JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

© 2008

 

Memorial Wars

 

       What will the Iraq War memorial look like?

       Wars usually keep people too busy to ask a question like that. It’s like planning your funeral on your honeymoon.

       But there the question was, popping into my head as I ate cereal, or in some other cereal-eating-like moment equally uninterrupted by this luxuriously remote war. It was a thought experiment that lasted as long as my oatmeal.

       It will be tougher for whoever has to take a chisel to this confusing mess and carve out what it all means.

       A chisel—this was the tool I pictured. Biting into black granite. Engraving names.

       Naturally, I was picturing Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, where Maya Lin decided that what Vietnam meant was 58,000 dead people and left it at that. A student in a funerary architecture class at the time (another class project: designing a memorial to “World War III”), Lin produced not a war memorial but rather a national tombstone. So (superficially) simple that it now looks inevitable, the Wall has become the cornerstone for all future war memorial ideas.

       The Wall speaks to a national obsession with counting. Quantification has become requisite in major death-memorials, from the empty chairs at Oklahoma City to the roll call of names at the World Trade Center. (Lin helped choose the design for the latter site.) The amateur proto-memorials of anti-war protestors are already ringing up Iraq. Roadside displays count white crosses. A touring art exhibit counts paper leaves marked with soldiers’ names. The Quakers count empty boots.

       Can we really count on this? Is the meaning of Iraq really translatable through the codes of the Wall? Surely it is not an exact blueprint for our future memories. A war memorial too much like the Vietnam Wall would be admitting the war was too much like Vietnam.

       Dangerous, too, is the Wall’s lulling sense of perfection. It gets credit for “healing” the social wounds of Vietnam. In reality, it dignifies ambivalence rather than resolving it, as memorial expert James Mayo has noted. It short-circuits arguments about Vietnam by making death an unassailable virtue—a rhetorical trick so complete it is easy to forget it is one, and that it is still being used. The deification of personal sacrifice that makes the Wall a solemn reminder about that old war became the “Support Our Troops” that dubiously enabled the current war.

       Memorials create memory as much as they preserve memory; they frame perspectives, not just retrospectives. Their meaning can diffuse across an entire culture. We see something new, but think of something old.

       In 1929, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built the German Pavilion at the Barcelona International Exposition as a striking statement of modernism: clean rectilinear design, an open floor plan, richly clad in chrome and marble and travertine, with a shallow, rocky-bottomed pool outside. It was the palace of the future. Now that its innovations have spread to museums and such sites as Bobby Kennedy’s grave, it could be mistaken for a cinerarium in a 1950s-era cemetery.

       “So suddenly,” the British artist Liam Gillick told me, “[the] pavilion looks like a monument to something.”

 

       I’m not the first person to wonder about an Iraq War memorial, but it turns out we’re all the same kind of person: war opponents. I could find no record of anyone proposing such a memorial from any other perspective. It’s a remarkably exclusive club you join by just wondering. What we really want is an Iraq Anti-War Memorial.

       That’s not to say war supporters aren’t curious about memorials. Heck, they’ve actually built a bunch already. They’re just called (Global) War on Terror memorials.

       It’s a linguistic split as stark and striking as “Civil War” versus “War of Northern Aggression.”  It draws a battle line of its own.

       “Most important…to understand is that there will be a local war over how the memorial should be designed,” Mayo, the memorial expert at the University of Kansas, told me. “There was a cartoon many years ago that I saw and wished I had kept. It was entitled ‘The Memorial to the War over the War Memorial.’”

 

 

        Every current anti-war Iraq War Memorial idea cribs the the Wall’s concept of crushing us under a generation-load of names. The sheer weight is meant to squeeze out some outrage, guilt or horror.

       The Web lets anyone dabble in DIY memorializing. The “Iraq Veterans Memorial” (IraqMemorial.org) collects video memories from loved ones of troops killed in action. It looks American Legion-y enough, but it’s actually operated by an anti-war organization that organizes “laptop vigils” emphasizing the human loss.

       Iraq War Memorials have been constructed in the virtual world of the online video game “Second Life.” All include troop names (typically real) carved into Wall-like black stone columns, a template somebody must have built and shared. The first one I visited there was fashioned like a Greek temple, perched on the side of snowy mountain. Along with the names, it quoted Pete Seeger’s anti-war folk tune “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” But the intrusion of First Life never seems quite real; if you die in “Second Life,” you simply reappear at your home, alive and well.

       The simplest version is just a Web page list of the 4,000-some dead. That sort of thing is not always anti-war; in fact, it comes to us by way of Sept. 11, an event whose own memorialization was profoundly influenced by the Wall. The New York Times famously memorialized the World Trade Center’s dead and missing with individual photos and profiles, echoing missing-person flyers around the city but also the personalized body count of the Wall. Today, the Washington Post does the same thing for troops killed in action.

