The Vietnam War, Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine High School
shooting, and attacks of 9/11 all shattered myths of national
identity. Vietnam was a war the U.S. didn't win on the ground in
Asia or politically at home; Oklahoma City revealed domestic
terrorism in the heartland; Columbine debunked legends of high
school as an idyllic time; and 9/11 demonstrated U.S. vulnerability
to international terrorism. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was
intended to separate the victims from the war that caused their
death. This focus on individuals lost (evident in all the memorials
and museums discussed here) conflates the function of cemeteries,
where deaths are singular and grieving is personal, with that of
memorials - to remember and mourn communal losses and reflect on
national events seen in a larger context. Memorials to Shattered
Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 traces the evolution and consequences of
this new hybrid paradigm, which grants a heroic status to victims
and by extension to their families, thereby creating a class of
privileged participants in the permanent memorial process. It
argues against this practice, suggesting instead that victims'
families be charged with determining the nature of an interim
memorial, one that addresses their needs in the critical time
between the murder of their loved ones and the completion of the
permanent memorial. It also charges that the memorials discussed
here are variously based on strategies of diversion and denial that
direct our attention away from actual events, and reframe tragedy
as secular or religious triumph. Thus they basically camouflage
history. Seen as an aggregate, they define a nation of victims,
exactly the concept they and their accompanying celebratory
narratives were apparently created to obscure.
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