On Memorials and Lack of (or too much) Thought

[Annie]

http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/lileks091405.html

The Sorry State of Modern Civic Memorials

BY JAMES LILEKS
c.2005 Newhouse News Service

\

More stories by James Lileks

How best to memorialize the victims of Katrina? Some would love a statue of President Bush in a dunce cap, strumming a guitar, with a quote on the plinth from Howard Dean: "He doesn't care about people." But an actual statue is out of the question, since we don't do literal-minded monuments much anymore.

You could have the modern memorial, abstract and sorrowful -- 800 small buses arranged in a pool, with the words "Never Again" in stone. The original design called for "It Will Never Happen Again" to be carved, but the stones bearing "It" and "Will" were stolen and "Happen" got cut because the memorial committee set aside funds for 498 no-show patronage jobs.

Or you could wait for New Orleans to return on its own, and let the sound of Bourbon street -- sweet jazz, boozy laughter, rubes chundering in the alley -- stand as the true memorial to Big Easy's spirit. Given the state of modern civic memorials, that might be best.

Decades ago you could expect a statue of the mayor directing generic city workers to patch the levee, with the word COURAGE chiseled below. Nonsense, perhaps, but it played to our better natures; gave you something to look up to besides the pigeons on the statue's head. But now?

Now our memorials are muted things whose passive beauty often seems at odds with the events they describe. Such a problem arises from the ill-named Crescent of Embrace, a memorial designed to commemorate the heroes of Flight 93.

In this crescent -- a red one, in the mockups -- many see the symbol of Islam, which was not exactly represented by its best ambassadors on Sept. 11, 2001. Even the design committee noted the Islamic implications of the word "crescent," but went with it anyway -- perhaps to show that they were Citizens of the World, ecumenical in their sorrow, and surely not Islamophobic. (Islam is peachy! Unless it's in the Iraqi constitution.)

Grant them that. But you suspect they would never approve the Cross of Understanding, even if the designers intended the shape to represent the airplane that crashed. That would make the wrong people happy and the wrong people mad.

"So you object to New Orleans being the Crescent City?" you say. "Better rename it Jesustown USA right away, you wingnuts!"

Sigh. Look: We don't need giant statues of the guys ramming the drink cart into door. But pedantic though such a momument might be, future generations would infer the plot. All you get from a Crescent of Embrace is a sorrowful sigh of all-encompassing grief and absolution, as if the lives of all who died on that spot were equal in tragedy. They were not.

Perhaps we might have gaps in the crescent to symbolize the terrorrists? Something that singles them out and excludes them. Or is that just playing into the he-said-shahid-said blame game?

The monument goes along with other sins of commission -- the tortured, everybody's-a-sinner museum proposed for the Ground Zero site, the tentative, Euro-styled Trade Center replacement that avoids any notes of bravado or American style, the palpable relief at the major networks that four years had passed and they didn't have to waste valuable advertising time on Sunday night with some bummer recollections of, you know, that.

It's not a red state-blue state issue. There are plenty of liberals who have no time for weepy self-criticism sessions and heal-the-planet memorials.

It is, to use a tiresome sobriquet, a matter of elites vs. the rest of the country -- specifically, the artistic sentiment of the elites, which has become so disconnected from the rest of the populace they cannot imagine what else to do but slather the land with abstractions and wind chimes. A statue? Of the people who died? Why, you might as well put a NASCAR track on the site.

Not a bad idea. The endless track represents futility and inability to think of new global conflict-avoidance paradigms. The air will be thick with the exhaust -- of shame.

You want a grant for that? Apply to the Heinz Foundation. They helped fund the Crescent, after all.

Sept. 14, 2005