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imaginary bell tolls.
    I might be wrong about these being bell towers. Maybe “Croquet Wickets de Triomphe” is the effect being sought. The two chapels—perhaps they’re stone gazebos—have bronze sculptures where their domes would be if they had domes. The sculptures, I believe, depict bald eagles getting tangled in Christmas wreaths. The gazebos are labeled “Atlantic” and “Pacific,” causing anyone remotely close to the age of a World War II vet to automatically think “Tea Company.” The fountain pools, though lacking fish, are very fish pond–like, and these, combined with an artificial waterfall, produce a miniature golf course foreground for the Lincoln Memorial. A Vegas touch is also provided in a wall of gold stars equaling (by some mathematical ratio that isn’t self-evident) thenumber of U.S. war dead. Elsewhere are scattered incised quotations of a barely stirring nature:
    Women who stepped up were measured as citizens of the nation, not as women. . . . This was a people’s war, and everyone was in it.
    â€”Col. Oveta Culp Hobby
    The American Battle Monuments Commission must have looked hard for that one. As to its being a “people’s war,” had previous wars been fought by furniture, toys, and pets?
    The World War II Memorial is entered from the east, down steps to the sunken plaza. Flanking the steps are haut-relief bronze panels sculpted in a style that could be called “accused-of-being-socialist realism.” They depict scenes from the Atlantic theater, on the right, and the Pacific theater, on the left. The Pacific tableaux begin with alarmed people listening to the radio (news from Pearl Harbor, one supposes) and end with V-J Day celebrations in Times Square. The Atlantic tableaux begin with an attempt at a visualization of the Lend-Lease Program and end with our GIs shaking hands with Soviets, smiles all around.
    This is not a fit monument to the American men who fought the war. But it isn’t meant for them, what with their being near eighty and dead and all. The Memorial is, rather, a sentimental gesture toward the whole “Greatest Generation,” about whom we are getting so sentimental now that we’ve put them in nursing homes.
    This
is
a fit monument to the American men, women, and politicians who endured a global depression only partly of their own making, struggled to free mankind from totalitarian oppression by fascists and communists (once they’dgotten over admiring the efficiencies of the former and being allies with the latter), and rebuilt the postwar world—with seven-foot ceilings and cheap hollow doors. We call them the Greatest Generation, and we call them other things when we’re stuck behind them in the ten-items-or-less grocery store checkout lane while they debate with the clerk about expiration dates on discount coupons for oleomargarine. Their World War II Memorial doesn’t quite ruin the Mall.
    I am reminded of the 1960s, when my own generation did a much more thoroughgoing job of ruining the Mall during various attempts to end war, expand cosmic consciousness, crush capitalist-pig imperialism, meet girls, and score pot. I can’t help wondering when we will get our monument.
    Technically, I suppose, the Vietnam Memorial counts. Vietnam veterans were for the most part born in the same years as my friends and I. But those were the kids who when somebody yelled “Get a haircut!” got a haircut—or, anyway, the Army gave them one free. What about
my
part of my generation? What about the Veterans of Domestic Disorders? I know Vietnam was a tough and terrifying experience. But you should have seen the fights around the dinner table at my house. Dad went ballistic when he discovered that I’d joined a commune that was living in the basement rec room. And when the cops broke out the tear gas at the anti-war demonstrations, my friends and I had to tap reserves of