Word: monumentalize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Harris poll a while back, 73% of those asked said the memorial should include "visible recognition of F.D.R.'s disabilities." The National Organization on Disability, which claims to represent the interests of 50 million disabled Americans, thinks that to ignore F.D.R.'s disability in the monument is a major cultural blunder. "It would be unconscionable to have schoolchildren visit the memorial five years from now, or 500 years from now, and have no sense of the challenge F.D.R. faced," says Mike Deland, the organization's chairman...
...first this argument seems logical and demagogically appealing. A dialectical look, however, reveals its utter hypocrisy. The Great Hall is not the only example of a redundant monument to a defunct, "oppressive" culture. Another excellent example of such a work is the Temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak, Egypt. While ancient Egypt is very much the culture du jour, those of us who appreciated this civilization long before it was fashionable to do so realize that, like turn-of-the-century America, it had many not-so admirable aspects. For 2,000 years, the Egyptian Pharaohs and High Priests poured...
...crest of Boston's Beacon Hill, a bronze monument portrays Colonel Robert Gould Shaw leading the black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in their assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863--a battle that cost the young aristocrat and nearly a hundred of his troops their lives. When the Union army asked for his body, a Confederate officer replied, "We have buried him with his niggers." Shaw's sacrifice--memorialized by the poet James Russell Lowell as a "death for noble ends"--has become an emblem of the lofty idealism that inspired New England's 19th...
...noble ends. But from the late '60s on, the role of white liberals was circumscribed by the rise of black nationalists, who suspected that Northern whites were as eager to put their own virtue on display as to seek self-determination for Southern blacks. After all, the Shaw monument portrays the young colonel with his patrician features, astride his prancing steed, while his swarthy soldiers follow obediently. As the 20th century moved toward its close, most American blacks no longer saw this as the model for relations between the races...
OKLAHOMA CITY: The chain link fence around the grassy field where the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building once stood is a monument to suffering great and small. Hundreds gathered here Friday for a memorial service one year to the day after the devastating blast killed 168 people in and around the building. Families wiped away tears, some smiling shyly at each other, as they observed 168 seconds of silence, a second for each of the 168 victims. Rescuers from around the nation, who came to help Oklahomans in the aftermath of the blast, joined the mourners today in an expression...