       But most of the Iraq War Memorial ideas come wearing a smirk. A major provocation is the “National Iraq War Memorial,” a Web-based stunt that presented itself as an official memorial design commission, complete with a proposed location across the street from the White House. It claimed to be apolitical; then it explicitly permitted memorial designs to evoke “anger,” “disgust” and “sheer disbelief.”

       It also posted all submissions uncensored, including the president shoving a flagpole down a civilian’s throat, and battleships made of human waste. The competition closed in 2005 with a more civilized entry declared the winner. Yet another version of the Wall, this one consists of giant video screens playing a constant rotation of soldier photos.

       Provocation and dark satire wreath artistic responses, high and low, to the Iraq War. The American Friends Service Committee’s touring exhibit of more than 4,000 empty combat boots is a tally of losses suffered. Sculptor Daniel Edwards’ shock piece “Iraq War Memorial: The Death of Prince Harry” shows the British prince—an army lieutenant deliberately spared deployment to Iraq—in a fictitious funeral tableau, a loss that will never happen.

       You really know an idea has come into its own when it can be the unexplained basis of a joke. The Wall is there. “Iraq War Memorial Planners Forced To Revise Length Again,” said a story in the satirical newspaper “The Onion” earlier this year. It imagined a Wall-type memorial full of names that, by necessity, now snaked across much of Washington, blocking roads and invading the Capitol building.

       The anti-war memorialists have a lot of faith in the Wall, in the ability of names to appall. The success of the Wall makes the tactic seem powerful, but the Wall has not stopped war. A decade later, the first Gulf War was based on the same concept of healing the “Vietnam Syndrome.” The idea of an anti-war war memorial is a vanity. The Wall works because it can be read either way.

       The Wall is also not especially humanitarian. Its names personalize—barely. They don’t humanize. The lives remain abstracted; the numbers are the message. The empty boots and video screens and Web page lists still have that same “Guinness Book” sense.

       The Wall looms large over these memorials in process as well as presence. The trend in discussing an Iraq War Memorial is to also propose an expert jury, an open design competition and a waiting period before anything would be built.

“We need to fight that rush to memorialize,” said Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne last year on an episode of National Public Radio’s “Day to Day,” apparently the only media outlet to have ever raised the specific notion of an Iraq War Memorial design. Five to 10 years should pass before anything is built, Hawthorne said, adding that the rush had ruined Sept. 11 memorials.

That sort of process is certainly responsible for the Wall’s striking innovations. Without an open competition and blind submission reviews, we surely wouldn’t have had a young Asian woman designing our Vietnam memorial.

But there may be something more to this call for a moratorium, and for a democratic yet expertly advised public review. It’s a coded wish that the war planning itself had gone that way. More simply, it is a desire for the ability to stop and think, a luxury no war grants but this one may particularly need.

Liam Gillick, who saw earlier than I that all wondering is political, suggested a different sort of moratorium. “I sometimes think that even thinking about a memorial now is akin to the ‘mission accomplished’ banner on the ship. It is a liberal/progressive projection with the best intentions but with a similar problematic.”

Still, once that quest for meaning begins, it’s hard not to follow it. Gillick told me he’s not very interested in memorials. He has a Guggenheim exhibit to work on, for pete’s sake. He said goodbye.

Then he kept BlackBerrying me with “and another thing” ideas about an Iraq War Memorial.

 

 

       Anti-war thinking is essentially analytical, speculative, doomsaying. It wonders about a future memorial because it wonders about the future, period. “What will a memorial look like?” is the same question as, “How long will the troops be there?” and “How many will come home damaged forever?” and “How many won’t come home at all?” As one of the “National Iraq War Memorial” founders told me, “The origin of the site was a series of conversations about the war and likely outcomes.”

       Pro-war thinking looks and sounds much simpler. “Bring them on.” “Mission accomplished.” “Support our troops.” They are like the self-hypnotic boasts of a team pumping itself up to win the big game. It is the language of immediacy, with no vocabulary for the future and no keyboard button for a question mark.

       Anti-war memorials now exist as ephemera—Web sites, art exhibits, yard displays—that want to provoke thought as much as summarize it. War supporters have a simpler message and no such hesitancy. The military, the American Legion and conservative state legislatures have already erected real memorials. Using the president’s official terminology, they are always called War on Terror memorials (sometimes prefixed with “Global” for full accuracy).1 Typically the memorials feature a small plaque with names of the dead. Sometimes there’s a soldier statue. Always the design is very traditional.

       None of these are official, national memorials. But they are the only sort to receive official attention. Earlier this year, President Bush attended the re-dedication of the Global War on Terror Memorial at the Army’s Fort Bragg. (In a real-life version of “The Onion’s” dark satire, the memorial was re-dedicated because so many soldiers died that the memorial ran out of room for names and had to be expanded.)

