A Monumental Failing

I am going off the beaten path today on a subject that is outside the mainstream, but very interesting nonetheless. I am taking this detour because I love the monuments in Washington, D.C. The Lincoln Memorial is my favorite. I like the Vietnam Memorial even though it makes me sad because one of my high school classmates and fellow football player's name is inscribed on it. The Washington Monument is visible as you fly into Reagan National Airport and it stands tall and proud as a symbol of our country. Something has changed, though, in how we view our national monuments and an interesting article in Imprimis by Michael J. Lewis offers some explanation. www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp

On the theory that a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a photo of the new Dwight D. Eisenhower memorial. Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied commander in WWII, planned and executed D-Day, presided over the total destruction of Hitler's Third Reich, and was a two-term President of the United States during the worst of the Cold War. What does this statue look like to you? I thought it was about Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. Whimsical comes to mind, but is whimsical the right way to remember Ike and all he represented in view of his resume above and the millions of Americans who fought and died under his command? I think not. Tellingly, the Eisenhower family did not agree either and testified before Congress to try and get a suitable monument built. Unfortunately, they failed and we are stuck with this small scale piece of public art that does not honor the man who Ike was or the brave souls that he commanded.

susaneisenhower.com/2012/03/20/my-testimony-to-congress-on-the-proposed-dwight-d-eisenhower-memorial/

The second new monument that Lewis critiques is the Martin Luther King Memorial. Again, a picture is the best starting point to get a feel for this issue, so here it is. The statue was sculpted by a Chinese artist and actually has "Made in China" engraved on it. Great. Cheap, contaminated consumer goods aren't enough - we have now outsourced our national American monuments. Does anyone think that the Chinese would do this for a new memorial to Chairman Mao? Right.

The second issue, speaking of Chairman Mao, is who is really depicted here? There is more than a passing resemblance to the Fearless Leader rather than the man who led the battle for equal rights for black Americans and finally closed the slowly healing wound of the Civil War. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a classic; this is not.

Lewis makes the interesting point that part of the reason that this statue does not work is that it is carved from granite rather than marble. Historically sculptors going all the way back to the Greeks knew that marble is a much softer material and can capture the soft curves and nuances of the subject's face and figure and allow shadow to interplay to bring out emotion. Granite is very hard and crystalline and only allows flat planes and harsh angles - no nuances, no emotion, just "heroic"in the Marxist/Leninist sense.   Perhaps an artist schooled in the Western tradition might have known this and avoided the problem.

All of the above is sad. These men were true heroes and perhaps the root problem is that our country does not believe in heroes any more, or even that it is a good thing to have them. And so we get whimsy, we get the great Proletarian Hero, but we do not get for posterity any sense of the character of these great men and what they represented and heroically accomplished in the crucible of history to make this land a better place.