Other capitals celebrate the gloria and fortuna of victory. No Arch of Triumph here. True, in the last few decades the Mall has added Vietnam and Korean memorials. But these are hardly glorifications of battle. They are melancholy meditations upon wars of sorrow. The very newest addition, the World War II memorial, is jarring and deeply out of place precisely because its massive and pointless wreath-bearing Teutonic columns represent European triumphalism disfiguring the heart of a Mall heretofore dedicated to the power and glory of ideas.
But Washington has a second distinction, more subtle and even more telling about the nature of America: its many public statues to foreign liberators. I’m not talking about the statues of Churchill and Lafayette, great allies and participants in America’s own epic struggles against tyranny. Everybody celebrates friends. I’m talking about the liberators who had nothing to do with us. Walk a couple of blocks from Dupont Circle at the heart of commercial Washington, and you come upon a tiny plaza graced by Gandhi, with walking stick. And perhaps 100 yards from him, within shouting distance, stands Tomas Masaryk, the great Czech patriot and statesman.
Masaryk, in formal dress and aristocratic demeanor, has nothing in common with the robed, slightly bent Gandhi with whom he shares the street—except that they were both great liberators—and except that they are honored by Americans precisely for their devotion to freedom.
Farther up the avenue stands Robert Emmet, the Irish revolutionary, while one block to the west of Masaryk looms a massive monument to a Ukrainian poet and patriot, Taras Shevchenko. And then gracing the avenues near the Mall are the Americans: great statues to Central and South American liberators, not just Juárez and Bolívar but even the more obscure, such as General José Artigas, father of modern Uruguay.
Discount if you will (as fashionable anti-Americanism does) the Statue of Liberty as ostentatious self-advertising or perhaps a relic of an earlier, more pure America. But as you walk the streets of Washington, it is harder to discount America’s quiet homage to foreign liberators—statues built decades apart without self-consciousness and without any larger architectural (let alone political) plan. They have but one thing in common: They share America’s devotion to liberty. Liberty not just here but everywhere. Indeed, liberty for its own sake.
America has long proclaimed this principle, but in the post-9/11 era, it has pursued it with unusual zeal and determination. Much of the world hears America declare the spread of freedom the centerpiece of its foreign policy and insists nonetheless that America’s costly sacrifices in Iraq and even Afghanistan are nothing more than classic imperialism in search of dominion, oil, pipelines or whatever such commodity most devalues America’s exertions. The overwhelming majority of Americans refuse to believe that. Whatever their misgivings about the cost and wisdom of these wars, they know how deep and authentic is the American devotion to liberty.
Many around the world find such sentiments and the accompanying declarations hard to credit. Europeans, in particular, with their long tradition of realpolitik, cannot conceive of a Great Power actually believing such hopeless idealism.
The skepticism is misplaced. It is not just that brave American soldiers die to permit Iraqis and Afghans to vote for the first time in their lives. There is evidence closer to home and of older pedigree. The skeptics might take a stroll through America’s other great capital. Up New York’s Sixth Avenue with its series of seven sculptures to Latin American leaders, culminating at Central Park with magnificent statues of Bolívar, Martí and San Martín. To Washington Square Park, where they will find the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi, while his more republican counterpart, Mazzini, resides along West Drive not very far from Lajos Kossuth, now of Riverside Drive, hero of the Hungarian revolution of 1848.
This is not for show. It is from the heart, the heart of a people conceived in liberty and still believing in liberty. How can they not? It is written in stone all around them.
The Washington Post, November 25, 2005
HOLOCAUST MUSEUM
I have long been uneasy about the idea of a Holocaust museum in Washington. If there is be to a showcase of the Jewish experience in the heart of America, why must it be the Holocaust? Why should Jews, a people with such an epic tradition, present themselves to America solely as victims of the greatest crime in history? The Jew as victim: Is this really what we want the visitor from Montana, who may not have met a Jew in his life, to carry home with him?
It was with these reservations that I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that was dedicated yesterday in Washington. The museum changed my mind.
Beginning with James Freed’s severe, demanding building, it is a masterpiece. In the East Building of the National Gallery, the absence of right angles is a pleasant geometrical conceit; in the Holocaust Museum, the acute unforgiving angles, the sharp forced turns, are a powerful pedagogical device. This is the architecture of forced marches, of mechanized cruelty, of industrialized death. The building’s texture of raw steel and brick and granite gives the feel of a factory, but its calculated irrationalities—cracked lines, dead ends, blotted windows, narrowing staircases—imply a machinery of derangement.
The details of that derangement are the subject of the permanent exhibit, three harrowing floors that take you step by step from the rise of Hitler in 1933 through the destruction of European Jewry 12 years later. Long before you reach the ovens of Majdanek, the shoes of Auschwitz, you feel you have had enough. But there is no escape, until the liberation at the end of the three floors and the emergence into a Hall of Remembrance, a stark, sky-lit hexagon, a chamber of reflection after a journey through absolute evil.