       Amateur versions outdo anything official. The self-declared national War on Terror Memorial in Hermitage, Pennsylvania duplicates the Vietnam Wall’s aesthetics, listing names of the dead on 12-foot-high panels of black glass and steel. A guy named Tom Flynn built it in his private park with a $5 million fund.

       Flynn’s display reminded me of the times I’ve seen soldiers on honor guard duty. There’s an artificial silliness I want to laugh at, but also a single-minded confidence I can’t help admiring.

       Of course, the reason I admire such confidence is because I lack it. As I tried to sympathize with these War on Terror Memorials, I found they aren’t so single-minded after all. Their walls may be 12 feet high, but they’re only a few inches thick, and there’s a lot lurking behind them.

       The “War on Terror” name itself is a dodge. The Iraq War Memorial ideas ignore Afghanistan to highlight controversy. The War on Terror Memorials blend the wars together to bury controversy.

       Indeed, several War on Terror memorials stretch the definition to include any terrorism-related death going back 40 years or so, making any modern controversy just a bit player in a grand historical drama. Flynn’s memorial goes all the way back to an American pilot shot down by Iran in 1975; his park includes an “Avenue of Flags”—444 of them, one for each day of the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis.

“If you’re doing the war on terror, you can’t just start with 9/11,” Flynn once explained to a newspaper reporter. Well, of course you can, considering that’s when the War on Terror was actually declared. On the other hand, if you want to embrace any kind of Islamic-state terror, you can’t just start with the Reagan era. Your memorial should, like the Marines, reach to the shores of Tripoli and the Barbary Wars.

The feigned historical accuracy is matched by a phony moral equivalence; the entire Iraq War is made identical to the killing of civilians in an airplane bombing. Anxiety about Iraq’s ambiguity is no longer its own animal; it becomes just a species of righteous fear and disgust about indisputably awful terrorist crimes. Even more importantly, its habitat is redefined: Iraq is a creature of the terrorists, not of us.

Physical positions are part the philosophical positions of War on Terror memorials. They stand on military bases or special sections of parks and cemeteries. Typically, they are add-ons to existing memorial sites, or literal additions to an existing memorial. It allows the War on Terror to borrow glory from wars with a more confident meaning, like World War II.

The locations also ensure that the memorials will be preaching to the choir. Getting to them requires a kind of pilgrimage. When President Bush re-dedicated the Fort Bragg memorial, it was the only item on his schedule that day that was closed to the press.

 

 

Carrying the weight of an entire war is a lot to ask of a single monument. The entire country used to share the load.

The Revolutionary War happened everywhere. You didn’t need a national memorial to something you saw happening in your own front yard. Probably the first Revolutionary memorial was the obelisk set up at the Lexington, Massachusetts battlefield in 1799. That’s how it went: a column here, an arch there, statues everywhere, on the dozens of significant local sites. If there’s any national Revolutionary memorial, it is the 1776 year of the mid-war Declaration of Independence, a number that has permeated American culture, high and low. The new tower on the World Trade Center site will be 1,776 feet high.2 San Francisco prostitutes during the 1976 bicentennial charged customers a bargain rate of $17.76.

The Civil War is similarly memorialized by the entire countryside. But it also brought significant changes. The intensely personal nature of the war and new cultural attitudes about death in general created a new demand for individualized memorials. Military cemeteries sprang up (most notably at Arlington) featuring separate, rather than mass, graves. White crosses let visitors count the loss. Coping with the huge number of dead was the main reason for turning the Gettysburg battlefield into a national memorial, where Lincoln’s famous “Gettysburg Address” informed us that death has an inherent sanctity. Gettysburg is perhaps the only national war memorial dedicated while the war was still going on—a rare official embracing of that quest for unifying meaning. Of course, that war was itself about unifying meaning, or lack thereof. 

       The Civil War also transformed Washington, D.C., into the home of national memorials. It became the definitive heart of the United States, consecrated as a wartime capital.

       But not until World War I did America force a memorial to say it all. It was a dislocated, foreign war; local troops were commemorated on small-town plaques everywhere, but there was no war-sanctified landscape anywhere at home. Machine guns, airplane bombing and poison gas had created a new type of war, an especially dehumanizing brand that produced huge numbers of unidentifiable victims.

       America’s response was the Tomb of the Unknowns—an unidentifiable dead soldier, chosen randomly, entombed at Arlington National Cemetery as a stand-in for everyone who served.  It is delicate bridge built between anonymity and individuality. It is an abstraction of death and sacrifice. The memorial itself is officially anonymous; “Tomb of the Unknowns” is its popular title.

       World War II was even more horrific and lethal, but its memorializing could not have been more different. In the post-war economic boom, America became a vast memorial. Public works projects serving the living, rather than tombs memorializing the dead, became monuments: bridges, highways and public halls were dedicated to veterans. Only recently was a national World War II memorial erected in Washington, widely loathed as the unenthusiastic token it is.

