Rants, Bile, Curmudgeonry
MAGAZINE Stuff
Rants, Bile, Curmudgeonry
MAGAZINE Stuff
Jane Fonda's Wall
Thoughts On The Chatter Of Candy-Asses
The Washington Times
(Written during the debate over the proper size, shape, and politics of the Vietnam Memorial.)
The papers nowadays sink beneath the weight of thought about the monument to the veterans of Vietnam, wondering whether it should be bigger, smaller, whiter, gaudier, or above water level. If I may speak for myself, I would just as soon not see a memorial built at all.
Other men who were in Asia in those strange, receding days may disagree, but I cannot see that the war is the proper concern of Washington. The city was never behind the veterans, neither the politicians who ran the war with the talent and morals of used-car salesmen, nor the crowds who ran through the street with North Vietnamese flags. No, here is not the place. There is impropriety in building a monument to the dead in a city that caused them to die, and that wished them dead.
I propose that the city build a memorial to the Peloponnesian dead, or to those who fell at Sevastopol or Cannae. Washington at least was not the enemy of these. To rededicate Maya Lin’s somber angle to men who will not have to see it is nothing more than decency. Living veterans ought not be honored by a tombstone. If we must build a memorial to the veterans of Indochina, let us do it on Wake Island, where the refugees came in the last frantic exodus from Saigon. On Wake a monument would stand in the windy silence, under sunsets like the vast gorgeous radiances we saw in Asia, and not seem a part of any particular place or time. This is fitting. A country that spurns its soldiers in time of war should not commemorate them in time of peace.
If we must have a memorial in America, let us put it in a coal camp in a forgotten hollow in West Virginia, or in the smoky blue evening of some border town in Texas, or in the decay of the Bronx. From there came the men who fought the war. Don’t erect it on the Mall to be psychically fondled by the literati, to be chattered over by hollow-chested little professors, the ghouls of the wars of others. The dead should not be displayed for voyeurs.
Besides, the sunken black wall is not a monument to the veterans. Already the chatterers have taken it from the men it stands for. The theoreticians of the art academies, knowing and caring nothing about soldiers, demand a funerary arch on its side to commemorate the sweating, literal-minded men who fought in the paddies. What have austere slabs to do with soldiers? I think back to my platoon at Parris Island, and wonder what Corporal Larry Reyes, a Chicano out of Fresno who died clearing a tunnel, would think of the dark wedge. No, I don’t wonder.
Those responsible never had it in them to design a monument to troops, and they didn’t even try. What earthly sense does it make to allow an intellectual, Chinese, barely-adult artist to design a monument to fifty thousand grunts from Topeka and Amarillo?
I have no hard words for Maya Lin; may she flourish—but no one could have had less understanding of the men who fought the war. No, those who planned the black vee were thinking of themselves, not of soldiers—thinking of their little theories and what the professional journals of art would say. I for one do not want to remember the Marines of 1967 by a memorial to the art department at Yale.
I have even heard it argued that the soldiers of the statue, if there is to be a statue, should be without rifles, as weapons might be controversial. Here is bared the spirit of the thing: the chatterers do not want to memorialize the veterans as they were; they want to memorialize the veterans as they think they should have been. They want a monument to their political passions, a disarmed marble catechism in perpetual apology. The thing on the Mall really is Jane Fonda’s wall. If I were among the dead I would not want my name on it.
If I were designing a memorial to my own taste, I would want an enormous bronze hand rising from the ground, making a rude gesture—no flag, no inscription, just a raised finger. Some might think it vulgar, but soldiers are vulgar. It would perfectly express my feelings about the war, the country, Washington, and the commission that designed Jane Fonda’s wall.
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