I confess. Sometimes I see other blogs. There's
my own. There's
Eschaton and
Hullabaloo and
My Left Wing and
Jesus' General.
And sometimes I visit AmericaBlog.
Tonight I'm surfing in a zone and read a disappointing post by John in DC.
Now everyone is entitled to occassionally write disappointing posts. We all have off nights.
But how in the world could he post this and think it would not set off a firestorm?
Open Thread
Open thread - My Holocaust Museum let down...
by John in DC - 10/09/2005 06:54:00 PM
Went to the Holocaust Museum today, and honestly, I was less impressed than I had expected from all the hype.
It was okay, but... The hoopla about being given a card with the name of a person who you follow through the exhibit and then at the end you find out if they lived or died - well, that's just silly - they hand you a small 4 page leaflet and you reach each page every few minutes or something. They even forgot to hand us, or anybody else we saw, the booklets.
Second, half the exhibit is illegible to anyone with eyes over the age of 25. The big descriptions of major events are in big font and readable, but the text accompanying all the small photos, artifacts, etc. is way too small for an adult eye to read, and the lighting on those objects is terrible. We finally gave up reading all the explanations because we were squinting against the glass like old people - I still have a headache. I suspect this museum cost a bit of change, and it's about a rather important topic - I can't believe they've had that horrible illegible text there all these years.
Third, it was just way too long and, honestly, kind of boring after a while. You have to read way through room after room after room after room of every single detail of every single year from 1933 to 1945. You don't even get to the Holocaust itself until you're halfway through the museum and totally exhausted. The second half of the museum is better - there's more "stuff" and less reading, but still. We finally just breezed through the last several rooms because we'd had it - it was just too much. Someone could have done a much better job of making this more of a museum and less of a reading assignment.
Here's my Holocaust Museum experience.
On a bitter cold day in the early 1990s, a friend of mine, a police sergeant, and I went to DC to speak to a Metro Police Department recruiter.
My friend was wanting to leave the department he was at and I was looking to change jobs myself. I was recently divorced from my first marriage and eager to begin again (I'll get to the Holocaust Museum. I'm taking the scenic route).
The recruiter told us we seemed like nice guys. He told us horror stories about DC cops having to buy their own tires for cruisers, even paying for gas out of pocket because the DC govt. at the time was so far behind in paying bills that service stations would no longer accept invoices. (Not long after, the Washington Post did several stories on exactly what the recruiter told us.)
We left feeling dejected. It was a freezing cold day and an icy drizzle was falling. We were already in a depressed mood so we decided to go to the Holocaust Museum.
I don't understand how John could say such things about such a moving museum.
I remember being presented a card with a person's name and a few other details. We walked through looking at the photographs, detailing ordinary lives, maps showing Jewish and other populations throughout Europe before and after the Holocaust, photographs of people celebrating ordinary and special moments of humanity and then photographs of unspeakable inhumanity. The exhibits help bring the people to life so that as one travels through the museum into the exhibits involving the death camps and other facilities for the Holocaust sufferers, it would take a hard heart not to feel empathy and pain.
I remember towards the end of our visit, we stood and watched video monitors of interviews with Holocaust survivors describing their experiences. And my friend - who has had to kill to defend himself from an armed attacker, who has gone into a bar to break up a brawl and ended up fighting five men alone with backup 20 minutes away - my friend began to weep openly and unashamedly as he watched.
So I don't know what museum John of AmericaBlog visited. But it wasn't the same one I toured.
And his responses in another post tonight do not do himself credit.
Since so many of you were so rude, you get my response
by John in DC - 10/09/2005 10:17:00 PM
Since so many of you felt the need to be gratuitously rude in response to me having simply critiqued a museum, I get to respond because, honestly, I'm not afraid of you people. I'm glad some of you think the Holocaust museum is a well-designed museum. But I don't. And last time I checked it was still okay in America to criticize the layout of a museum, even if the museum is about - heaven forbid - the Holocaust.
Yes John, criticism is still allowed even by people with large blindspots about what they see before them.