       These are big wars with big memorials. History books about memorials hop across them like stepping stones in a swamp. But there are many more down in the muck: Panama and Kosovo, the Spanish-American War and the Indian Wars, “police actions” and imperial expansions. They’re too small; too short; too dirty; too confusing. Worst of all, some are defeats. A national war memorial is always a way of polishing the family silver, but the nation won’t bother at all unless there’s some glimmer underneath, some reflection of our perceived national identity.

       We won the War of 1812, but the British burned the White House. We’re not interested in a memorial to that; we’re satisfied with a souvenir: “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

       The Korean War was a proto-Vietnam: too ugly to love, too lethal to ignore. As with the Iraq War in the War on Terror memorials, it was dealt with by coattail-riding—names tacked on to existing World War II memorials. The Tomb of the Unknowns was expanded to include other wars in the Korean War era, the well-defined victory graciously sharing its umbrella with the confusing Asian whatever-it-was. Even then, the Korean unknown was entombed as part of a trilogy dominated by a pair of World War II soldiers.

 

 

       Korea was the first unpopular war to crawl out from under the carpet and demand a national memorial. But Vietnam was the first to be successful at it. In both cases, it was surviving veterans who did the demanding.

       Vietnam memorials began much the way Iraq/War on Terror memorials are beginning now. It seems that 1968, the year peace talks began, was a popular time to begin memorializing. Plaques with the names of local troops began appearing in local high schools, statues in jungle warfare gear on military bases.

       That was also the year U.S. Marine Lt. David Westphall was killed in Vietnam. His family put his life insurance money toward founding the Vietnam Veterans Peace and Brotherhood Chapel in New Mexico. Dedicated in 1971, it still features names and photos of the dead as an anti-war shrine. This grassroots, from-the-heart effort became a key influence on the Wall.

       Among its fans was veteran Jan Scruggs, who began fighting for a national Vietnam memorial. Specifically, he proposed a veterans memorial, not a war memorial. The goal wasn’t so much to honor veterans as simply to make them members of the family again. The disgrace, both real and perceived, felt by veterans of that war was extreme. When Congress approved the idea of the memorial in 1980, the honor was widely felt as insultingly late, though it came only seven years after the main U.S. troop withdrawal and five years after the last Marines left at war’s end.

       There were two key design rules. The memorial, like the Westphalls’ chapel, had to feature the names of the war dead. And it had to “make no political statement about the war.” This was to be a memorial to the common fighting man. In the same democratic spirit, designs were solicited in an open competition. Mayo notes the design they chose was dazzlingly modern, a way of saying the Vietnam vets were distinctive.

       Maya Lin certainly provided innovation. Nobody, for example, had ever designed a memorial to look like a geode. Lin created a dark wall buried in a cut in the earth, V-shaped like an open book, its polished surface reflecting its visitors and surroundings. It bears the names of more than 58,000 dead (in the order they died). It is nearly as long as the Washington Monument is tall.

       Modern, yes. But behind the scenes, Lin’s main influences were very traditional: WWI memorials. One was Yale’s Memorial Rotunda, a building turned into a shrine to students killed in war. “On the walls of the Memorial Rotunda the University has inscribed with equal honor the names of all who made like sacrifice,” regardless of length or quality of service, notes Yale’s official history of its involvement in WWI. Then there were the Walls of the Missing—walls engraved with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of names of soldiers missing in action, erected as footnotes in the astonishingly vast WWI cemeteries of Britain and Europe. Names: the magic ingredient from the war that popularized the dog tag.

       Lin tore these walls apart and rebuilt them as a newfangled Tomb of the Unknowns. No one could possibly know all of the men on the Wall. They are anonymous names. They are names turned numbers, the sheer deathliness creating its own holiness. The Wall is also dedicated to the surviving vets: those who made the ultimate sacrifice extending their sanctity to those who made the penultimate kind. In the Tomb of the Unknowns, one stands for all; here, all stand for any.

       Of course, for those who did know the person behind a name, the Wall is something much simpler: a headstone. An unexpected feature of the Wall is the mementos visitors have showered on it from the start, treating it the way many cultures treat grave markers. Somebody once left a glass shower door. Like all the offerings, it went into a permanent collection that is considered an official part of the memorial.

       I visited the Wall about 20 years ago. Despite its little replica standing tall in my brain as the go-to design when I think about memorials, I barely remember the real thing. What I remember is the tension, the awkwardness, of standing next to a stranger as they touch a loved one’s grave.

       I’ve basically just described a work of moral genius. I can see why Lin’s design was chosen, why it got built, why it was such a success that within three years somebody was driving a Plexigas-and-plywood replica of it around small-town America. Who can possibly argue against a grave?

       I gave up trying to count them all. A war memorial war began before the Wall is built; skirmishes continue today. The design was a “black gash,” a ditch, an insult.  Lin was too young, too elitist, too—well,  Asian. The Wall was so modernist it had to be hiding something. Probably it was anti-war. And whose names, exactly, should go on it? Plus, no flagpole. Must have a flagpole.