I know more about the Holocaust than I want to. Here I learned even more. I had, for example, made errors of scale. The cattle cars packed with Jews headed for death—you walk through one that took the doomed to Treblinka—were much smaller than I had imagined; the gas chambers of Auschwitz—a huge diorama depicts the actual machinery of scientific mass murder—were much larger. These were not rooms of death. These were auditoria of death. They took hundreds, thousands at a time for asphyxiation. I had imagined dozens.
Yet one of the triumphs of the museum is that it rises above numbers. It contains, for example, a three-story tower of photographs taken over a half century by the Jewish inhabitants of the village of Ejszyszki. Pictures of ordinary, flourishing life: a jaunty skater, a naughty smoker, bathers, lovers, mothers, cantors. These are the faces of the Jews of Ejszyszki, 3,500 in 1939.
A brief notation nearly buried in the wall text informs the visitor what he had feared upon entering this gallery of vibrant life. That in two days, Sept. 25 and 26, 1941, the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators herded and shot the Jews of Ejszyszki, leaving it forever Judenrein.
We return to the perennial problem of Holocaust remembrance: presenting Jews as victims. Does the Holocaust Museum solve it? No. But with the success (if one is permitted to use such a word in such a context) of the museum—its fidelity, its subtlety, its power—the problem loses its urgency.
Yes, dwelling on the Holocaust has its price. But a museum so miraculously executed is worth the price. Yes, the Holocaust is but one part of the Jewish experience. But it is a monumental part, and perishable. As this generation passes, the memory of the Holocaust will fade. This museum—immovable, irrefutable—will do much to guard the memory.
And it will do so not just by what it says and how well it says it but where it says it. The Hall of Remembrance has at each of its six corners a narrow vertical window. Through one you can see the Washington Monument, through another the Jefferson Memorial. The juxtaposition is not just redemptive. It is reassuring. The angels of democracy stand watch on this temple of evil. It is as if only in the heart of the world’s most tolerant and most powerful democracy can such terrible testimony be safely contained. Only here will it remain secure and unmolested for the instruction of future generations.
Hitler boasted that his Reich would last 1,000 years. One has th
e feeling that in this building it will. One has the feeling that here the film (taken by the Nazis themselves) of the machine-gunning of the innocents of one Jewish town will run night and day until the end of time. Here, in such a building, in such a place, infamy will achieve the immortality to which it aspired.
Yes, there are Holocaust memorials in Poland and elsewhere. But these are not to be trusted. Who knows what Europe, birthplace of the Nazi plague, will one day say of or do with these monuments. There were anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland right after World War II, as if Hitler’s job needed finishing.
Yes, there is a memorial in Israel. One might say that Israel itself is a memorial to the Holocaust. But there will be those in generations to come who will not trust the testimony of Jews.
With this building, America bears witness. The liberators have returned to finish the job. First rescue, then remembrance. Bless them.
The Washington Post, April 23, 1993
SACRILEGE AT GROUND ZERO
A place is made sacred by a widespread belief that it was visited by the miraculous or the transcendent (Lourdes, the Temple Mount), by the presence there once of great nobility and sacrifice (Gettysburg), or by the blood of martyrs and the indescribable suffering of the innocent (Auschwitz).
When we speak of Ground Zero as hallowed ground, what we mean is that it belongs to those who suffered and died there—and that such ownership obliges us, the living, to preserve the dignity and memory of the place, never allowing it to be forgotten, trivialized or misappropriated.
That’s why Disney’s 1993 proposal to build an American history theme park near Manassas Battlefield was defeated by a broad coalition that feared vulgarization of the Civil War (and that was wiser than me; at the time I obtusely saw little harm in the venture). It’s why the commercial viewing tower built right on the border of Gettysburg was taken down by the Park Service. It’s why, while no one objects to Japanese cultural centers, the idea of putting one up at Pearl Harbor would be offensive.
And why Pope John Paul II ordered the Carmelite nuns to leave the convent they had established at Auschwitz. He was in no way devaluing their heartfelt mission to pray for the souls of the dead. He was teaching them a lesson in respect: This is not your place; it belongs to others. However pure your voice, better to let silence reign.
Even New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who denounced opponents of the proposed 15-story mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero as tramplers on religious freedom, asked the mosque organizers “to show some special sensitivity to the situation.” Yet, as columnist Rich Lowry pointedly noted, the government has no business telling churches how to conduct their business, shape their message or show “special sensitivity” to anyone about anything. Bloomberg was thereby inadvertently conceding the claim of those he excoriates for opposing the mosque, namely that Ground Zero is indeed unlike any other place and therefore unique criteria govern what can be done there.
Bloomberg’s implication is clear: If the proposed mosque were controlled by “insensitive” Islamist radicals either excusing or celebrating 9/11, he would not support its construction.
But then, why not? By the mayor’s own expansive view of religious freedom, by what right do we dictate the message of any mosque? Moreover, as a practical matter, there’s no guarantee that this couldn’t happen in the future. Religious institutions in this country are autonomous. Who is to say that the mosque won’t one day hire an Anwar al-Awlaki—spiritual mentor to the Fort Hood shooter and the Christmas Day bomber, and onetime imam at the Virginia mosque attended by two of the 9/11 terrorists?
