08.09.05 - 5:28 p.m.

The Weekly Standard has a critique of the current state (overcrowded, or soon to be, with monuments and unwelcoming to pedestrians) of the national mall in Washington (if the first image that pops into your mind on hearing the phrase "national mall" is the rollercoaster in the middle of the Mall of America, something is decidedly wrong with the world) coupled with a fascinating history of the mall as urban architecture, the plans fulfilled and those fallen to the wayside, the visions of various planners, snapshots of the promenade throughout history (President Nixon apparently wanted an amusement part where the reflecting pool is now situated).

I was really enjoying the story - and quite surprised that I was enjoying it so much - when crazy conservative dude and I hit our first damn roadblock.

The National Museum of American History is a showcase of "social history," the revisionist approach that downgrades the extraordinary and exemplary while elevating the everyday and unexceptional. Except the unexceptional isn't very interesting, and neither is the museum.

I haven't been to the National Museum of American History in ages and have no specific familiarity with its current approach to our nation's history. I suspect that the exhibits attempt to illuminate both the extraordinary and the everyday - but goddamn, what a boring, unimaginative man if he doesn't find the historical quotidian to be equally as fascinating as the great events. How can I capture this? Add great event to great event and the great events become a little... less great, a bit less extraordinary, a measure more ordinary, a kind of historical deflation, desensitizing one's historical imagination, shaving away context and meaning until there's only one (rather boring) narrative that reinforces your own world view (whatever it may be) rendering this great big world with all its magic bits, irrational outgrowths and stuttering accidents, smoother, rounded, monotone.

Without the context provided by ordinary rhythms of life (conservative idjit's much derided and dreaded social history), the great events lose meaning. Blah. And after providing a fascinating uh... social history of the national mall, one might think that dude would get this - except he can't tow the party line if he doesn't somehow reject modernity. I'm sure that plenty of nutty social historians go overboard in the other direction, doofus conservative guy, but they just have SO much power outside MLA conventions. I mean, the history channel is all deconstruction, all the time!

(Frustrated.)

The permanent exhibits are built around concepts, the larger and more abstract the better--"Information," "Transportation," "Electricity," "Time." These vague and expansive subjects are then illustrated with material objects displayed willy nilly. The objects chosen are seldom remarkable; they seem to have been chosen, in fact, precisely because they aren't remarkable. In the "Time" exhibit you find a sundial and a pocket watch. "Electricity" gives the curators a chance to show off their collection of . . . electric fans. "Information" has rolls of teletype paper, and "Transportation" has, of course, cars, plus a slab of paving from an old highway. There's a wheelchair from 1978, and a shoe shine kit from the 1950s, and cue balls and bags of grass seed.

Ugh. Okay: this does sound bad and boring and haphazard, but that doesn't mean that a contextual approach to well-done social history + great events wouldn't be kinda awesome. I don't think that this is social history. I think this is the condescending (and quite potentially true) idea that the national museum has to create exhibits at ... the "ninth grade level" or something similar in order to appeal to as many Americans as possible (and in a way that offers the most opportunity to push buttons and/or ring bells).

(When I worked in state government, we used the "readability score" generated by our word processing programs to figure out whether our correspondence was appropriate for communicating with the public. We were supposed to aim for "Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level" scores of 2 to 3. That's (allegedly) a second to third grade reading level.)

Of course, Mr. Bow-Tie (I don't know him. I'm just making an assumption based on a picture I once saw of the Yale Political Union's "Party of the Right" members and alums - all crazy conservatives in bow-ties licking W.F. Buckley's boots, all a bit too effete for the current Tom DeLay/Gary Bowers regime but still kinda necessary to the movement what with their bow-tie gravitas and intellectual pretensions.) attacks the Vietnam memorial on two grounds: 1. the me-too memorial phenomena; and 2. god, it's so post-modern and depressing and insufficiently triumphalist, wahhhh.

Here's the thing: the me-too point is pretty important. I agree with the guy (can't be bothered to figure out his name) & I'm sure that plenty of other people like me would, too. we can't have a memorial for everything. Vietnam leads to Vietnam women's memorial leads to Korean memorial (can't be any smaller) + FDR + MLK, Jr. + WW II + what next? Grenada? 9/11? Why leave out Oklahoma City? What about the African embassy bombings? Our space shuttles (x2)? My grandmother? The first Gulf War? Afghanistan? CIA agents? Department of Agriculture Meat Inspectors killed on the job? Somalia? Iraq? the Peace Corps? Hey - we'll run out of room eventually, and each new monuments further clutters the green (dust/mud) - the expanse of grass that serves as a monument to and backdrop for our history.