       The national Vietnam Veterans Memorial today is actually four separate memorials. A plaque to vets who died post-war was added in ’04, a statue of women servicemembers in ’93, wallflowers edging as close as they dare to the quiet conversations at the Wall’s wake.

       Then there’s “The Three Soldiers,” a bronze antidote erected almost immediately by the Reagan administration. It is a sculpture, safely realistic and traditional, not to mention sinewy and gun-slinging. Its soldiers stand facing toward the Wall in what is commonly described as a searching gaze, and more accurately as a “High Noon” showdown.

       “In a funny sense, the compromise brings the memorial closer to the truth,” Lin once wrote. “What is also memorialized is that people still cannot resolve that war, nor can they separate the issues, the politics, from it.”

       Of course, Lin’s original Wall couldn’t resolve the war, either. It couldn’t bear the entire weight of history. It fractured into multiple memorials debating each other.

       The Wall’s meaning is clear. It draws the visitors. It is what I think of when oatmeal hits the spoon. It means a lot. But not enough.

 

 

       There is definitely going to be a memorial for our current wars. An idea’s time has surely come when it can serve as the basis of con: last year, a Michigan grifter convinced scrap yards to give him valuable metal for a fictitious Iraq War memorial.

       There is going to be a memorial war, too; the first shots have already been fired. Years from now, I’ll be saying, “I once asked, ‘What will an Iraq War Mem—gack’” as I’m choked by somebody who prefers “Global War on Terror Memorial.”

       Part of the attractive simplicity and neo-traditionalism of the Wall is that it could at least name the war it memorializes. Will we have an Iraq War memorial with the Afghan War attached? Or will both be added to a far more unifying Sept. 11 memorial? That has already happened in the bizarre War on Terror Memorial at Texas’s Brazos Valley Veterans Memorial Park, which really is a World Trade Center memorial complete with salvaged girders from the debris. (Today, “Iraq War Memorial” scores about 28,500 Google hits; “War on Terror Memorial” about 3,800.)

       I realize I’m envisioning a perfect memorial, a total answer. A lousy memorial will be much easier to build, and much more likely product of Washington’s design-by-committee atmosphere. Memorials don’t come less controversial than the “Lone Sailor” statue at the United States Navy Memorial. But its sculptor, Stanley Bleifeld, later wrote of the design process in shaken tones: “Perhaps all that I can say is that erection of any meaningful monument on a public site might be something of a miracle.”

       Whatever the memorial might look like, we’re already borrowing meaning from the Wall. That means we’re borrowing its flaws as well.

       The Wall is an example of how we pay tribute to dead soldiers while ignoring living ones—especially those who come back disabled. The Vietnam memorial add-ons reflect this, honoring the survivors and non-combat women.

       The living may play a bigger role this time. Troops already blog and e-mail from the war zones. They have an unprecedented ability to speak for themselves. Amateur memorial efforts will probably be highly influential for the same reasons. Look at the impact the Westphalls had in a pre-Internet era. Troops may not only fund-raise and organize a memorial like Scruggs did; they may create it themselves.3

       Death is the core value of the Wall. But do we really think sacrifice is always honorable and death always a consecration? Our current unpopular war is being fought by paid volunteers. If the war indeed is at best a mistake (as a majority of Americans now believes), aren’t those fighting it ultimately to blame? America is obsessed with personal responsibility in virtually every other corner of society. And America has long denied an inherent sanctity to the deaths of its enemies’ troops, saying the causes those enemies fought for matter very much indeed. Worst of all, what if there is no cause at all in this confusing war?

       These are the taboo questions underlying the anxiety-masking “Support Our Troops” cries. They are largely subjective and unanswerable, but no less real. Death is an ambivalent value in an unpopular war.

       The Wall got around this by rephrasing national tragedy into personal tragedy: Vietnam as tombstone. But it still kept the focus on death and all its anxieties. Maybe our future memorial will look more to the living for meaning.

       The deepest assumption to challenge is the single national memorial itself. It speaks to America’s conformist ways and mythos of a national identity shared by all.

       The Wall tried to squirm out of summing up the entire war by simply declaring itself apolitical. Scruggs and Lin could not really have been that naïve, and it didn’t work anyway.

       James Mayo has noted that later, local Vietnam memorials tried embracing ambivalence instead of avoiding it. A memorial fountain in Kansas City features two pools suggesting the split in public opinion about the war. A wall in New York City includes soldiers’ writings reflecting a wide range of reactions to the war.

       In a critique of an art exhibit last year titled “Memorial to the Iraq War,” Liam Gillick rejected the memorial concept: “Is is no good looking back to some earlier moment of apparent cultural consensus. We have to look instead towards art as a carrier of cultural differences and a perfect form for the revelation of paradox.”

