Statues, monuments, war memorials and art installations are erected in optimistic times. How long they endure is not up to their creators. In Baghdad, Saddam Hussein built the Victory Arch, two massive crossed swords, to commemorate the Iran-Iraq war and serve as a paean to his reign. Unlike many of the monuments to Mr. Hussein, the Victory Arch still stands, and is now, somewhat surprisingly, undergoing a renovation .
The monument evokes mixed reactions among Iraqis. “Nuremberg and Las Vegas all rolled in one,” Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi-born author and architect called it in “The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq.” Mr. Makiya, who now lives in Massachusetts, was surprised, but glad to hear that the Victory Arch would shine again. He wrote in an e-mail: “It is such a perfect symbol of the Baathist experience. It is vulgar, but vulgar in an unspeakably horrible, terrible - and therefore unique - way.”
The government defends the restoration, which is part of a $194 million beautification project in the Green Zone before a summit meeting of Arab League leaders in March.
“We are a civilized people,” Ali al-Mousawi, a spokesman for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, told The Times, “and this monument is a part of the memories of this country.”
It also happens that a civilized people can find some reminders inconvenient.
One night in June, Georgian authorities carried away a statue of Stalin from Gori’s central square, taking him off the pedestal where he stood for 48 years.
The removal was a relief to Georgia’s leadership . Many citizens in Gori, however, whose claim to fame during the Soviet era was the brick house where Josef Stalin was born, felt differently.
“They were afraid of the people’s reaction, that’s why they did it at night,” Gocha Suriashvili, 62, told The Times.
But Mikheil Jeriashvili, a 19-yearold medical student, said that he was glad to see it go. “I would prefer if he had been born in another town altogether.”
Some places far off and little noticed make more modest statements. When a highway bypass routed traffic around the town of Hooper, Nebraska, population of about 827, the locals decided to do something about it.
“We kind of lost our identity now that the highway didn’t go through town,” David Hingst, 58, the general manager of a seed company, told The Times.
They decided to put an 8-meter-high sign with half-meter letters spelling out “Hooper” next to the new highway exit, as if a declaration of who they are would somehow slow their demise.
“We have a hard time keeping young people,” Joel Hargens, 59, a Hooper native who runs the town’s bank, told The Times. “This is rural America.”
On the coast, about 2,500 kilometers west of Hooper, is another endangered slice of Americana, this one a mashup of towers, cathedrals, fountains and ships, constructed from pipes, broken bottles, seashells and ceramic, climbing 30 meters high. Known as the Watts Towers, the sculpture was built by Simon Rodia, an eccentric Italian immigrant working in his yard over 33 years in the first half of the 20th century.
“You get a lot of Europeans coming, and the first thing they want to do is see the Watts Towers. It’s an international icon, but it’s a local blind spot,” Luisa Del Giudice, a scholar who organized a conference on the towers in 2009, told The Times.
Now the towers need about $5 million in restoration work, but face an uncertain future because of budget cuts.
That future must have seemed assured when Mr. Rodia finally finished building his folk masterpiece in 1954, just as Mr. Hussein believed in his iconic power, which he expressed in the many monuments he built throughout Iraq.
It turns out in the case of the Victory Arch, he was right.
TOM BRADY
