“You can hear the Wall crying.”
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
Guernica screeches, screams, and wails. Two artistic masterpieces – “Guernica” & “The Wall” – in the pantheon of great art. Both almost too large to take in. War memorials like no others. Unflinchingly and uncompromisingly honest. Unsentimental. No glory. No flag waving rah-rahs. Weeping is the only authentic human response to these two works. Remembrance.
Works that should have, but didn’t, bookend the horrors of the mid-twentieth century wars. Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Hanoi were embedded in “Guernica.” The Wall evokes and stands for
Where Have All The Soldiers Gone.
The morning after the initiation of “Shock & Awe,” my male co-workers gathered to talk about the awesomeness of US bombs. They were gloating over the US military might. I was on the ground in Guernica. I interrupted their armchair warmongering with, “You do know that those bombs are being dropped on people, innocent people, don’t you?” But, but – Saddam, WMD, 9/11. “So, killing innocent people that had nothing to do with 9/11, nor did Saddam, and for non-existent WMD is justified?” – They’ll find the WMD, just you wait. – “Those innocent dead people will remain dead when no WMD turn up. Shame on you for cheering on the killing of innocent people. And you all call yourselves Christians? Shame on you.”
(Didn’t win a popularity contest that day.)
After over a dozen years, the 9/11 (war memorial) museum opened last week. The (gauche) elites gathered to imbibe in gourmet hors d’oevres and wine and cocktails (and to be seen) as they inaugurated the opening. Some viewed the behavior of those elites as a desecration of sacred ground. The WTC sites are no more sacred than all the countless grounds on which peoples have died in wars that have been built over in the past century and centuries. The desecration is the museum itself with its ticket price, $300,000/year director, and gift shop selling (made in China?) trinkets. A plaque, a fountain, inscribed benches in memory of those that died that day should have sufficed. They died in response to US rapacious capitalism and are honored with a theme park, sponsored by plutocrats, admission prices, and overpriced souvenirs?
Many years ago in Dallas and with a few hours to kill, I visited the old JFK assassination museum. It was cheesy and uninformative. However, it was at least free. That visit left me with no interest or desire to traipse through late 20th century Presidential libraries or any disaster site (not that some shouldn’t be maintained). Memory facilitated by great art is the highest of all memorials. They are the ones that live and breathe like human beings as they should. Otherwise it’s just some pedestrian dead statue for pigeons to shit on.
“Guernica” and “The Wall” taught me why the proposals to bomb and invade Afghanistan and Iraq were very bad ideas. The millions of dead people and destroyed countries for what? To further enrich western oil oligarchs and plutocrats? Wall Street? Shame on US.
In memory forty-five years on for Jimmy (“the one and only”) and Billy (who made us laugh):
and the millions of Vietnamese: Memorial by Michael Nyman.
