Word: monumentalize
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WASHINGTON, D.C., May 15 -- West Potomac Park, where they set up "Resurrection City USA," is right next to the Reflecting Pool, which stretches between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The Reflecting Pool is very deceptive. It looks calm and deep and beautiful. But actually it is only two feet deep. Three or four times a year, maintenance men from the U.S. Park Service drain the pool and pick up the garbage on the bottom. Then you can see that it is only two feet deep. And that is very disappointing...
...tables with bronzed baby shoes. Many of its public buildings are self-conscious copies of old Washington favorites. Its war memorials offer some of the most embarrassing examples of social realism west of Leningrad. And right smack in the center of the whole city is the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument -- a phallic shaft of stone topped by a 200-foot representation of a frightfully winged female, supposedly "the happiest lady in town...
Buoyant Bending. Since the work had ample exposure in Harper's magazine and Commentary, it is widely known by now that this is Mailer's attempt to build a Washington monument by providing a step-by-step account of what in the present perspective seems like a decidedly minor news event: the peace march and militant demonstration in Washington last October. Mailer does indeed cover all the accepted journalistic steps, from the ceremonial handing-in of draft cards at the Department of Justice to the activists' vain roughhouse attempts to storm the Pentagon...
...Angkor Wat. That may be slightly hyperbolic, but everyone who has made the pilgrimage to Indonesia's temple of Borobudur, just outside Jogjakarta, ranks the soaring pyramidal shrine as one of the world's most magnificent examples of Buddhist architecture. Virtually untouched by tourism, the massive monument rises symmetrically from the serene green plains of central Java...
Finally, strapped by a hard-pressed economy, Indonesia has taken the plight of Borobudur to the United Nations, arguing that a "monument to all mankind" is at stake. After a searching survey, UNESCO's Bernard Groslier, conservator of Angkor Wat, and Dutch Hydrologist Caesar Voute have now agreed, and next month will recommend a $3,000,000, seven-year restoration program. Indonesians see prompt UNESCO aid as their only hope. "The balance now is precarious," warns one Indonesian archaeologist. "The walls of Borobudur could fall down today, and they could fall down in 20 years...