Word: monumentalizing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They came like pilgrims, bigger crowds each day, to Washington's newest and most unorthodox monument: the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial. Its long walls, inscribed with the names of 57,939 killed or missing in America's last war, are simple, elegant and dignified, everything the Viet Nam War was not. By the end of last week the adjacent ground was a fringe of private memorial icons: messages in ink and gold glitter, photographs, candles, tiny flags and hundreds of flowers. Virginian Larry Cox, one of four survivors from a 27-man platoon, found the black granite chilling...
...deliberate notes of reconciliation, politicized discord swirled around the centerpiece of the week's events: the Veterans Memorial. Three years ago, Labor Department Bureaucrat Jan Scruggs, a former Army corporal, decided that he and his fellow Viet Nam veterans needed palpable, permanent recognition in Washington, their own monument in the city of monuments. His Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Fund (V.V.M.F.) persuaded Congress to assign them two acres on the Mall, got 500,000 donors to give $7 million and managed to attract 1,421 entries to a professionally judged design competition. V.V.M.F. wanted a "reflective and contemplative" memorial with...
Around the country, in fact, Viet Nam veterans sense a growing acceptance, an accommodation that owes more to plain human respect and less and less to pity. Washington's is not the only monument. Last week in downtown Chicago a commemorative fountain was dedicated, and in Vermont, Interstate 89 last month became Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Highway. On the courthouse lawn in Glasgow, Ky. (pop. 13,000), the brand new black granite marker is still awaiting the names of Barren County's two dozen Viet Nam dead...
...made his own. There, all lives are dead ends, but the turnpikes go on forever. Springsteen certainly has mined this territory before, but he makes the repetition work for him: he can get the same sort of mythic resonance from this setting that John Ford took out of Monument Valley...
...please do not rely upon my opinion. It is unashamedly biased. Instead come along next spring when we shall offer the course again. Maybe then you can decide whether or not it is a "Monument to Futility". William H. Coaldrake Senior Teaching Fellow "Monuments of Japan...