Tag Archives: competition

Memorializing History?

The angry battles over the propriety of statues commemorating Confederate soldiers, and the somewhat different arguments that regularly erupt over the design of war memorials and the like, are reminders that–as a species–we humans like to erect permanent (or at least, long-lasting) mementos of people and events we consider worth memorializing.

There are probably psychological studies probing the reasons for that evidently widespread impulse, and I thought about what that desire to commemorate might tell us when I read a request from Lester Levine, who regularly comments here. Lester asked me to post the following announcement/invitation to the community that converses (or lurks) on this site.

You are a creative bunch. So, as we all wallow in health and political turmoil, I would like to invite you and anyone you know to deeply immerse hands, minds and souls in an engaging project. It will require minimal artistic skills and “production” time.

In addition to my curmudgeonly comments on this blog, I am Lester Levine, the only person to read all 5,201 entries to the 2003 World Trade Center Memorial Competition. My 2016 book highlights the 100+ most innovative designs submitted. That research forever interested me in the role of memory/memorials in history and culture.

And so, as we approach 9/11/2021, I am struck by how the January 6, 2021 event has also been “named” by its date.. Likewise, I can’t help but wonder about the artistic/intellectual challenge of imagining a physical marker for historical memory. It was not war; there were few killed. Yet, many think the event was a seminal moment for the United States and all that it stands for.
___________________________________________________________
Announcing the “Remembering 1/6 Design Competition”
Opens 8/17/21
Open to anyone, anywhere
Entry format, rules, questions – lester.levine@gmail.com
Entries due by midnight US Eastern time, 10/22/21 to lester.levine@gmail.com
Judged by creators of innovative 9/11 memorial entries
Winners announced on 12/6/21
____________________________________________________________

I will be interested to see what the people responding consider appropriate “markers” of that very troubling and ominous event.

I just hope that a hundred years or so from now there are still people around to see whatever monument is ultimately erected.

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Elizabeth Warren–Telling It Like It REALLY Is

I would be shocked if Hillary Clinton chose Elizabeth Warren for the VP slot. The Democrats have a good chance of regaining control of the Senate, and it would be foolhardy to give Republicans a “freebie” by choosing a Senator from a state with a Republican governor.

Besides, in the Senate, Senator Warren is stiffening the spines of her colleagues.

Warren has become a hero to many Americans (including this one) and one of the reasons for that, in my view, is her uncanny ability to explain complex realities in language that everyone can understand.

During her Senate campaign, her defense of taxation–really, a defense of the social contract–went viral, and is still being widely quoted; more recently, she did it again.

Warren is, of course, famous for her attacks on too-big-to-fail banks. But in her address yesterday, entitled “Reigniting Competition in the American Economy,” she extended her critique to the entire economy, noting that, as a result of three decades of weakened federal antitrust regulation, virtually every industrial sector today—from airlines to telecom to agriculture to retail to social media—is under the control of a handful of oligopolistic corporations. This widespread consolidation is “hiding in plain sight all across the American economy,” she said, and “threatens our markets, threatens our economy, and threatens our democracy.”

Antitrust is one of those legal theories that can make citizens’ eyes glaze over. But–as Teddy Roosevelt understood, and economists and businesspeople have come to recognize–vigorous enforcement of antitrust rules is essential to the proper operation of markets. Without such regulation, we do not have the healthy competition that a capitalist system requires; instead, we have corporatism and corruption.

As the Washington Monthly put it, in a post describing Warren’s speech,

As our readers know, economic consolidation is a subject the Washington Monthly has long been obsessed with—see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. In our current cover story, Barry Lynn (impresario of yesterday’s event) and Phil Longman argue that antitrust was the true legacy of the original American Populists and a vital, under-appreciated reason for the mass prosperity of mid-20th Century America. But this legacy, and the new Gilded Age economy that has resulted from its abandonment, is not a narrative most Americans have been told (one reason why even the “populist” candidates running president have shied away from it).

The Washington Monthly included the entire text of Warren’s speech. You should click through and read it. It’s not only a model of clarity; it’s a model of common sense.

Elizabeth Warren is the politician who really “tells it like it is.”

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