The Vietnam Memorial in DC is the only decent war memorial I’ve ever seen, in that it stunningly and movingly commemorates the dead without glorifying the war. People flock to it every day, unlike, for example, the gigantic and Mussolini-like WWII Memorial that is nearby. Twenty-five years ago, the neocons villified the design and the designer for not heralding war. The Wall Street Journal called it a “black slash in the earth” and Congress added a banal happy-to-be-killed soldiers statue, which doesn’t, thank goodness, spoil the design. The brilliant young architech Maya Lin, whose design was unanimously chosen by a … Continue reading The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Is 25