and rational.

In fact, a good deal of war is the collision of failed strategies.

 

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Monuments to Victim Vanity

The strange, strange sacred and immutable right of families of 9/11 victims to spend an unlimited amount of public money on an obscenely tasteless monument: does anybody have the guts to say, enough is enough? They are now discussing a $1 billion dollar monument to the victims of 9/11, at the site of the former World Trade Centre. Did you know that the monument to all 55,000 dead soldiers from the Viet Nam War cost a “mere” $7 million? For that $7 million, those families received one of the most graceful, respectful, and amazing monuments ever built.

(Then the veterans jumped in and erected a more traditional monument right next to it to spoil the effect. Damn you– we are not ashamed of our war!)

Where will all this money go? Probably to middle-men, agents, lawyers, and contractors. Oh– there will be about $500 for a “vehicle security” gadget. I can’t imagine what that will be. Is it because they think more 9/11 hijackers are going to come over and destroy the memorial?

Will families of dead soldiers from Viet Nam please organize themselves? It’s never too late to jump on the bandwagon and demand your share. You should probably get a $10 billion dollar monument, and it should be right in front of the White House and it should be at least 2000 feet tall.

I’m sorry, but as sympathetic as I am to the families of the victims, it’s hard to not see this all as an insult to their memories.

But not all of them. I’m sure some of the families believe, as I do, that this entire exercise has turned into a tawdry, tacky joke and someone should stick a fork in it.

Now here’s my insanely great solution to the entire debacle: they should build a quiet, humble, small memorial at the base of the towers, and then donate the $990 million left over to fund “freedom schools” in Arabic countries that teach, for free, science, geography, music, literature, and math to earnest young Arab boys and girls.

Some of the families of the victims will say: such a small memorial would be an insult to the memories of our loved ones. Well, think about that. The memorial is not about them– it’s about you.