Memorials

I had a little free time Saturday morning, so I decided to get out of the antiseptic, muggy world of the hotel area (manicured grass, fake ponds complete with geese, no real life) and go downtown. I got off the metro at Dupont Circle and browsed kramerbooks for a while and then sat with a cappuccino and my laptop, making some notes on my proposal.

Since this is our last time in DC for national session (the July meeting is in Kansas City next year), I thought I should wander down to the mall and look at the Vietnam memorial one last time.

I first saw it in the summer of 02, right after I started at Fielding, when the entire core of the city was hyper-militarized. It was my first time in DC, and I was over-aware of the signs of flexing muscle, so I came to it with that underlay of raw dread, sorrow, fear, yearning that we all carried after September 11th in different ways.

The wall was overwhelming, that first time, the descent from the thin line of a few names down to the deep well of names names names, crowding out everything else. Lives lost living out a flimsy story of empire.

That time, I came to the wall at a time of day where somehow, eerily, I was able to see a reflection in the black granite, superimposed over the names, of … fighter jets, landing at a base behind me. Echoes of the images from September 11th, interpolations into its aftermath. The Lincoln memorial posed another ironic question – how do these two contradictory images connect, make a coherent narrative? And all of this was triangulated with the little kiosks between Lincoln and the wall, on the edge of the mall, selling military memorabilia, insignia. Including unfathomably crude iconography of imperialist might, like the bumper sticker that said “I’d walk a mile for a camel” – with a 19thc-style cartoon figure of an grinning arab on a camel with a bullseye over him.

A couple of years later, Mary Alice and I went to the newly opened WWII memorial, and I was struck dumb by that addition to the collective story of self. It’s downright Victorian in its empire and excess, the Albert Memorial for the American love affair with power. Giant eagles, huge bold names of battles, the war years punctuated through the American lens (1941 – 1945), not the rest of the Allies. A stunning reassertion of inward-focused, unquestioning imperialism. Beyond ironic.

It reminded me of the time that a friend of mine returned from her father’s funeral wearing his clothing, apparently unconscious of how stunning it was to see her rawest grief and yearning worn in public. I still squirm at how shocked I was that she didn’t seem at all aware of what she seemed to be doing, trying to be him, hold him alive, when it was so naked. The memorials feel the same way to me, shouting clear questions into the national discourse – questions that the people making their poignant pilgrimages, leaving teddy bears and notes about how much the soldiers are loved for their sacrifices, should be knocked over by – but which apparently echo only silently around them.