Sunday, September 27, 2009
Reflection: Splurging on big stone monuments
Why do we spend so much money on memorials when sometimes they don't evoke emotion? Well, doesn't it say something in itself that we spent so much money and time commemorating an event in history? Whether or not when someone looks at it and has a reaction, they are, in fact, looking at it. People know about the monuments and, generally, what they stand for. Even tourists who are so caught up with being in a new place, and just stand like dopes for a picture and then leave--they have to look back on those pictures, they have to explain what they stood in front of for someone else, they have to understand, somewhat, the significance. If there was no memorial at all, the opporunity to spread, even a hint of its importance, would not exist.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
I find this comment very interesting. I am wondering if you would think that a very cheap monument that did not truly show the significance of an event would be better than no monument at all? To me, I think that it would be better to have no monument. Personally, I think it would be better for people to forget that an event ever took place than to remember the event as something different than it actually was.
ReplyDeleteWell if you think about it, all monuments are prompting you to remember an event differently from how it actually happened..at least slightly. I mean, we're not going to glorify the moments in which we were at fault, or we didn't win. In a way, that's changing history, too. There's no way you can get all the information about an event into one monument.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, I have always thought that monuments are supposed to glorify individual people who have lost their lives or done something great, not to glorify the country. Of course, this doesn't always happen and many monuments are a form of propaganda, but idealistically, monuments should be for the people, not for the government or the country.
ReplyDeleteLooking at all of the monuments and memorials in DC, most of the famous ones on the Mall are for wars. Vietnam, Korea, WWI, WWII. Only one of those lists specific names. I don't think a memorial necessarily needs to be for a specific person. The wars themselves should not be forgotten either. We, as a nation, and therefore for the country, needs the monuments to remember what happened. Not just who was there.
ReplyDeleteI think that we should stone (publicly) people who do not have an emotional reaction to monuments. Clearly they are just seeing the monument to be seen and committing some kind of treason through their stoicism.
ReplyDelete