An al-Awlaki preaching in Virginia is a security problem. An al-Awlaki preaching at Ground Zero is a sacrilege. Or would the mayor then step in—violating the same First Amendment he grandiosely pretends to protect from mosque opponents—and exercise a veto over the mosque’s clergy?
Location matters. Especially this location. Ground Zero is the site of the greatest mass murder in American history—perpetrated by Muslims of a particular Islamist orthodoxy in whose cause they died and in whose name they killed.
Of course that strain represents only a minority of Muslims. Islam is no more intrinsically Islamist than present-day Germany is Nazi—yet despite contemporary Germany’s innocence, no German of goodwill would even think of proposing a German cultural center at, say, Treblinka.
Which makes you wonder about the goodwill behind Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s proposal. This is a man who has called U.S. policy “an accessory to the crime” of 9/11 and, when recently asked whether Hamas is a terrorist organization, replied, “I’m not a politician.… The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.”
America is a free country where you can build whatever you want—but not anywhere. That’s why we have zoning laws. No liquor store near a school, no strip malls where they offend local sensibilities and, if your house doesn’t meet community architectural codes, you cannot build at all.
These restrictions are for reasons of aesthetics. Others are for more profound reasons of common decency and respect for the sacred. No commercial tower over Gettysburg, no convent at Auschwitz—and no mosque at Ground Zero.
Build it anywhere but there.
The governor of New York offered to help find land to build the mosque elsewhere. A mosque really seeking to build bridges, Rauf’s ostensible hope for the structure, would accept the offer.
The Washington Post, August 13, 2010
FDR: THE DIGNITY OF DENIAL
Even as President Clinton officially opened the Franklin Roosevelt memorial last Friday in Washington, the great controversy raged: The memorial contains no statue of FDR in a wheelchair. Should it?
The arguments pro and con are by now well known. One side points out that when a man has over 35,000 photographs taken of him and exactly two show him in a wheelchair, we can fairly conclude that he was intent upon concealing his disability. How odd, then, to honor a man by portraying him precisely opposite to the way he wanted to be seen.
The other side argues that Roosevelt was merely reflecting the prejudices of his time. He needed to hide his disability to achieve high office. Had he lived today, he would wear his wheels proudly.
However, the whole debate seems to miss the point. The very question of what Roosevelt would have wanted makes no sense. It depends on which Roosevelt. If the real Roosevelt, president of the United States, 1933–45, the answer is obvious: He would not—he did not—want his “splendid deception” undone.
And if by Roosevelt we mean Roosevelt today, i.e., a Roosevelt who had absorbed all the self-revelatory cultural conventions of our time, well then, of course he would bare everything. He would go on Oprah, indeed not just in a wheelchair but hand in hand with Lucy Mercer.
The point is not what some imaginary FDR would want, a question both indeterminate and unanswerable. The point is: Which of these competing ideals—the restraint and reticence of the historical FDR vs. the self-revelation and display of today’s politicians that we would impute to a contemporary FDR—do we want to honor in a great national monument?
I vote for reticence. The current statue—FDR in his wooden kitchen chair with casters, a great cape hiding the tiny wheels from all but the most observant visitor—captures perfectly Roosevelt’s cloaking of his disability. At a time when our politicians are “stricken with self-pity and given to sniveling” (to quote Mary McGrory), what a balm is Roosevelt’s attitude of defiant and dignified denial.
This is an age in which both the speaker of the House and the president of the United States cannot resist, in dramatic televised addresses, making pointed reference to their latest bereavement. This is an age in which the vice president, in consecutive convention speeches, makes lachrymose use, first, of a son’s accident, then of a sister’s death. (Noted one mordant wit: At this rate, his wife had better not walk near any plateglass windows.) In such an age, we can use the example of a man who through four presidential terms dealt with the agony of a nation while keeping his own agonies to
himself.
In an age in which every celebrity finds it necessary to bare his soul and open her closet, we need a monument to a man who would have disdained such displays. Why, even poor Bob Dole found himself going up and down America for months talking about how reluctant he was to talk about the war injuries he could not stop talking about.
Such is the style of the ’90s. Fine. But who dares argue that it can match Roosevelt’s for nobility? It is not just that we have no right to impose our sensibility on Roosevelt. We should be ashamed to.
Leave Roosevelt out of a wheelchair. But not by saying, condescendingly: Well, he lived in a benighted time; let’s make a concession to the attitudes he had to accommodate. After all, Roosevelt’s deception did not reflect the attitudes just of his constituents. It reflected his own attitude to his disability. It is not just that he never discussed his paralysis with the voters. He never discussed it with his mother.
The critics say that to fail to portray FDR in a wheelchair is to give in to his false—i.e., nonmodern—consciousness about disability. On the contrary. It is to celebrate his ethos of bold denial.
Denial is not in great favor today. It is considered unhealthy, an almost cowardly psychic constriction. The mantra today is that all must be dealt with, talked out, coped with, opened up, faced squarely.
This may work for some. But it has become something of a religion. And if its priests are so correct about the joys of catharsis and the perils of denial, how do they explain how the champion denier of our century, Franklin Roosevelt, lived such a splendid life?
Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics Page 20