Photo by brents pix

The WWII Memorial just celebrated its fourth anniversary, and a little meme has popped up on several blogs over the last couple of days that paints a picture of almost universal loathing for its design.

Arms and Influence kicked it off, condemning the monument for looking too much like a “Nazi memorial,” then Matthew Yglesias picked it up, noting that it’s difficult to illustrate what he sees as wrong with it “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.” Yglesias also links back to a 2006 post from Lawyers, Guns and Money, which complains that the 56 pillars representing states and territories don’t mean anything and points to the memorial’s “genuinely unimpressive character.”

Professional cranky old man Garrison Keillor even weighed in on the subject in a recent Salon column about how he doesn’t much like Rolling Thunder, either.

A work of art can lift you up from the mishmash of life, the weight of the unintelligible world, and vulgarity squats on you like an enormous toad and won’t get off. You stroll down past the World War II Memorial, which looks like something ordered out of a catalog, a bland insult to the memory of all who served, and thousands of motorcycles roar by disturbing the Sabbath, and it depresses you for hours.

The monument has been around long enough for a judgment to be made, but do you agree that it “comes closer to belonging in a third-rate Soviet city than on the National Mall”? Is it really that bad?