How We Remember

STEVE LISS FOR TIME
Who Sits Here? The 168 chairs at the Oklahoma City Memorial, each individually dipped in bronze, commemorate the dead and inspire the living

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CYNTHIA JOHNSON FOR TIME

SYMBOLS OF THE DEAD: The empty leather shoes of the Holocaust

The nature of protest itself is complicated. In Oklahoma City, people have said the memorial is a protest against a godless education; thus it stands as an argument for prayer in public schools. They have said it protests a permissive society, that it stands against violence in the movies and on TV. "How do you measure what people take away from these things?" Linenthal asks.

He adds that it is important that all this complexity be a product of a slow, painstaking process. "The language of 'healing' and 'closure,'" he says, "is the obscene language of forgetfulness." Yet he also says the effect of the new memorials is to make one both remember and forget. The Murrah Building wall and the shell of the Journal Record newspaper building behind the Survivor Tree were deliberately preserved to recall the destructiveness, the ugliness, of the bombing. Without them, the memorial would look solely like a pastoral landscape--soothing and quietly evocative, yet minus clues that something terrible had taken place. "One does not enshrine the violence," says Linenthal, "but it is necessary to retain some edge." He believes modern memorials provide "a sense of turning to the past for orientation, cautionary tales and moral lessons. They are seen as ways to correct the sins and evasions of the past."

Nathan Glazer, the Harvard sociologist, takes a different, less admiring view. "The mute memorial is all around us," writes Glazer in The Public Interest; and the most successful of them, the Vietnam Memorial, "does not tell us that [those killed] died for their country, or for liberty, or for democracy, or even that they died in vain. It says nothing except that they died." We may speak to the memorials, says Glazer, but they no longer speak clearly to us. Modern art has replaced excessive clarity with none at all.

Vietnam and Oklahoma City represent public deaths, that is, deaths that had an inordinately strong effect on the public consciousness. Yet the idea of public death is also selective. Which events are chosen for memorialization, and which are not? A memorial is the result of the importance the public ascribes to the death. No one thought to create a monument to the victims at Waco because people did not wish to identify with them. Class and race get involved too. There was no move to build a memorial to the 87 Hispanic victims of the Happy Land social club fire in the Bronx in 1990. For a memorial to be built, there must be a widespread desire to enter into the event, and it must be framed by the media in that way.

"Memorials are a product of who we are right now," says Linenthal. "We are a people negotiating our identities--individual, corporate, ethnic and more. In part, we are doing this by creating and feeling the power of memorials."

Oklahoma governor Frank Keating, who used to work with several of those killed, had been a mere three months in office when the bombing occurred. One should really go to the memorial at night, he tells me. "To see those chairs lighted; it makes you understand that each chair is a symbol of a human life lost. The hillside of lights is overwhelming. I met a woman who lost her father in the bombing, and I expressed my sympathy. But she seemed to take solace from the chairs, and unlike some others, she did sit in the chair with her father's name on it. She told me, 'It's like sitting in my dad's lap. Like being a little girl again.'"

I ask the Governor why creating the memorial was so important. "Because this was a federal building, it was an attack on the U.S.," he says. "There was a special horror involved because these were ordinary people serving their fellow countrymen." Keating feels that the people who died give the memorial its authority; that they died for liberty and democracy; that that message underlies all the individual reactions one might have to the chairs. "Ordinary people died," he says. "Ordinary people selected the memorial."

Taking his suggestion, I return to the memorial at dusk and wait to see the lights in the bases of the chairs. The lights are on all the time, but one cannot see them in the day, when the bases seem to absorb the pale green color of the lawn, like Coke-bottle glass. Some 50 people walk down one path and up the other in a casual ceremony. Many more were here at midday when I was with Jeanine. It is estimated that the memorial may attract as many as 1 million people a year, from all over the country and the world.

At the moment, the sky is layered in horizontal stripes of deep blue, gray and orange. I sit where Jeanine said she most liked to sit--on a bench across the reflecting pool from the rows of chairs. Karen's is aligned with an American flag flapping against a high pole near the back wall. Jeanine can orient herself in relation to it. I take the same position. The pool is blacker this evening, the ripples tighter; they make the dark water look like the ridges of an old 78 phonograph record. A stiff breeze blows the flag against the pole and makes a tinny ringing sound.