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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nihil who wrote (53239)	7/10/2000 6:08:23 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Maybe I am just selfish, because the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial are not abstract to me, they are something I can see whenever I want, and they are beautiful. Tomorrow I am going to the National Archives to research their collection on the Carlisle Indian School and see if I can find something about my great-grandmother. And some time this week I really need to go to the NIH library to do some medical research. Your tax dollars at work. Some time if you ever get out this way, I'll chauffeur you around and we can take in the sights. I haven't been inside the White House or the Capitol yet. The Rotunda of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress is incredible, I think you'll like it. We can take a trip to the National Archives and look at the Constitution, too. I think you'd probably want to make sure you saw the Sackler gallery, you like Asian art, I bet. Your tax dollars at work.

To: nihil who wrote (53239)	7/10/2000 10:20:10 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

Things like memorials should be built from pennies from school children and car washing parties. They should reflect the pride and gratitude of the people for our heroes and warriors. Sounds sensible to me, the car-washing parties. But isn't it sorta the opposite of this: They should be mostly paid for by draft dodgers IMO. They should be built voluntarily from our surplus, rather than money diverted from our security or taxes extorted from our citizens. Substitute "conscientious objectors" or "pacifists" for your words, "draft dodgers," and I think you'll see the irony in your declarations that "things like memorials" should be "built voluntarily" -- and that they should, btw, be mostly paid for by money extorted from those who most strenuously object to war and to monuments to its glories. Those whom you call "draft dodgers" would argue strenuously, I am certain, that such monuments serve not only as expressions of grief for the dead, but also as war-sentimentalizing machines of propaganda, concentrating as they do on the heroicisms of war rather than on its inevitable (supernumerary) tragedies and evils or on the strategic and intellectual failures that have eventuated in that primitive exercise. FYI, I am not now nor have I ever been a pacifist. Take the brilliantly designed, deeply affecting, Vietnam memorial. Which I think must, for the emotion it arouses, and the painful specificity of those it honors, be the most successful, most poetically beautiful, war memorial ever conceived. Though it makes me cry -- even a picture of it on TV makes me cry -- something in me is shamed by the absence of any reference there to the Vietnamese dead (there were so very many more of them, and they were so small, and so undernourished, and fought so bravely, in their bare feet, against our great might.) All I'm saying is, I feel, in my heart, a sordidness and blindness and manipulativeness hovering about every war memorial I've ever seen. Even that most moving, most magnificent one that honors the dead warriors, as you call soldiers, of Vietnam. The American ones. I'd like to have a car washing party for a monument to dead limbs, too! Maybe just the ones blown off by our land mines! Maybe just those blown off since the war was over! Wars are so much more complicated than monuments make them seem to the impressionable and the sentimental, aren't they? Here one can clear a few land mines for a free click: clearlandmines.com