       No shiny black marble, no reflecting pools. “I wouldn’t propose a singular monument,” Gillick later told me, “but maybe something installed near every gas station, near every car dealership. Near every school.”

       But what meaning would fill this new, scattered plan for a war memorial? I felt teased, as though the idea didn’t quite touch an elusive truth. Maybe he was right; maybe we just have to wait until this war is over to see what it means.

       Then I thought about the conversation I was having myself—and the conversation the multi-memorial Vietnam memorial has with itself. Both are processes of creating meaning, not just finding it laying around someplace.

       I thought I would find some meaning to the war by looking to the past and asking artists of the present. Turns out, that’s exactly what a war memorial does.

 

 

       This essay is a kind of monument itself. I began researching it on my own in May of 2008. In a move tactically smart but strategically foolish, I wrote it as an assignment for a writing course I was required to take for ulterior purposes; which is to say it became a monstrosity composed of my own insights, the need to please an audience and the standards of an academic/commercial writing style whose internal logic I appreciate but do not follow. A student in the class, attempting to characterize my essay as one-sided (because, of course, support for the war is so lacking in publicity), suggested in a stop-me-on-the-street-after-class moment that I visit war memorials personally (the idea, quite pertinent to my theme, being that my worship at shrines would inevitably cause me to join the True Religion). I demurred on grounds of topicality and pragmatism.

       What I forgot is that I walk past two notable war memorials almost every day. One, on the main street of my neighborhood, is a Civil War monument featuring a statue of a pensive Union soldier, his head bowed, his eyes full of the ambiguity of winning a war against one’s fellows. The other, at the end of the very street I live on, is a sign dedicating the intersection to a US Marine killed in Iraq. His father made the news for lighting himself on fire in the madness of grief upon hearing of his son’s death. Today, the father frequently stages Iraq War protests—complete with a flag-draped coffin symbolizing his son—in front of the very same Civil War monument. These monuments, and their current interrelation, could not be more relevant to the topic of this column.

       Even more relevant is that I forgot them.

 

 

 

       1 The new president is not so open to this terminology and may have an enormous impact on the eventual actual war memorial(s). As CNN’s Anderson Cooper perceptively pointed out in a recent interview with the president, Obama does not use the term “War on Terror.” Obama replied: “Well, you know, I think it is very important for us to recognize that we have a battle or war against some terrorist organizations. But that those organizations aren’t representative of a broader Arab community, Muslim community. I think we have to—you know, words matter in this situation because one of the ways we’re going to win this struggle is through the battle of hearts and minds.” It’s still semantics, but strikingly different ones. Perceptive though Cooper is, he apparently was unaware of the existence of memorials that already use the “War on Terror” terminology Obama opposes.

       Update: The “War on Terror” term is officially dead. An Obama administration e-mail to Pentagon officials said that “this administration prefers to avoid using the term Long War or Global War on Terror (GWOT)…please pass this on to your speechwriters.” The replacement term is different in tenor, and just as Orwellian: “overseas contingency operations.” It remains unclear what this means for extant Global War on Terror Memorials on government property. The White House did not respond to my questions on the matter. (Sources: CNN.com partial transcript of “Anderson Cooper 360°” interview with Obama, Feb. 3, 2009, and “Obama administration says goodbye to ‘war on terror’” by Oliver Burkeman, Guardian.co.uk, March 25, 2009.)

       2 This tower is another monument whose terminology outpaced its reality and is now changing; its symbolism slowly chewed, rather than bit, the dust as panic, sentimentality and chest-beating wore off over the years, to be replaced by America’s true red-blooded idol: money. Originally, the new building was to be called the “Freedom Tower.” But now, it will simply revert to “One World Trade Center.” And it first signed tenant is a Chinese real estate company. The phallic response to al-Qaeda-induced castration anxiety will still be 1,776 feet tall, though of course that’s another typical American cheat, a “spire” that will rise high above the actual building. The overall plans for the World Trade Center site have similarly been reduced over time. (Source: “Owners drop Freedom Tower name for new WTC skyscraper” by Chris Kokenes, CNN.com, March 27, 2009.)

       3 A whole other can of worms is Iraqi versions of war memorials. The first version I’m aware of is an entirely new breed: an 8-foot-long copper shoe memorializing the action of Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who wrote the ultimate editorial by hurling his shoes at G.W. while shouting, “This is a farewell kiss…you dog!” (The memorial was built at an orphanage said to house victims of the war; government officials ordered it removed immediately.) Arguably the one true hero of the war, al-Zaidi immediately became the target of neo-con attempts to appropriate his actions by the likes of women-who-marries-serial-killer-on-death-row think-alike Laura Bush, who informed CNN that the shoe-throwing “is a sign that Iraqis feel a lot freer to express themselves.” They won’t feel that way since al-Zaidi was savagely beaten and tortured by government thugs and is now seeking asylum in a real democracy with real human rights (guess what—it’s not the US). The shoe, already an Arab cultural symbol of supreme insult, is likely to become a lasting image of the war. It hilariously ruined G.W.’s canned farewell tour cum Pontius Pilate hand-washing in Iraq; it has symbolic echoes of those empty combat boots the Quakers display. Somebody will be tossing pairs of Converses or Vans onto G.W.’s grave 30 years from now. Keep an eye on this one. The shoe fits, and we’re going to wear it. (Sources: Laura “The Killer Beside Me” Bush on CNN.com, Dec. 28, 2008; “Monument to Bush shoe-throwing shines at Iraqi orphanage,” CNN.com, Jan. 29, 2009; “Shoe-throwing monument removed from Iraqi orphanage,” CNN.com, Jan. 30, 2009.)

