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Home Front: Culture Wars |
The Sorry State of Modern Civic Memorials |
2005-09-15 |
BY JAMES LILEKSHow best to memorialize the victims of Katrina? Some would love a statue of President Bush in a dunce cap, strumming a guitar, with a quote on the plinth from Howard Dean: "He doesn't care about people." But an actual statue is out of the question, since we don't do literal-minded monuments much anymore. |
Posted by:Steve |
#4 Locally we have a memorial under construction dedicated to residents of the city killed in combat. Including Korea. But it seems the people in charge of purchasing sourced the black granite being used from the PRC of all places |
Posted by: Cheaderhead 2005-09-15 13:04 |
#3 After WWII, there was a general aversion to war memorials. Most veterans, themselves, started to see them as gratuitous monuments from civilians, for civilians. The veterans were far more interested in forgetting about the war and getting back to normal lives. It was also at that time that the left began to really despise what America stood for in the world. And while there was considerable need for social reform, the left was still moonstruck by the "inevitability" of socialism and communism. So the soldiers were indifferent, and the left was iconoclastic. Last but not least, the degeneracy of the arts had really accelerated, leaving few artists either capable or willing of expressing a monument in a classic form. Stone is a particularly difficult medium and takes many dedicated years to perfect techique, and there are no guarantees of proficiency. Other, far less durable media are much more forgiving and give an artist more opportunity to create more than a handful of works in his life. So that, too, explains the absence of great monuments in the post-war world. |
Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-09-15 10:37 |
#2 We live in an era where our "sophisticated" elites are embarrassed about the notion of having memorials at all, while knowing that they still have to provide some acknowledgement of these events for the "yokels" out there. These wan gestures are the result of the compromise between these views. |
Posted by: dushan 2005-09-15 10:03 |
#1 The pussification of the US at the hands of the leftist elites continues. I'm not at all suprised. |
Posted by: JerseyMike 2005-09-15 09:59 |