I suppose there has always been a large component of ticket-balancing-type politics in our choice and placement of memorial statues, fountains, stone inscriptions and the rest: your guy gets depicted in bronze outside the library; my guy must have precisely equal treatment outside the county courthouse. But now the balancing and propitiating of contending parties has become much more intense, reflecting the heightened group politics of the day. Memorials in Washington have become like cabinet agencies in this respect: often there is no reason whatever to create a whole cabinet-level department devoted to some concern (and much managerial reason not to); but failure to give over a building and secretaryship to, say, commerce or labor or transportation or education or energy is interpreted as not caring about the subject. Thus cabinet departments can become mainly earnests of the presiding political establishment’s ““concern,’’ even if they make no practical, flow-chart sense. The same is often true of the monument-building and memorializing impulse: the point is not so much to commemorate an event or a victim or a hero as to show what a responsive bunch we are and to appease whatever group is most clamorous at the moment.
These feelings lie behind much of the argument over the siting and size and engraved text of these monuments. People are trying to re-create the good guys of the past in their own image. The analogy in the news media is the endless stream of anniversaries we observe. Much of anniversary journalism is simply opportunistic and ridiculous: the noting of the anniversary of this or that because there seemed to be nothing else to write that day. Sometimes it is undertaken for no other reason than that some portion of our readers or viewers will feel affronted if a minor anniversary or holiday important to them is not noted by us. But often it seems to serve the same purpose as memorial-building does for some: it provides a chance to make a little political or personal public-relations hay. It is not about remembering others. It is about promoting or vindicating oneself against some historical backdrop. Surely some part of the 25th-anniversary yak-yak about the Watergate events, for instance, was that.
In truth, it is memorials to ourselves that we often seem most intent on building in Washington these days. By that I mean people don’t just exploit the transcendent or calamitous moments in our shared history to advance their own transient, small-bore political ambitions. They exploit them along with everything else they can think of to create their own future memorials, to determine the way they will be remembered by posterity. This heightened concern with how we will be remembered has become a near obsession. I’m not referring just to Bill Clinton’s well-known preoccupation with the nature of the reputation that awaits him or to Newt Gingrich’s startlingly similar penchant (he reportedly likened his stewardship of the House Republicans to General Washington’s stewardship of the revolutionary armies a short while ago). The impulse is much more widespread than that. Large numbers of our politicians and journalists and many others have taken to trying to pre-empt posterity’s role in defining them. We bury stuff in indestructible casings and record stuff and tell those people who will turn up decades after we have gone not just what we did, but what they are supposed to think of what we did, how much they are meant to admire us.
It isn’t vain so much, I think, as pathetic. That is because if we know anything, it is that the generations make their own judgments about what went on in the past, and these judgments rarely reflect what people at the time thought they would. We have gotten awfully good at spinning each other, but we probably can’t spin history, no matter what we do. I thought of this while the Watergate 25th-anniversary talk was at its height. Not everyone, but practically everyone, was grinding some ax, defending some action, promoting some interest in relation to it.
An odd but telling little news item went by without much reaction in the midst of these commemorations. In The Washington Post, a reporter who had been listening to recently released Nixon tapes from the archives quoted Nixon’s reaction in 1972 to the news that his political rival George Wallace had been shot and severely wounded and that the gunman, about whom little was as yet known, had been apprehended. Nixon encouraged his aides to see if they could covertly break into the suspect’s apartment and strew it with McGovern literature so it would look as if this would-be assassin were a Democratic partisan.
The president of the United States did this - the man who would be responsible for the federal agencies investigating the heinous criminal act. In effect, he authorized tampering with the evidence and jeopardizing the case to win a political, public-relations point. There was a time when that would have shocked us. It was ho-hum by 1997. We’d heard so much of this kind of thing since then, so much of people in responsible positions sacrificing every kind of principle and standard at the shrine of temporary personal advantage. My guess is that the political and cultural trends that brought us to this point of indifference are what future generations will remember about us - not all our talk about how swell we are (and compassionate!) or our posed pictures in front of all the monuments we have caused to be built. The thing about memorials is this: you don’t get to build your own.
