Tired

I got up at 6:30 yesterday so I could take the 9am Chinatown bus to DC. It was not a pleasant day for travel, cold and raining. Also, the Chinatown bus was slightly skeevy and the guy drove like a maniac in the pouring rain and occasionally yelled for one of the passengers to come wipe condensation off the windshield as he veered around other cars. Megabus and Boltbus are infinitely nicer, but alas, from Philly they only go to New York, not DC.

The day was pretty nice, though. I spent a few hours in the mostly-empty National Gallery, and then I decided, despite the rain, that I would walk down to the Lincoln Memorial and see the WWII memorial, which was not there when I last went to see the monuments in 6th grade or so. I actually really liked it, despite having been slightly prejudiced against it by this speaker I heard this semester who compared it to the work of Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect, and pointed out that contrary to its name, it's a monument, not a memorial. And it's true: the Vietnam Memorial is just that, a testimony to the thousands of individuals who died, but the WWII memorial/monument is in every way larger and grander, fitting for the last war that we feel like we can be proud of.

However, even as I found myself very affecting by the entire setting, I was conscious that this, too, is a performance; not only are there are no good wars, but we tend to focus on our bravery and to deny our complicity in letting WWII and, with it, the Holocaust ,happen. We focus on the fact that it was our push starting in 1941 that brought the war to its conclusion, which is true; we had resources and manpower that the other Allies, after years of fighting, sorely lacked. But just because we stepped in (when forced, by Pearl Harbor, to do so) and helped carry the day doesn't erase the years we spent vacillating on the sidelines. Isolationist arguments aside, we knew what was happening in Europe, and the government knew what was happening to the Jews--maybe not the full grisly details, but Eleanor Roosevelt received visits from Jewish emigres who told the government what was happening to the ones left behind and implored the Americans to do something, and we didn't, not until we absolutely had to. And even in the end, while we memorialized the troops who lost their lives, we only lost around 400,000, or 0.32% of the population. The Soviets lost 23 million people. 13% of their population died. Yes, they originally sided with Hitler, and yes, 'communists, bad,' but they still faced a loss unlike that of any other nation; what's more, could we have won the war without the Russians fighting the Germans on the Eastern front? Perhaps, but it would have been longer, costlier, and far bloodier for the Allies.

Thus, while I found myself affected by the ideals of patriotism, unity under a just cause, and American exceptionalism that the monument presents as historical fact, I had to step back and remember that this is what propaganda does. Someone said in class a few weeks ago that we'd like to think of propaganda as 'what the other guy does' but it's not true; it's all around us, in the Lincoln Memorial as much as in the war memorials--the ideological myth-making of the American people.