About a third of the way through the World War II memorial, I turned to the missus and said, "Does this seem kind of cheesy to you?" She couldn't hear me, though, because the fountains were so loud. I've read plenty of commentary about this memorial, both
pro and
con, but I was ready to give the thing a shot.
In his review of the memorial, the
Washington Post's Blake Gopnik said:
It says so little, in fact, that our soldiers' worst enemies would have felt equally comfortable with its design. Imagine the memorial as paying tribute to the efforts of the Wehrmacht in Poland, or of the Carabinieri in Ethiopia -- change just a few of its explanatory inscriptions, that is -- and you realize that Europe's fascist leaders could not have found a thing in it to take exception to. Its sculpted raptors and victors' wreaths and imperial colonnades trumpet warlike virtues, but they never flag which side they're fighting on.
Wow. A point Gopnik doesn't address is the sheer Hollywood-ness of this memorial. I guess that's low-hanging fruit, but think about the echoes between those overwhelmingly loud fountains and the way memorial backer Steven Spielberg (whose movies I generally like) blasts his audience with ear-splitting music that tells them what mood they should be in for each scene. In the context of the memorial, these fountains say, "This is important," but they make contemplation of the magnitude of that war next to impossible.
Which is in keeping with the rest of the memorial. At the visitor's center, you can look up relatives who died in the war, but otherwise the only suggestion that people died in this thing is a wall with a bunch of brass stars on it. There are giant columns with the names of all the states, plus Alaska, Hawaii, D.C. and Guam, and absolutely nothing on them to convey the number of people from each state who perished fighting. It's all terribly grand and utterly forgettable, much like most World War II movies (with the notable exception of
Saving Private Ryan). The setting, on the Mall between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials, is nowhere near as scarring as I thought it would be, but the monument itself feels like an afterthought to its location--as if the real estate conveyed so much gravitas no one would notice that someone parked a McMansion there.
I agree with Slate's Timothy Noah that while Vietnam was "in retrospect...largely about death," and that the World War II memorial doesn't necessarily require a "telephone book" roll call of the the dead to make an impact. But like the movies that partially funded this turkey, death is idealized in the World War II memorial, skated over and ultimately emptied of meaning.
