Not so much Understated, but the Most Understood Monument

Theodore Roszak, that intelligent, successful, neo-fascistic Greennik, wrote the following perceptive commentary concerning the Vietnam Memorial:

The Vietnam Memorial in Washington may be, aesthetically speaking, the single most understated public monument in history. For that reason it is worth pondering its one distinctive feature. It lists all the names. Rather than presenting an idealized figure or a symbolic group over the grave of a great national agony, the wall simply lists the names. And while there are only the names, the public that comes to view the wall has from the beginning sought to bestow a personal value on these names, bringing photos, mementos, flowers, messages, standing in grieving silence before the one name that matters, reaching out to touch it, to plant a kiss. These tributes have become a part of the wall; its very featurelessness invites decoration.

The names are not there as they might be on tombstones where necessity requires it. A monument is meant to express a nation's collective sense of a great event's importance. The wall does so by stripping the event of everything that has been used for that purpose in the past: the platitudes, icons, patriotic emblems. Nothing is left but the terrible reality. The names of the dead.

Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 263.