January 06, 2006
There's only one war...
Clinton W. Taylor has a good piece in American Spectator of the Flight 93 memorial...
...I suppose that is an improvement. Nonetheless, the winning memorial to a plane crash is still...a hole in the ground....
...Murdoch's designers bear some of the blame for this failure, but there are three sources of bad inspiration that deserve singling out as well.
The first precursors of failure were the poor design criteria. Murdoch's design responded to a "Memorial Expression," directing that the plan should "allow freedom of personal interpretation" of the Battle Over Shanksville. In a brochure announcing the new design, Paul Murdoch's letter boasts that his memorial is "open to emotional experience, individual interpretation and personal contemplation."...
In other words, it's tacky to express any public belief in anything. It's acceptable to have personal beliefs (it's better to just be "open to emotional experience"), but our nation must not express any belief in anything. Especially not that our people were heroes, that they were soldiers in the war on the terrorists, who deserve to be held up to our children as models of what Americans should be.
This argument over a memorial, like every culture-war skirmish, is a battle in the war. Which war? There's only one war.
...Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure....
This is a war against America and all it stands for. How do you know who's on the other side? It's easy.
Just imagine a different sort of memorial. say, a high hill topped with big American flags surrounding a large bronze sculpture portraying ordinary Americans attacking terrorist animals with their bare hands, clawing their eyes out and stomping on their skulls.
Now, think of all the people who would hate that monument. Leftists and al Qaeda killers and multiculturalists and Taliban and Quakers and (most) Europeans and Ba'athists and journalists....you know, the whole evil America-hating kit 'n caboodle. That's the enemy. That's who we are fighting against.
Read the whole piece by Taylor. It will be worth your while...(Thanks to Michelle)
Posted by John Weidner at January 6, 2006 11:12 AMI'm with you 100%, John, about how today's artists, with their "heightened sensitivities", are offensive in their determination to be inoffensive.
I'm sorry, though-- your image of a big bronze statue on a hilltop, surrounded by flags, only calls to mind the overwrought, Bizarro-world sculpture in the Soviet Union, designed to extol the world-changing virtues of Soviet workers. Bleah.
I would be happier with a smaller-scale granite memorial, similar to what you find at sites dedicated to the memory of Civil War or World War I soldiers.
Think Gettysburg, not Red Square.
Posted by: Hale Adams at January 6, 2006 02:34 PMI wasn't advocating such a monument, just using it in the thought-experiment. Point is that any monument that conveyed "American Heroes who fought and died in a good cause" would be offensive to...well, you know who.
I know the Soviet things you are referring to, they can be appalling. And prior to the 60's these questions would never come up. Simple and tasteful would not mean a Maya Lin black subterreanean thing...(And thinking about that makes me decide to make my statue 50' tall, and give the terrorist figures fangs and pig-snouts.)
Posted by: John Weidner at January 6, 2006 04:31 PMFunny thing about Maya Lin. You know that the statues by Hart were added later to the Vietnam Memorial. Lin was consulted, and said that it would be OK with her, as long as the models were not hurt! (She assumed that the figures would be made by encasing live people in plaster to make molds.)
She's a noted "sculptor," but apparently never even imagined that someone would or could sculpt a human figure! That's how far the art world has sunk.
Hart, not surprisingly, is self-taught.
Posted by: John Weidner at January 6, 2006 04:40 PMActually, aesthetically I'm probably closer to Lin than Hart. But it's the sub-text that rankles...
Posted by: John Weidner at January 6, 2006 04:49 PM"She's a noted "sculptor," but apparently never even imagined that someone would or could sculpt a human figure!"
OMG you're kidding. That's hilarious.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at January 6, 2006 05:41 PMIt is hilarious. (I must add that I haven't heard her side of the story; It was from an article on Hart.) But it rings true...
Posted by: John Weidner at January 6, 2006 06:43 PMThe story would be delightful if true, but I doubt it. She was young at the time - a grad student, I think - but even the laziest Art student could not have missed Michelangelo or Rodin.
About twenty-five years ago, there was a vogue for casting figures from life. Some models had difficulties breathing. The setting plaster became unbearably hot. Sometimes they panicked, and the unfinished mold had to be destroyed to extricate them.
That may be what she had in mind.
Its sad how you right-wing nutballs can even turn memorials to the dead into a culture war that no one else but you is even trying to fight!
Thanks for reminding me that it was you whackos who were running around a few months back screaming that this memorial was really some sort of secret tribute to al-Quada because part of it faced to the east (as a Muslim would face to pray)...
Doesn't it ever get tiring spending every waking moment inventing reasons to hate your fellow Americans?
Posted by: Zoomie at January 8, 2006 11:59 PMZoomie,
We don't have to invent reasons to hate our fellow Americans. (Not that I "hate" them to begin with. Dislike, yes; hate, no.) Those fellow Americans do a pretty good job of *giving* the rest of us reasons.
The rest of us, Americans NOT steeped in a blame-America-first ethos, get tired of the condescension with which the "enlightened" Left treats us.
And you wonder why we lose our tempers? Exercise your brain and use a little imagination, Zoomie.
Posted by: Hale Adams at January 9, 2006 10:32 AM
