Against the WWII Memorial

It's true, the newish World War II memorial in Washington really is a stinker. It's a bit hard to illustrate the badness because part of its terrible-osity is that it's been designed at a scale where it's almost impossible to take the whole thing in and offer anyone a decent photo to illustrate what it looks like. But the aesthetics are bad and vaguely un-American, the efforts at symbolism are simultaneously over-literal and incomprehensible. All-in-all it's something that comes closer to belonging in a third-rate Soviet city than on the National Mall.

Here's a lengthy complaint. I'll only note in the WWII memorial's defense that the Korean War memorial also sucks and nobody seems to mind.