Democratic realism on the mall.

OF all the faults that have been found in Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington, the greatest has been overlooked. From the start, in 1982, conservatives and war veterans chastised Miss Lin for left-wing anti-Americanism. However just that charge may be, the real sin of her memorial is not that it seems so glaringly critical of the Vietnam War, nor that it appears to consign the lives of so many Americans to a black ditch, but that it provoked a trend that is in the process of ruining one of our truly great and inspiring national sites.

Miss Lin's odd, unintended revenge on her critics may take another step this month when a design is unveiled for the National World War II Memorial. Her co-conspirators, as unwitting as she is, are veterans and conservatives.

Miss Lin's design, these critics said at first, was a symbolic denigration of the war, a denigration that showed no respect for the sacrifices of those who gave their lives in pursuit of the national interest. Tempers eventually subsided, and the Vietnam Memorial has become one of the most visited sites on the Mall. When the weather is pleasant, you can find a crowd filing through even past midnight.

Before the resentment died down, though, veterans groups demanded satisfaction. Their protests resulted in the commissioning in 1984 of Frederick Hart's representational sculpture group, Three Soldiers, which stands near Miss Lin's memorial. With its high degree of realism, it is about as different from hers as it could be: three combat-seasoned soldiers (of the proper mix of races, of course), battle-wearied but alert, standing tall, with suffering and sacrifice written all over their faces. This sop to the vets set in motion an unfortunate trend toward a kind of vivid realism in war memorials -- call it democratic realism. Representation is now the safe option, especially when artistic committees are confronted with the demands of men whose combat experience gives them formidable moral stature.

The next war memorial, the Vietnam Women's Memorial, appeared in 1993, celebrating the sacrifices of military nurses -- again with the proper racial mix, again with the overplayed emotion (one nurse cradles a wounded soldier in her arms in a pose that has been compared to Michelangelo's Pieta). And most recently, there is the Korean War Memorial, dedicated in July 1995. It features a group of 19 realistically portrayed soldiers -- this time not only with the proper racial mix, but also with a mix of service branches --marching wearily on patrol.

It appears likely that we are about to end up with another war memorial on the Mall peopled with replica soldiers. Haydn Williams, a member of the American Battle Monuments Commission and chairman of the World War II Memorial Site and Design Committee, says, "It's up to the designers." But a number of the finalists chosen by the ABMC in August have used representational sculpture before in their designs, and others admitted to a strong interest in it. One designer, skirting the strict ABMC rule that the design proposals not be discussed until one has been chosen, even confessed that the World War II Memorial probably calls for it.

Tom Wolfe and other conservatives have written passionately in support of Frederick Hart - style representation. They see it as the antidote to the artistic modernism that produced Maya Lin's memorial. The sum and substance of this modernism, they argue, is the desire to overturn bourgeois taste; at its core it is devoid of humanity. If by this Wolfe and Company intend to make the conservative or the populist case for realism, they should think about it again. This kind of realism in war memorials promotes values we should not want to promote.

Why? Take the Iwo Jima Memorial, the prototype for all the realism that has since come to the Mall. It turns out that the Iwo Jima flag-raising, one of the greatest, most patriotic images of the War in the Pacific, was staged for the camera. The hill had already been secured, the flag already raised. The memorial in Arlington is thus two steps removed from the real war, a re-creation of a re-creation, allowing a moment of imitation glory to symbolize the War in the Pacific.

The newer memorials on the Mall share something of the photographic quality of the Iwo Jima Memorial. The soldiers of the Korean War Memorial slog along, astonishingly lifelike. In the fogs that periodically blanket the Mall, the effect can be haunting. But out of the fog, one almost expects to see William Holden there leading the troops. Or Sylvester Stallone. Indeed, democratic realism seems to take its influences less from traditional patriotic values than from the entertainment values of the movies.

Just as movies are different from still photography, however, so are the newer memorials different from the Iwo Jima Memorial. The original Iwo Jima photograph, staged though it was, still honors the collective enterprise of the war and suggests that a greater objective lies behind its horror and tragedy. The flag-raising gains its symbolic power from showing the triumph of American virtues, hinting at the purpose behind the soldiers' sacrifices.

The newer democratic-realist sculptures suggest no such larger purpose. The close-up detail with which they are rendered focuses more on the heroics of the individual than on the collective effort of war -- just as present-day movies do, with their plots driven by the box-office power of a single star. The bedraggled look of the soldiers is a design characteristic that comes not out of some Army manual, which would impose a measure of discipline even in a combat environment, but straight out of cinematically created expectations of what soldiers in war should look like.

What these similarities suggest is that current movies and the newest war memorials have something deeper in common: a programmed-in response. Through carefully calculated and market-tested methods, Hollywood calibrates every scene to produce a particular response in the viewer. Every audience reaction -- every tear, every rush of adrenaline -- is programmed in. Nothing (except possibly the humor) is left to chance. The result is a packaged experience, the only variations being due to differences in viewers' taste and intelligence.

The realism of the new war memorials produces a packaged experience too: the seasoned looks, the noble postures are intended to elicit a quick rush of patriotism. But the effect is more Patriot Games than Federalist Papers, and it remains about as long in the mind, for the cinematic technique eliminates the need for creativity and imagination on the part of the viewer. Like socialist realism, democratic realism packages the narrative of history in its own way, leaving little room for independent thought. Is there anything democratic or patriotic about that?

It is therefore surprising to hear conservatives taking positions in favor of this sort of realistic sculpture as an expression of "bourgeois taste." After all, it is we who, rightly, have been arguing the necessity of preserving hierarchies of artistic merit, a view that sits uneasily beside the idea that bourgeois aesthetic standards deserve to be defended for the mere reason that they are bourgeois. And, all politics aside, the artistic merit of Frederick Hart's war memorial -- pace Tom Wolfe -- is of a distinctly lower level than that of his sublime work for the National Cathedral. (If it's any indication, a scaled-down replica has been made available from the Franklin Mint.)

Finally, with democratic realism's constant focus on the individual, we see the final triumph of the anti-war sentiment imputed to Maya Lin. Just as Miss Lin was said to have criticized the war in Vietnam through her abstraction, the democratic-realist fixation on the individual seems to say that war has no larger significance than the immediate suffering of the soldiers. The sculptures hint at no great aims, no collective purposes that might redeem the lives sacrificed; they can find nothing better in war, no more redeeming purpose, than the self-expression of its participants.

War memorials were once places of remembrance, places of gravity and contemplation. In many of them, the viewer was confronted with simple images and symbols -- an obelisk, a single rider on horseback -- that were meant to evoke a range of responses, but meaningful responses that came from within the viewer. The experience, admittedly, is demanding, and many viewers are not up to the task. For them, symbolic memorials will mean little. But those who do respond are rewarded with a powerful and genuine experience -- and all of us are edified, in the end, by at least attempting to go through the exercise.

Perhaps we have lost that capacity to respond from within. Maybe in an age that esteems entertainment above almost all else, we need to be told how to respond to works of art. At any rate, the World War II Memorial Site and Design Committee will very soon decide whether our national war memorials are to continue in the mode they have followed for the last decade. Are they to be therapy for the living, or are they to be lasting commemorations of the dead? Are we to crowd the west end of the Mall with soldiers? If so, then how many is enough? If the memorials are to be realistic, where will the realism end?

I have never been to war, and thanks to the sacrifices of America's veterans I probably will never have to. That is all the more reason why their memory deserves better than what Hollywood can give it.