The State Hornet does not necessarily endorse the opinions expressed in this blog. James DeShaw Rae is an assistant government professor at Sacramento State, and is not affiliated with The State Hornet.

In looking for a photograph to attach to this blog as a way of visual self-introduction, I had to sort through a great deal of images. Of course, this was only a quick scan through electronic virtual images; around 2001 my personal collection switched from real hardcopy images on real paper to these ephemeral images that permanently reside on my computer; 2001 was the year I bought a digital camera.

I have a pretty active memory, so I have never been too dependent on visual records to remember important moments in my life. I strongly recall my fist visit to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington DC. The year was about 1984, the date is fuzzy, but the man I saw left a strong imprint. A man who appeared to be in his late 30s, very tall and stout, Native American, and wearing full fatigues capped with a green beret, was weeping at this wall. Though my father was a Marine Corps captain who served in Korea, I was not used to seeing anyone dressed in full fatigues, and at least 6’5″, such a striking figure at that. I was certainly not used to seeing men weep, having been raised in a traditional Midwestern family where emotions were to be controlled, particularly for males. I have visited the Memorial at least 30 times since (I lived in DC for three years), and seen many similar images, but that first one is the most vivid.

Maya Lin, an undergraduate architecture student from Ohio who happened to be Chinese American, won a nationwide contest to design the memorial in an anonymous, impartial contest. Her work won despite (or because of) the simplicity of its design: a black wall cutting into the earth with lines connecting the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, etched with the names of the more than 58,000 fallen in a military engagement that lasted nearly 20 years. The names are presented chronologically so as to require loved ones to search out those who were lost, and the memorial is sunken to allow a private, quiet space for personal reflection. This memorial represents the triumph of substance over style and of prudence over politics, as well as the power of simplicity in art.

Maya Lin went on to design the civil rights memorial in Montgomery, Alabama which I have used as my blog picture. It quotes from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (which I recently watched again on YouTube – one of the great inventions of our day, I usually employ this device to watch classic MTV videos from the ’80s, but occasionally use it for more educational purposes as well), “Until Justice rolls down like waters, and Righteousness like a mighty stream.” In this project, Lin uses the progressive power of water to represent the chronological movement of the civil rights era in the United States. Situated down the road from Alabama’s state capital (itself only two blocks from the church where Reverend King regularly preached his gospel of tolerance and peace), the Civil Rights memorial is a lasting record of a hate-filled time in this country, when the authority of government and the police were used to discriminate, to segregate, an to instill fear. That time is not so long ago.

I also visited the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama which sits across the road from the 16th Street Baptist Church, which was bombed by white supremacists in 1963, killing four young girls and injuring many others. This beautiful red brick church still stands and is remains an active, vibrant church, a symbol to the idea of “we shall overcome.” Throughout the South, a place that causes some trepidation for me, because of the sad legacy of racism, there are landmarks and memorials to the idea of equality and courage in the face of hatred: the bridge at Selma, the Tuskegee Institute founded by Booker T. Washington, etc.

I paid this visit to the historic sites of the civil rights era in 2006 during a visit to my sister, who had just moved to Atlanta. My lasting memory is probably standing outside Reverend King’s church peering across the empty streets of Montgomery, Alabama, and seeing the Confederate flag flying on the capital grounds. The New South of economic opportunity is certainly occurring, and is visible in cities like Atlanta, Georgia and Charlotte, North Carolina, but the remnants of the Old South remain across the region (I know I have seen them myself in Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina).

Just this weekend, I watched, for the second time, the Denzel Washington film “Remember the Titans.” In at true story set near Alexandria, Virginia, Washington’s character coaches a freshly integrated high school football team. While the players do two-a-day practices at summer camp, and reveal their ethnic and personal animosities, Coach Boone (Washington) takes the youth to Gettysburg to bring home the point that 100 years ago people fought and died to keep this house united and improve society. All across America we have symbols, statues, street names, and the like. It is worth a visit to these places to contemplate their meaning then and for today. Sometimes one discovers the legacy of these mementos reflects the downside of a certain time that we have all forgotten, other times we freshly recall the triumph of the human spirit.

Which brings me to the Memorial to September 11. Which is strange in and of it self, to have a memorial to a date, rather than a place (Vietnam) and specific people (Washington, Lincoln, Vietnam Veterans) or a cause (civil rights). We have not even yet determined how we want to refer to what we are remembering. President Bush refers to the subsequent events as a war against “terror,” or a fight against “Islamic fascism,” or simply the “enemy.” Could it be called The Terror Memorial? Well, perhaps we want to forget terror and find a more uplifting “idea” to remember. How about the Memorial to Honor those who fell to Islamic Fascism? Well, it’s unlikely that associating one of the world’s five great religions with the memorial would be acceptable, and fascism is making the political state the preeminent purpose of society, as Mussolini and Hitler attempted in the 1930s. Since Al-Qaeda is a non-state actor motivated for religious purposes (and political reasons of course) to tear down states (be it the United States or the corrupt governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan), “fascist” may not be wholly appropriate. Perhaps “World Trade Center Victims Memorial” would make it more personalized, though this partially implies these were victims of the WTC. It might be a useful exercise to explore the proper naming of such a memorial as a way of considering who is/was the threat, how to counter such a threat, and how to define the threat, and for such a memorial, what is the best way to remember these events.

Maya Lin’s memorial is most impressive in that today, veterans of the Vietnam War are nearly unanimous in their praise of the memorial, whether veterans (or ordinary citizens) who supported or opposed the war, they can all go to this small corner of the Mall in Washington, DC and silently remember what they want and how they want. Lin faced concerted opposition in the early 1980s from those such as conservative commentator Pat Buchanan and Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy James Webb (now U.S. Senator from Virginia, though for the Democratic Party), as many labeled her a communist or used racial epithets to attempt to humiliate her, but she stood proudly and ignored these ludicrous attacks. In the end, her design was vindicated.

I have only casually followed the ongoing turmoil over the design for the New York City memorial at Ground Zero. I was always partial to leaving it empty, perhaps reconstituting the area as a memorial park to symbolize the victims and as a pronouncement that the protection of individual human life and liberty are the highest values of this nation. I thought that building new bigger and better World Trade Centers, taller than before, sent a more nationalistic message that was reactionary and immediate and designed as a message to Osama bin Laden that we will build and carry on, but not reflective of the purpose of a memorial — to remember. The Pearl Harbor Memorial in Honolulu, Hawaii is a gravesite over the sunken USS Arizona that again features the names of the victims and is a silent tomb for those lost individual human lives. The wrangling over ownership of this valuable Manhattan property, insurance settlements, the competition among premier architecture and design firms for the contract, the scale of the project, caught up amidst the many unanswered questions left after the 9/11 Commission Report (especially by victims’ families) leaves a distaste in my mouth. I have never visited Ground Zero, so I have no visual image of this immediate unplanned memorial, my only recollection is still of being awoken where I lived in Hawaii by a phone call from my mother exclaiming that “we’re under attack!” and rushing to watch an airplane crash into the second WTC tower. Memorials take time to conceive, and people need time to recover, and ultimately we need a place to remember. I would hope to replace my image of that day with another deeper and more reflective than that initial reaction of shock. Six years later is probably enough time.

James DeShaw Rae can be reached at [email protected].