       In the vein of wars about war memorials, one battle already was decided by a federal court last year. An Arizona man won a First Amendment case protecting his right to market T-shirts listing the names of thousands of troops killed in Iraq along with the message, “Bush Lied—They Died.” Incredibly, the state of Arizona had attempted to prosecute him for this under a law preventing the marketing of dead soldiers’ names without family permission. This free speech spat shows the passions that will be involved in much larger battles over an official memorial. (See “Ruling Protects Arizonan Who Sells Anti-War Shirts” by Paul Davenport, Associated Press, Aug. 20, 2008, via ABC News at http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=5622195.)

       Update: We may now have the first Iraq War memorial: the movie “The Hurt Locker.” Movies are modern versions of monumental sculpture, after all. And if this is our first memorial, it is yet another Maya Lin throwback, a politically safe and ambiguous tale of triumph and failure, clarity and darkness, death and heroism, and so on. Surreally, it was made just miles from Iraq in Jordan while the war still rages. It is an Iraq War movie, but in her Oscar acceptance speech, director Kathryn Bigelow thanked the troops in Afghanistan as well; again, Iraq is a body-double for that conflict.

       Meanwhile, I have learned of yet another memorial art project that began shortly before this column was finished: British artist Steve McQueen’s “Queen and Country,” which aims to put portrait photos of British troops killed in Iraq onto postage stamps. McQueen, who nabbed “official war artist” status with the military, already has stamp mock-ups going on a major exhibition tour. The portraits were chosen by survivors of the dead. This effort is an intriguing nexus of old and new war memorial modes. It combines anonymous mass production and intense personalization; it is politically ambiguous; it is memorializing in an ephemeral medium. It has the air of both grassroots effort and official government imprimatur. It is also perhaps a bit tacky—licking and sticking the dead on a phone bill—but no moreso than it is for other honored Brits. The image I cannot escape, however, is these stamps arriving cancelled. (Source: “Steve McQueen puts his stamp on the National Portrait Gallery,” The Guardian [UK], March 18, 2010, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2010/mar/18/steve-mcqueen-stamp-national-portrait-gallery.)

       Yet another memorializing attempt came in the March 21, 2010 New York Times Sunday Magazine: Ashley Gilbertson’s photo spread on the home bedrooms of dead U.S. troops. (Source: “The Shrine Down the Hall,” at www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/21/magazine/20100321-soliders-bedrooms-slideshow.html?hp.) Incidentally, good lord, are these wars going on forever. Maybe they’ll be memorials to themselves.

 

 