Who wouldn't love to go walk on the national mall and imagine herself at the March on Washington, with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech on I-pod or via holographic projection or whatever. Our putative children's children's children's 3rd generation clones should be able to do that, still, without stubbing their toes on the 3rd Moon Conflict's women's batwing pilot's memorial. Somehow, the memorial-building craze has to be stemmed, and means some people who should be remembered and honored should not be remembered and honored on the national mall. It means that every memorial-building interest group has to be more civic-minded and less damn selfish. Maybe we shouldn't build memorials to anything anymore until everyone involved in/with them has died.

Of course, the bow-tie-guy careens right back into the arena of ideology as critique, precept as truth. If the far left has learned only pacifism from the legacy of Vietnam (and, well, the fun and somewhat self-aggrandizing protest culture?), then conservatives from the middle of the road rightward take one lesson from Vietnam as well: that liberals suck! and lost the war for us, the pansies! (At least the left's reaction to the legacy of Vietnam can be seen to logically follow from the experience of Vietnam. The conservative reaction seems to be wholly constructed, without any basis in reality, like a kid closing his eyes and shouting I can't hear you! and believing that that makes it true.

See for yourself:

If traditional memorials were designed to lift the viewer out of himself and thrust him into a larger drama of enduring significance--this had been one of the principal purposes of the mall, as it developed and grew--then the Vietnam memorial careens violently in the other direction. It is an invitation to commune with one's own sad feelings; it is the memorial as therapy, flattering the visitor's sensitivity. It's enormously popular.

At first the popularity wasn't universal. The original design's morbid inwardness, its meticulous avoidance of any elevating or patriotic symbolism, created a reactive special-interest group of its own--Vietnam Veterans against the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, who hoped to correct, or at least complicate, its overt pacifism and its sly denigration of the war and the warriors.

(Hey, buddy, how about this for larger significance? Everything of larger significance has hundreds and thousands of personal, individual consequences. If they're going to be tragedies, make sure you have a damned good reason. And do it right.)

The Vietnam Veterans against the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, according to my beloved tour guide, wanted to "complicate" the memorial's meaning with a more traditional monument, three marble soldiers with an American flag, the sort of thing that we like to have around so that we can ignore its elevating or patriotic symbolism, its gung-ho guts and glory Lee-Greenwoodization of Our Great Nation. Obviously, he understands the concept of "complicate" - what's wrong with a mature nation complicating the national mall? Does he think that the Vietnam experience is best memorialized with a big fountain and some old dude on a horse, the story of his death told by the number of hooves on the ground? I can make room for many meanings and respect an awful lot of beliefs and belief systems, but not this weird inability - this refusal - to complicate the meaning of war, any war, or memorials, or grand ideas with ordinary griefs and everyday tragedies, let alone the grand griefs, the terrible misfirings, the great betrayals of the promises of our ideals.

Bleh. What a nitwit. I don't understand how ... urgh. I just don't get <-- my thoughts are getting less coherent as time passes and the need to wrap this up and bill! more! hours! presses home.

The author doesn't seem to understand that the Vietnam Veterans memorial IS part of a shared patrimony - public grief made private made public is so shared, and helps to drain some of the poison from the oozing open sore of that particular wound, and - except for the super rich, I think, the men who were able to escape service by "joining up" in the national guard (a different animal then v. now), the experience of the Vietnam war WAS national. Ana's son is fifty-something, and still in and out of institutions with PTSD ( - a diagnosis of which I am skeptical under most other circumstances); my uncle served. My father was luckier: student/teacher deferments + high draft number. And so on.

Such a shame. Except for the horribly quotidian right-wing critique of the contemporary (misguided, as always) of le POR member (nominally named Alexander Ferguson, a senior editor for the Weekly Standard), it's a great article - and the solutions (expand the mall, remove all the varying jurisdictions to one administrative body, a Board of Regents or something similar, and made it, once more, people-friendly), which come primarily from the interviewee, an activist on the topic and not necessarily a POR member, all sound good to me.

I love Washington. I love the city's neoclassicism, the great big buildings, the great big columns, the wide downtown avenues deserted at midnight, the mall, the reflecting pool, napping on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, breakfasting on Entemann's waxy chocolate donuts dipped in milk as the sun rises, watching the shadows change and lengthen along the expanse, and I hope my children's children's children's children's seventeenth generation clones' cousins' kids are able to walk on the lawn listening to I Have a Dream and imagining what it was like to be there 875 years ago.