The friend we were meeting moved west a couple of years ago and was back in town this week for business. He wanted to walk around the Mall, one of the things he misses about the city, and while there we visited the World War II Memorial.
This may make me unpopular, but honestly...I was less than moved. The memorial is impressive but to me it lacks poignancy, and it doesn't seem to encourage contemplation. It has too many elements: Pillars! Arches! Waterfalls! Fountains! I found myself wondering what was symbolically significant (are the states in some kind of order? If the moving water represents the sea battles, what represents land and air?) and what was just architecture for its own sake.
In some ways, because the scale of the memorial is so huge, it's more like a park within a park rather than a monument. It's going to be a nice place to eat lunch on a warm day, and that's not bad thing...being able to sit in a nice park and eat lunch with views of the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the Capitol dome may be an excellent way to pay tribute to the Greatest Generation, if you remember what they did to allow you to be there.
It's been several years since I last visited the Vietnam Memorial, but to me that had quite a different atmosphere, one that really did promote remembrence. People were hushed at the Wall. It was reflective. As I said, though, I haven't been there for years, and maybe it's not like that anymore.
Like they do at the Wall, people are leaving things at the WWII Memorial...flowers, photographs, newspaper clipping. Here is a page from a program remembering the USS Gilligan and a medal. That's when this becomes poignant and what I think of as a true memorial.
Update to add: The medal is a Distinguished Flying Cross.
Posted by Nic at June 20, 2004 09:16 AM