Notes on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

A few weeks ago The New Republic posted a series of photographs documenting Glenn Beck’s "Restoring Honor" rally on the National Mall.  They're not particularly compelling; the stuff of typical snapshots. They bear only the documentary gesture of pointing: I was there, I took this photograph.  One of them, however, of a steady stream of visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM), struck me as particularly interesting. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise to see rally participants visiting the VVM. Since its dedication in 1982, Maya Lin’s memorial has become the most visited in Washington, DC, and is now considered the National Mall's very own sacred space.  It wasn’t always so, and the rhetoric employed by Beck and company is an affecting reminder of the mutability of space and of history. 

As Beck spoke about the “scars,” that will “crush us or redeem us,” he seemed to miss the irony of that particular metaphor for the seemingly reparative acts of Tea Party politics  (a point made by LA Times art critic Christopher Knight). Indeed, Beck extolling our ability to ignore the scar and see only “what it stands for” signalled a public act of forgetting of a kind the VVM was meant to prevent.  Lin had envisioned the VVM as a V-shaped gash in which two black granite walls, placed below grade, would meet at an apex signifying the chronological closure of the Vietnam conflict.  Lin: “I had an impulse to cut open the earth…an initial violence that in time would heal.”  The VVM is antiheroic, a trace of violence suffered, not victory brandished in a heroic cause. It was meant to materialize a shared wound that will never heal, a scar that will never fade. The wound it represents is the process of memory – but the visitors captured by TNR’s camera were, in essence, rewriting space and history by reinscribing American imperialism. In doing so, they resisted the very function of the VVM itself and the uncivil discourse into which it was born. 

When Lin’s design was first unveiled, critics condemned it for politicizing the shame of an unvictorious war.  They called it the “black gash of shame,” a “degrading ditch,” a “black spot in American history,” a “memorial for Jane Fonda,” and a “wailing wall for draft dodgers and New Lefters of the future.” The VVM’s design became a locus of political discord. Though six years had passed since the end of the war, a cohesive narrative had yet to emerge in which to frame the memorial and its expectations.  Thus, the VVM and Lin herself became the focus of widespread fears about the state of the nation and equally emotional narratives about social stability, civil unity, and national security.

The framing of the Vietnam conflict was important to Cold Warriors, and they did their best to undermine Lin and her design.  Pat Buchanan worked hard to derail the project. So did William F. Buckley Jr., Rep. Henry Hyde, Jim Webb and President Reagan himself (who refused to attend the dedication ceremony).  Each had his own reasons but all seemed to agree on one thing: the VVM should be an American monument - designed by an American, not a young Asian woman. Lin was born and raised in the US, but that part of her identity was swept under the rug in the effort to rejig America's post-Vietnam narrative.  Her design too was deemed foreign – Communist, Vietnamese, anti-heroic.  Though Lin endured jingoism and unwanted additions to her design, the monument was, of course, ultimately built, becoming a postscript of the narrative frame of the Vietnam conflict itself. 

I bring up the VVM because its creation story is similar in many ways to the current debate about Ground Zero. Marita Sturken, author of Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism From Oklahoma City to Ground Zero, suggested that Vietnam ruptured our perception of war.  Beck's rally, and similar incidents in New York, are desperate attempts to conceal and suture the rupture, and to redefine our engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Public art is inseparable from what Jügen Habermas called, “the liberal model of the public sphere” – an idealized space in which disinterested citizens could contemplate a transparent emblem of their own inclusiveness and deliberate on values.  It seems, however, that we are far from the Habermasian vision of a public sphere in which rational citizens can exchange ideas and come together in progressive actions.  Instead,"space" and "history" are highly contested terms and their frames seems especially marked by irrational appeal and affective investment.

Like the VVM, Ground Zero is a place in which space and construction are politicized because they are still symbolic, because we recognize that whatever is built on or around Ground Zero will be part and parcel of the future narrative of 9/11, foreign wars, and nationalism. It’s a narrative worth fighting over.