Ghosts and Memorials
A weekend in our nation’s capital has left me wondering about our national identity. It s a grim place, Washington D.C. It’s a city filled with people from everywhere, which lends it a sense of being absolutely nowhere at all. Ask people on the street for directions and you might get a hit by inquiry number four. (“Excuse me, which way is the White House?” “Oh. Ummm. I’m not from around here.”)
The big draws in D.C. are things made of stone, most of it white marble. The buildings are massive and undoubtedly impressive: the Library of Congress, the Senate, The Auxiliary Office of Support Staff. Only the Red Cross looks shabby and utilitarian, stripped bare and ready for service. The tallest, and therefore most eye catching structure, is the Washington Monument, a ridiculously huge phallic tower jutting skyward for no apparent reason (because we could – which is reason enough for anything in D.C.) Then there are several memorials to lost soldiers reminding us of the tens of thousands that are dead, and more to come. Marble statesmen are tucked into corners at the National Cathedral, the quote above Lincoln’s head, for instance, waxing eloquently not about God, or faith and politics, but about state pride. A short distance away lays the tomb for the unknown solider and many other markers, orderly and named at Arlington National Cemetery. One can not help but be reminded of neatly tilled corn fields. Here, we plant our dead.
As Jen and I drove across the bridge spanning the Potomac, I felt myself cowering under the gaze of two giant equestrian figures, both with goddesses at their sides. They were guardians at the gate, gold and shinning in the moonlight.
This place is haunted. It’s all memorials and ghosts.
Every monument here has to do with death and the dead. It stuns me that this is what we choose to highlight at our nation’s center. This is what we present to our children, pouring out of the school tour busses. This is what we show our guests from distant shores. We came. We saw. We conquered. I feel like I’m at some horrible high school football match, only with much higher stakes.
Where is the multi-cultural center celebrating the ethnic immigrants who have occupied this land? We could have a daily party here–a world of dance and song, art and drama, food and wine, religion and customs. Where’s the place where the people can reach out and touch the cool walls of the White House – the “people’s house”—and understand true democracy? Where is the joy and wonder of diversity and discovery? Of years lived on peaceful shores?
We’ve buried it under massive pedestals, weighted it down by dead generals.
Jen and I stand in front of the White House. We are as close as we can get–which is yards and yards away, across a wide swath of lawn. Families take digital photos between the iron bars of the dark fence. A security guard doubles as a tour guide. Snipers pace the roof. I’ve asked to come here. I want to honor the sadness I feel, to lean into reality. But now that I’m here I feel the complexity of the situation, the enormity of the tasks at hand. It feels…inextricable, this stew of beauty and sorrow, power and impotence. Jen and I have brought a book of poems against the war, but it stays in her bag. The place is just too big; the volume of white marble is too overwhelming.
“We should add a memorial,” I suggest. “One for all the people we’ve killed on their own soil.” Jen says we should make it out of pennies. Stacks and stacks of pennies on one of our manicured memorial lawns. One penny for each dead Vietnamese villager. One for each Korean son. One for each Iraqi, Irani, Afghanistani. One for each citizen unknown. Stack of pennies on the White House lawn.
When people talk about war
I vow with all beings
To raise my voice in the chorus
And speak of original peace.
-Robert Aitkens
On Monday of this week, I went to chair a meeting in Westminster – right at the governmental centre of London. The emphasis in Parliament Square is upon politicians rather than dead war heroes. I wonder which is worse! I walked past the gates of Parliament, with Big Ben towering over. And then to my right, immediately outside the entrance to the Houses of Parliament, where Tony Blair drives in every day, I saw again the rag-tag protest against the war in Iraq, with placards facing the cars as they drive out of the building. This man is Brian Haw (http://www.parliament-square.org.uk/), a Christian, who has been protesting here 24/7 since June 2001, first about the West’s sanctions against Iraq, then about the war and its after-effects. He’s become a national institution. The Government hate him being there, but under present law cannot do anything about it. There have been mutterings about making his protest illegal, but the right to protest in Parliament Square is held dearly in Britain. Brian holds a weekly prayer meeting on Parliament Square (‘for all faiths and none’). Whenever anyone gets a chance to visit London, Brian’s protest, right outside the main gates of the House of Commons, is a must see. The main war memorial in London is the Cenotaph, which is located in Whitehall. It’s a simple stone block in the middle of the road. There is some distinction, therefore, between the places of government and the remembrance of the fallen. Here in UK, the fallen soldiers tend to be remembered together, rather than at separate memorials for separate campaigns. This has been so since the First World War. I think, perhaps, it’s because the ‘war dead’ in Europe are not just combatants, but citizens who died in the bombings and shellings of two world wars. They are all around us. The soldiers are just one part of the remembrance.
I used to love the openness of D.C. - I would go and read or nap on the Capitol grounds, and bike past the White House on my way to school. (I lived there from 1994-1998). It actually improved my sense of citizenship as I saw democracy modeled in physical space and participated in it. I visited after September 11, and things are so clamped down, patrolled, and militarized. It felt like we were part of a war…and the militarized nationalism inscribed in monuments predicts that we would be the ones to start such a war.
Rachelle, this post is so beautifully you, deep and full of passion and care. Most of the time the problems in the world are just too, too much for me to wrap my mind around so I stay home in my little safe space and pray about small things… one child that has been kidnapped or hurt, one woman who has been abused, one man lost in the confusion of life, one village who is tortured.. anymore than that and I become overwhelmed with it all.
Just so funny to me to read this now… as I’m spending a few days in Seattle and having a real inner battle over the ease of this city (though fo course, I love it….)
DC is a battleground. That’s what it always feels like to me- just tons of tension pulling in every direction. There’s a real weight to it- like if you saw it on one of those maps that show geography, the lines would all be so close together because the tension just pulls it down, down, down.
As I drive through these looming evergreens here and breath deep the northwestern pure, gray air- i wonder which city lives in me- neither one feels like my home- i feel like such an outsider.
sorry for the purely self-centric post. just reading a seattlite in DC is so intereesting to me as I now struggle in Seattle for a few days.
April,
So good to have you “home.” Do call or drop by if you have the space.
Shalom,
Rachelle