The time has come for a few good men to lighten the heck up.
Or to put it another way, the Leathernecks certainly do seem to have a thin skin these days.
Among its many other distractions, the nation’s capital is currently embroiled in what the Marines would probably not like described as a tiff between them and the leading aesthetes of the nation’s arts establishment.
Mostly the tiff is between Rep. Gerald Solomon (R-N.Y.), a rugged ex-Marine turned congressman who now chairs the all-powerful House Rules Committee, and J. Carter Brown, scion of one of New England’s oldest old money families, former director of the National Gallery of Art, chairman of cable TV’s Ovation culture network and head of the capital’s Fine Arts Commission that has jurisdiction over all the public monuments in the Washington area.
The two have been tiffing for weeks now over the decision of Carter’s commission to allow the namby-pamby, never-been-through-boot-camp, bet-they-sleep-on-pillows
U.S. Air Force to erect a heroic monument to itself here in Arlington just 500 feet away from the heroic Marine Corps Iwo Jima memorial!!!
Rugged ex-Marine Solomon, supported by many of his fellow Corps veterans, has flatly denounced Brown & Co.’s action as “conspiring to desecrate” the Iwo Jima Memorial.
Last week, the tiff went from simmer to full boil when Solomon discovered a four-year old transcript of a Fine Arts Commission meeting in which Brown lamentably remarked: “I would say that the Iwo Jima Memorial is kitsch.”
“Kitsch” can be defined as something meretricious and tacky, such as those Elvis Presley figurines they sell tourists in Memphis, or simply as something designed to appeal to the widest possible popular taste, such as those Elvis Presley figurines they sell tourists in Memphis.
But to Solomon and other ex-Marines, “kitsch” became a fighting word when they found it in the transcript. Demanding Brown’s immediate resignation from the Commission, Solomon exclaimed, “I’m not going to mince words. I think (kitsch) is one of the most uncaring, irreverent and insulting comments I have ever heard uttered.”
Now, I have admired Solomon as one of the more responsible Republican leaders on Capitol Hill. And I’ve long admired the U.S. Marines–whether the faux, movie Marine kind like John “Sands of Iwo Jima” Wayne and Clint “Heartbreak Ridge” Eastwood or the actual kind, like Col. Chesty Puller or Sen. John Chaffee (R-R.I.), who as a Marine captain in the Korean War would scoop up thrown Chinese Communist hand grenades and hurl them right back at the enemy.
I’ve even admired the fact that former Sen. Adlai Stevenson III became a tank commander in the Marines.
But, golly Moses, as we probably didn’t say when I was an Army corporal with the 82nd Airborne back in the 60s, aren’t we getting just a gosh darn bit touchy over a teensy little word?
Carter Brown was quick to apologize and proclaim his love for the Iwo Jima Memorial–and to note that he and his commission have seen to the erection of some Washington’s finest and greatest military monuments during his 27 year tenure: the Vietnam, the Korea, the Navy, the Women in Military Service–and soon, the World War II Memorial and the Shaw Memorial honoring black Civil War soldiers.
It is true that he sometimes wears velvet tuxedos and probably went too far by invoking his father’s war record as assistant secretary of the Navy and his brother’s quitting Harvard to become a career naval officer.
But the point is that Brown is probably the leading art authority in America. He is the Lorenzo the Magnificent of our time. It’s his job to discuss monuments and memorials with terms like “kitsch” if he needs to, as he frequently does.
We could have used Brown when Congress put up that half naked, asking-for-a-towel-in-a-Turkish-bath statue of George Washington that now sits in a Smithsonian Institution basement.
The Marines were in another such a tizzy late last year, when that silly Clinton assistant secretary of the Army woman, Sara Lister, dared call them “extremists,” and got run out of town.
What ever happened to the Marines I used to know–who could endure bombs, cannon shells, bullets and bayonets, jungle rot, burning desert heat and the numbing cold of Korea, without grumble or whimper or even twitch. Can’t they now even cope with a word like “kitsch?”
I can recall a night when, as a rat G.I. in the wrong place at the wrong time, I had to spend a night in a Wilmington, N.C., jail cell with a drunken Marine Corps gunny sergeant with so many service and combat stripes he looked like a green and yellow zebra. I think he even had stripes for the nights he’d spent in jail cells.
Believe me, he knew a few more uncaring, irreverent and insulting comments than “kitsch.”