Significant sources include: “Boundaries” by Maya Lin; “Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial” by Kristin Ann Hass; “Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914” by William Blair; “Columbus, Ohio’s happening side” by Jason Cohen, “Budget Travel” (article describing Iraq War memorial exhibit at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; via http://www.cnn.com/2008/TRAVEL/getaways/05/30/columbus.ohio/index.html); “Dead Prince Harry sculpture stirs controversy,” Reuters, Oct. 5, 2007, via http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKL0519650920071005; “Designing a War Memorial for Iraq,” “Day to Day,” National Public Radio, March 26, 2007, archived at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9138933; “Dunedin has early war memorial” by Laura T. Coffey, St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, Nov. 11, 1991, via LexisNexis; “Efforts to Honor Vietnam Veterans Spreading” by Ben A. Franklin, New York Times, Nov. 9, 1985, via LexisNexis; Liam Gillick, conceptual artist, London, England/New York City, personal e-mails; “Global War on Terrorism Memorial at LRAFB,” KTHV-TV, Little Rock, Arkansas, May 2008, via http://origin.todaysthv.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=65720&catid=2; Bill Hammons, Unity Party of America, Colorado, personal e-mail; http://archone.tamu.edu/college/news/newsletters/fall2006/warMemorial.html (Texas A&M University College of Architecture newsletter, fall 2006, detailing Brazos Valley War on Terror Memorial); http://coloradosenate.com/2007/01/29/war-on-terror-memorial-stalls-in-committee (site detailing Colorado state plans for War on Terror Memorial); http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0805/22/cnr.04.html (transcript of CNN news broadcast detailing rededication of Fort Bragg’s Global War on Terror Memorial, May 22, 2008); “Iraq War Memorial Planners Forced to Revise Length Again,” “The Onion,” April 9, 2008, via www.theonion.com/content/news/iraq_war_memorial_planners_forced; “Iraq War memorial sets tempers ablaze” by Jason B. Johnson, San Fransisco Chronicle, Nov. 20, 2006, via www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi/?f=/c/a/2005/11/20/MNG0DMGE091.DLT; “Is there anything for art to say about Iraq?” by Liam Gillick, Guardian blog at http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/05/is_there_anything_for_art_to_s.html; “Judge Orders Man to Clean Vets’ Memorial with Toothbrush for Iraq War Memorial Scam,” Associated Press, July 28, 2007, via www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,291271,00.html; “Maya Lin,” American Academy in Rome; Prof. James Mayo, University of Kansas, personal e-mail; “‘Remove Not the Ancient Landmark’: Public Monuments and Moral Values” by Donald Martin Reynolds, ed.; “Riley to unveil war on terror memorial,” The Decatur [Alabama] Daily, Nov. 4, 2007, via http://legacy.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/news/071104/riley.shtml; “Rueful Reflections” by Greg Cook, Providence Phoenix, March 12, 2008, review of exhibit “Experiencing the War in Iraq,” via http://thephoenix.com/Arts/57837-%e2%80%EXPERIENCING-THE-WAR-IN-IRAQ%e2%80%9d; “Second Life” online video game world, personal visits, May 2008, see also event listing at http://secondlife.com/events/event.php?id=1425836&date+1209520800; “The New Ground Zero: Finding Comfort in the Safety of Names” by Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, Aug. 31, 2003, via LexisNexis; “Vietnam Memorial Takes to the Road,” New York Times, Dec. 1, 1985, via LexisNexis; “War Memorials as Political Landscape: The American Experience and Beyond” by James M. Mayo; “War on terror memorialized in Hermitage” by Bob Batz Jr., Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 26, 2005, via www.waronterror.org/repository/pittsburghpostgazette.pdf; “Where Memory Endures; After 25 years, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial casts a long shadow” by Cathleen McGuigan, “Newsweek,” Feb. 12, 2007, via LexisNexis; “Why Has Maya Lin Retreated From the Battlefield of Ideas?” by Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2006, via LexisNexis;  www.abmc.gov (American Battle Monuments Commission site); www.afsc.org/eyes (American Friends Service Committee site for exhibit “Eyes Wide Open”);  www.ica.org.uk/Memorial%20to%20/the%20Iraq%20War+13499.twl (Institute for Contemporary Art, London, England, site for 2007 exhibit “Memorial to the Iraq War”); www.IraqMemorial.org (Iraq Veterans Memorial site); www.langea.org (Louisiana National Guard Enlisted Association site detailing plans for Global War on Terror memorial); www.mdva.state.mn.us/Events/VeteransLakeFallenSoldiersMemorial.pdf (September 2007 announcement of dedication of Global War on Terror Memorial for troops from Minnesota); www.NationalIraqWarMemorial.org; www.PrinceHarryMemorial.com (apparently a ghoulish squat site); www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbsc.dll/article?AID=/20080526/NEWS/80526005 (Montgomery [Alabama] Advertiser site with article on May 26, 2008 dedication of Alabama War on Terror Memorial);  www.okhouse.gov/committees/Comm_CommitteeMembers.aspx?CommitteeID=43&SubcommitteeID=0 (Oklahoma House of Representatives site detailing plans for War on Terror Memorial); www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/memorial (San Diego Union-Tribune site featuring database of “war casualties);www.TheVirtualWar.org (official Vietnam Memorial site); www.UnityParty.us/iraq-war-memorial.htm (Unity Party of America memorial site); www.warheromemorials.com (site of war memorial sculptor); www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM3V1B (site detailing Nevada War on Terror Memorial); www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/05/20080522-3.html (White House press office site detailing President George W. Bush’s rededication of Fort Bragg’s Global War on Terror Memorial); www.williamgbecker.com/ArlingtonMidwest.html (personal memorial site); www.woodtv.com/Global/story.asp?x=6573588 (WOOD-TV, Grand Rapids, Michigan article of May 30, 2007 about War on Terror Memorial); “Yale Senior, A Vietnam Memorial and a Few Ironies” by B. Drummond Ayres Jr., New York Times, June 29, 1981, via LexisNexis. I also spoke via e-mail with an organizer of the National Iraq War Memorial effort (at www.NationalIraqWarMemorial.org), who requested anonymity due to “hate mail.” Maya Lin did not respond to an interview request for this column. Posted Aug. 12, 2008. Updated Dec. 29, 2008; Feb. 4, March 27, April 19 and Sept. 6, 2009; and March 12 and 18 and May 5, 2010.

 

 

 

 

JOHN THE OBSCURE HOME