WASHINGTON DC- Who knew it wasn’t just the Vietnam War veterans who had misgivings about Maya Lin’s design for a memorial? Fair enough it doesn’t celebrate the achievements of our armies. This peripheral statue offers the more conventional bronze tribute. It depicts as addendum, three survivors emerging from the woods, disheveled and still brandishing assault rifles. They appear to regard the wall and its visitors with wariness. I recognize the faces now, they are the chicken hawks who didn’t go, but still want to wage war, and had to figure out how to get America over that wall.
Nearby, the WWII memorial celebrates the victors more than it commemorates the dead, it’s fashioned like a stone coliseum, as might have been fashioned by the world champion rooster after an undefeated string of cockfights.
The statue was added in as part of a tantrum by H. Ross Perot.
The contest for the memorial design was run by rules he set, almost fair since he was providing the financial backing
Sort of, because then he got his money back by writing it off on his taxes as a “charitable contribution” so basically the American Public paid for it anyway.
The Wall was chosen by votes from actual veterans, then Mr Perot, once it was “set in stone” so to speak, found out the artist who designed it was of Chinese descent and he “just wasn’t about to fund no project designed by no fookin’ gook”
Cultural Purist bigotry and racism on his part,
The rules for the contest were simple, direct and a regular contract, but you notice, when the Contract runs contrary to the irreligious, amoral and pseudo-patriotic sentiments of one of the signatories, H. Ross Perot suddenly finds himself to be Above The Laws regarding contracts.
He was such a crybaby about it that they put the statue in just to shut him the hell up.
Pretty bad since every contract he ever had that made money for himself and his companies were PUBLICLY FUNDED.
The company E.D.S., built entirely on public funds and then “sold” to his Country Club buddies, (so he doesn’t “officially” run it anymore”) was given a No-Bid contract by former Governor and Eternal Drinking Buddy Bill Owens to “upgrade” the Dept. of Human Services computer system…
So the leopard has never changed his spots.
Nor, it seems, have any of his own personal Axis of Evil “friends”.
Did you notice, there’s no flowers or dogtags or people praying in front of the statue, and, As Far As I Know, nobody has gone to The Statue, caressed the name of a friend and while looking into the eyes of The Statue, committed suicide.
On the other hand, the Wall…
In the picture nobody is actually looking at The Statue.
It’s kind of like the metaphor “voting with their feet”
When it comes to paying homage to the ugly mess that was Viet Nam perhaps a little abstraction is a necessary comfort. Statued thugs emerging from a jungle, smelling of napalm and the blood of innocent women and children, renders plastic flowers and be-flagged teddy bears an even more sickening spectacle.
Maya Lin understood her task. Ross Perot is a twit.
The Wall was described as “looking like a tombstone” and, yeah, it is.
Here’s to “no need for any more Walls”.
What hits me about it, and I’ve never even been there…
It’s got a shine to it, like an ebony mirror, so when you look at a name, you see your own face framed by that name, and reflected back in the darkest of tones.
Awesome in other words.
Maybe that’s the answer for Peace, looking up and knowing, hey, that could just as easily be ME on that list.
I was there saturday for the pentagon march…I didnt visit anything.. just stayed in the park and worked my feet off.
My first time in DC
Had I known the V.M. wall was so close to where we were, I would have went to it.
There was a version of the same concept we did at Camp Casey-C.S.
With crosses, hung up on a wire frame, with the names of the American dead on them. There were 2000+ of them, and we were behind on the number.
That was 3 and a half years and 2400 dead ago.
Some of the returning vets would come every day… not usually the same ones every day.
Some people who were families of the “names on the crosses” who used to be, like Casey, live people..
came from other parts of the country to see it.
I talked to some fellow Texans, had come up from the Austin area just to see their brother’s name remembered.
Then we had the Bu’ush Regime supporters who thought that we were just “hiding behind the memory of the dead” to protest the Invasion and Occupation they themselves started…
As though WE were the ones waving the Bloody Shirt.
They usually didn’t stop, just did drive by insults from, as the hip-hop song about “Scrubs” said, “leaning out the passenger side of your best friend’s ride”.
And equally anonymous drive-by sniping on the editorials of the “local” Corporate Media.
If people would look closer they would see what this statue REALLY represents…Civil Rights in America! The three young men are Latino (Cuban to be specific), White, and Black. Not many people know much about the heroic battles fought by non-white men in the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and Korea, nor are there many (if any) statues that honored them before THIS statue. It showcases the war they fought in Vietnam AND at home. With the three of them exhausted from fighting for reasons they don’t know about (also in Vietnam and at home against one another) they have their heads UP, not down, looking just above the Vietnam Wall knowing that they have horrible obstacles to overcome, but they will do it together.
‘There is about them the physical contact and sense of unity that bespeaks the bonds of love and sacrifice that is the nature of men at war’
Yeah right, Brad. Whatever they say? I don’t buy it though.
Who are the terrorists ?
CIA USA ,,, CIA USA ,,, CIA USA, this was the slogan that the protests were chanting years ago. America is involved countless terror activities via its criminal espionage agency CIA in additional to various means thats including puppets regimes. In recent move into same terror-ism activities, America represent real danger on the world safety, is propelling another puppet regime of the south Korea into staging a tension on the region.
“The south Korean military warmongers has been busy with madcap large-scale air battle ex-ercises with U.S. forces in the air over the western part of the Korean Peninsula since October 15”
“exercises with the U.S. imperialists right after their provocative PSI exercises came to a clo-se. This is an intolerable provocation to the DPRK and a blatant challenge to the desire of the Koreans to see the inter-Korean relations improved and the need of the times.”
“The puppet military is spearheading the exercises now under way in the air over the western part of the Korean Peninsula with combined air forces of south Korea and the U.S. involved. Herein lies a dangerous military purpose”
Reference”
US and S. Korean Warmongers’ Joint Air Battle Exercises Flayed
http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201010/news19/20101019-05ee.html
Renewed American Threats: Building a Pretext to Wage War on North Korea?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20227
Secrets of the CIA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QYZBMIBOck
Secrets of The CIA – Iraq
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=803apgVhMDQ