There’s a new monument in Washington, D.C. honoring the
Japanese-Americans who were wrongfully interned during the Second World War, as
well as those who fought in the United States armed forces. Well, why not? It
is the height of fashion to make much of the mistakes-even the crimes-of the
past, and there is no doubt that many years ago, Japanese-Americans got the
feces-dipped end of the stick.
The events commemorated by this cenotaph took place so long
ago that few of those thus wronged can still be among us-yet if it brings them
a measure of solace, so be it. But a small mouse by the side of my computer
suggests that this may be another of those acts of resentment by which the past
is used to put a sharp elbow into the ribs of the living, in this case the
dreaded white male hegemon. Perhaps non-Japanese-Americans might attempt to
shame the Japanese government into putting up a marker of some kind
commemorating the objects of Japanese atrocities way back then.
In no time at all, this kind of thing could get seriously
out of hand. Every group, every religion and every nationality can look back to
a moment when terrible crimes were done to it, and each one does therefore have
some claim (albeit somewhat exiguous) to raise a shaft in memoriam. In a short
time, Washington-which is already halfway there-will come to resemble a
cemetery. But it won’t be a cemetery, exactly: It will be a garden of grudges,
a place where some of the most fortunate people in history can buff and polish
the mask of anger at brutalities inflicted on their forefathers and
foremothers.
Recently, another group has come forward with the proposal
that a monument be erected marking the life and accomplishments of John Adams,
the second President of the United States. Evidently, the backers of this project
believe that two centuries of statuelessness is long enough for Mr. Adams.
Conversely, though, it could be asked why, if he’s gotten along for 200 years
without cluttering the streets of the District of Columbia with his visage, he
has to pop up now? Of course, he was a grumpy sort, and it’s possible his
discontented spirit-Adams lost his bid for reelection-has been troubling the
worthies pushing the statue idea.
As far as I can judge, the proponents are the most WASP-y of
WASP’s, or people of a not-quite-WASP ancestry who have bought the whole WASP
trip, right down to the brogans and uneven hems affected by high WASP ladies of
the New England sort. This faction has a reverence for works like The Federalist Papers and Alexis de
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
They will beat any passerby within the length of their umbrellas over the head
with stuffy talk about civil society and their other clubby ideals. What would
the lowering Henry Adams-John’s great-grandson-make of the gabble issuing from
these portly minds? Would he say his blessed relative was already in the
pantheon? Would he speculate that this recent gusher of talk and public
genuflection in front of the Holy Founding Fathers is a frightened reaction to
the vast number of immigrants that have come into the United States in the last
20 years? Not only are many without fluency in English but-though they arrive,
for the most part, from nations run by tyrants, extortionists and murderers-few
are political refugees. Most, it would seem, are here for the American Dream,
which is a fancy-falutin’ word for a greedy urge to acquire that with which
Wal-Mart bulges.
The Adamsonians’ tactic is to populate the nation’s capital
city with gigantic idols bearing what purports to be the faces of the Holy
Founding Fathers and, in so doing, overawe the burping, farting multitudes as
they make their way out of the fast-food franchises to meander, stiff-necked,
amid the marble. In this way the grasping, yapping, oh-too-numerous recent
arrivals will be socialized and find their respectful place, not in the
American Dream, but in the American Order.
When it comes to erecting shafts and markers, Holocaust
remembrance is fast becoming a veritable industry. At the rate we’re going, we
may live to see the day that every principal city on the globe has a Holocaust
museum or at least a piece of statuary. What all of this is about, however, is
not so easy to pin down. Is it to spur the hunt for Nazi war criminals and
genocidists? The last crime against humanity committed by a Nazi cannot have
taken place less than 56 years ago-that is, before most of the people currently
alive were born. He who committed that last crime must at least be in his late
70’s, and if he was a person of any rank at the time, he’d have to be in his
80’s or 90’s-thus it is safe to presume that few Nazis are left to be ferreted
out and brought to the bar of justice.
One would hate to think that the United States Holocaust
Remembrance Museum is meant to make us feel vaguely guilty-and, therefore, less
likely to question some of the U.S. government’s policies in the Middle
East-but the thought does occur. Or is the purpose of the Holocaust Museum to
somehow ensure that the crimes of the Nazis are never repeated? If the
prevention of new holocausts is the purpose, they might consider closing the
place. When I went on the museum’s Web site, I could find only one significant
reference to the Rwandan genocide, and that was to Philip Gourevitch’s book, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will
Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda .
One of the drawbacks to physical memorials is that people
get used to them. So we have grown accustomed to the photographs: the
stripe-clad shapes with the Käthe Kollwitz eyes staring through the barbed
wire, the hills of naked corpses. We have gotten used to knowing these things
were done once a long time ago. We grew up with these images. Much good it has
done.
Let there be fresh images for fresh crimes, and not in
marble on the Mall. This scene is printed in Linda Melvern’s book, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in
Rwanda’s Genocide : “Jean de Dieu, 11, was curled up, a ball of flesh and
blood, the look in his eyes was a glance from nowhere … without vision;
Marie-Ange, aged nine, was propped up against a tree trunk … her legs apart,
and she was covered in excrement, sperm and blood … in her mouth was a penis,
cut with a machete, that of her father … nearby in a ditch with stinking
were four bodies, cut up, piled up, their parents and older brothers.”
The Rwandan holocaust has been portrayed in the papers and
on television as tribes, tribal, ancient grudges, hatred beyond the ken of the
modern American brain. Hence, the tribal dispensation is invoked. It stipulates
that murders and atrocities committed by people classified as
“primitive”-although you may only utter the word on pain of losing your P.C.
soul-don’t count. In fact, there was nothing remotely tribal about the Rwandan
holocaust. It was Hitlerian-that is, it was planned with a thoroughness the
Nazis would have admired. Reports have it that, armed with guns and weapons
sold to them by Belgian and French interests with complicitous foreknowledge,
the Hutu faction, organized to the nines, fell on the Tutsis and exterminated
them with the same fine precision of the German death camps-but, if this is
possible, with perhaps more cruelty.
Since these terrible things were done not 60 years ago, but
six or seven, the men and women who did them are still alive and there for the
catching. Instead of congratulating ourselves on having such splendid
ancestors, the time and money might be better spent (by that portion of the
world which styles itself “civilized”) in apprehending the killers. Since the
United States and Europe can buy Milosevic from the Yugoslavs for a billion
dollars, we should be able to get carloads of murderers from
even-more-impoverished Africans for half the price. To bring the French and
Belgians involved to the bar of justice, however, may cost a good deal more.
As for the statues, memorials and museums: Aesthetics aside,
they are each of them unobjectionable-but taken together, they are turning
Washington into a mortuary garden. The grumpy epigones of bygone times and
people, in putting up their temples of ancestor worship, are turning Washington
into a backward-regarding city of whited sepulchers and bleached statuary, a
place of tombs and whispers of the dead.