Absolute travesty
Have a barf bag handy. You have been warned.
The proposed $100 million national monument to Eisenhower will be used to promote one more "inversion of traditional hierarchies." How challenging and transgressive! Naturally, the proposal gets a rave review from the Washington Post's art critic who fairly chirps at the prospect, praising it for "de-emphasizing the 'masculine power' that has traditionally marred Washington’s memorial architecture" with a proposal that “has ‘re-gendered’ the vocabulary of memorialization, giving it new life and vitality...“The effect will be that of a giant stage set enveloping a relatively small representation of Eisenhower, yet another inversion of traditional hierarchies that suggests a powerful sense of the finitude of man and the vastness of history, nature, and fate.”
Little re-gendered Ike, made small by a powerful sense of human finitude in the face of the vastness of fate. Yes, no doubt that's the kind of man it took to command the European Theater of Operations in WWII, to run Operation Torch in North Africa and the invasion of Sicily, to be Supreme Allied Commander planning, organizing, and commanding the largest armada in all history in the cross-Channel invasion of Fortress Europe in Operation Overlord (D-Day), and to be Supreme Commander of NATO after the war. Sick.
Ferguson perfectly identifies the problem when he calls this fiasco "testimony to postmodernism’s ability to corrupt everything it touches." Just so.
Since what's proposed is much worse than no memorial at all, the far better alternative is to junk the whole thing. Or if it has to be built, remove all reference to Eisenhower, and make it a monument to Billy Elliot.
Byron
The proposed $100 million national monument to Eisenhower will be used to promote one more "inversion of traditional hierarchies." How challenging and transgressive! Naturally, the proposal gets a rave review from the Washington Post's art critic who fairly chirps at the prospect, praising it for "de-emphasizing the 'masculine power' that has traditionally marred Washington’s memorial architecture" with a proposal that “has ‘re-gendered’ the vocabulary of memorialization, giving it new life and vitality...“The effect will be that of a giant stage set enveloping a relatively small representation of Eisenhower, yet another inversion of traditional hierarchies that suggests a powerful sense of the finitude of man and the vastness of history, nature, and fate.”
Little re-gendered Ike, made small by a powerful sense of human finitude in the face of the vastness of fate. Yes, no doubt that's the kind of man it took to command the European Theater of Operations in WWII, to run Operation Torch in North Africa and the invasion of Sicily, to be Supreme Allied Commander planning, organizing, and commanding the largest armada in all history in the cross-Channel invasion of Fortress Europe in Operation Overlord (D-Day), and to be Supreme Commander of NATO after the war. Sick.
Ferguson perfectly identifies the problem when he calls this fiasco "testimony to postmodernism’s ability to corrupt everything it touches." Just so.
Since what's proposed is much worse than no memorial at all, the far better alternative is to junk the whole thing. Or if it has to be built, remove all reference to Eisenhower, and make it a monument to Billy Elliot.
Byron
posted by Byron | Sunday, March 04, 2012
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