The Memorial Problem
Political correctness erases achievement, sacrifice, and suffering from our memorials by subordinating truth to pandering. In an attempt to satisfy all groups and points of view, fact and meaning are lost in vague, noncommittal monuments such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington D.C. (2011). In examples like this one, honor that would have been created by the representation of achievement becomes a casualty of the desire to take a broad, encompassing and inclusive view, and the wide perspective assumed by the monument ultimately blurs King’s role in ending segregation. Fifteen vague quotations on a range of subjects carefully avoid direct reference to civil rights or segregation, shifting the focus of the monument to King’s interest in global human rights, rather than his actual achievements in the South. Honor is also lost when images of sacrifice are minimized in a fruitless bid to include everyone, as in the World War II Memorial (2004) on the National Mall. Taking the contribution of an entire generation and nation as its theme, the monument all but erases representations of violence, shrinking the traditional focus on combat and sacrifice and ceding most of the space to 56 pillars symbolizing the states and territories during the war. In twenty-four sculpted panels designed to show the war effort at home and abroad, only three dead bodies are pictured, a remarkable feat of imagination considering that more than 400,000 American men perished in the conflict—the bloodiest in human history. Minimization of the highest sacrifices steals honor from those most needful of it, handing it instead to arbitrary role groups. The same censoriousness is also on display in our memorials to victims of terror and genocide wherever the evil, injury, and death that are a part of suffering are whitewashed for the sake of trigger avoidance and a preference for the superficially therapeutic.
Since impartiality and symmetry (what is due) are key to just outcomes, political correctness is inherently unjust, both biased and disproportionate. Its attempt to secure equal results is based on the unknowable and unmeasurable: which race, gender, class, or orientation has suffered the most. It is biased in a way that it can never justify, which is itself discrimination. Far from creating a landscape of equality, political correctness inescapably prefers some groups and worldviews to others, pitting black against white, woman against man, queer against straight in an endless dehumanizing contest. Jettisoning values of proportionality and historical truth in our memorials, this oppressive legalism raises American heroes to life in granite and bronze only to darken them in mystery.
The transformation is costly because public memorials provide a unique and faceted form of justice not replaceable by the popular formal apology used in justice initiatives. Monuments are primarily instruments of justice enacting both honor and avowal, with lessons for posterity. This moral function is evinced by a universal feeling of obligation to commemorate and remember, even at great financial cost. Yet, as Washington D.C. becomes a graveyard of monuments to every race, gender, and accomplishment, justice is increasingly absent.
Great American monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial, the National WWI Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Indianapolis Soldiers and Sailor’s Monument, provide a blueprint for justice, raising up vivid, moving, and succinct stories of sacrifice, achievement, character, and suffering.
For more see:
https://www.nps.gov/linc/learn/historyculture/murals.htm
https://www.nps.gov/mlkm/learn/quotations.htm
https://www.nps.gov/articles/ww2memorialguide.htm
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-great-frieze-edmond-amateis/_AGPMSL2Dqy3UQ?hl=en
Photo by Daniel Narsco