BETTER LATE THAN never, the powers that be have decided there'll be a World War II memorial in Washington and they'll put it on the Mall with the others.
What's it going to look like? Nobody knows. But after commissions and advisory panels and rich contributors and members of Congress get through arguing, don't expect anything simple, like a sword-waving President Franklin D. Roosevelt on horseback.From what's been going on in recent years in design of Washington war memorials, the World War II memorial might become a new Disneyland.
If the World War II memorial is opened to the highest bidders and loudest persuaders, as some signs suggest, the memorial might be turned into a pageant, a theme park of favorite war stories, maybe with those little bumper cars taking visitors from episode to episode of revisionist history and a stirring message of some kind or another at the end.
What's clear even before the first demands have been issued that this or that or some other thing be included in the World War II memorial is that it's not going to be easy, not like the old lone soldier days or winged victory days or even the days of the starkly magnificent original statement of the Vietnam War Memorial.
That dark granite gash on the Washington Mall that silently protests the war and honors its dead, name by name, was dedicated in 1982 after long argument that never actually ended.
By 1984 critics of the memorial succeeded in adding to it what they said had been lacking: heroic and ethnically diverse statues of three infantrymen, weary, wary and beautifully rendered but obvious as tacked-on additions to the original design. More critics were heard from and in 1993 other statues, three women nursing Vietnam wounded and wary as the infantrymen, were added to what began to look like a Vietnam War Memorial complex, perhaps lacking only an aircraft carrier and a carload of generals.
But Vietnam and Korea were simple wars with simple memorials, remembrances of tragedy and triumph confined in small corners of the world, compared with the vastness of the arena and the catalog of awesome experience of World War II. To satisfy the war memorial traditionalists and the clear trend of wary infantrymen portrayed as statues, the World War II memorial might present FDR in a wartime Jeep - not on horseback - with room in the Jeep for a changing cast that would at least include Winston Churchill, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Gen. Charles DeGaulle, Chiang Kai-shek, Bob Hope and certainly the ubiquitous wartime Kilroy, all of them surrounded by 1,000 statues of wary infantrymen.
Lacking theme and diversity, you say? OK, put Eleanor Roosevelt in the lead sidecar of a multiethnic motorcycle escort and head the 1,000 infantry statues toward all the points of the globe as if to warily wage war and win the peace.
The point is not just the kookiness certain to erupt but that the design process for Washington war memorials has been opened to whoever's the loudest with the most clout. Another point is that contributions will be solicited to cover the estimated $100 million in costs for the World War II memorial, and big contributions from influential contributors can come with strings attached.