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The Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery has long served as a site of instruction about national sacrifice, but its lessons in mourning war's costs and honoring its combatants have changed with time and shifting political currents, as reflected in the reordered space, the sentinels' altered rituals and the public's increasingly disciplined engagement with the site. Tracing these changes, this article argues that the gradual distancing of the monument and its sentinels from the visiting public mirrors the sharpening sense of civilian-military division within American society itself, revealing the exclusionary politics of obligation that help shape contemporary political discourse about war and its costs.
Keywords: commemoration; memorials and monuments; unknown soldier; militarism; civil-military relations; politics; obligation
There, just a few feet from the marble steps of the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery and yards from the somber monument to the unknown soldiers of the past century's wars, Lindsey Stone struck a pose of purposeful disrespect, what she would later defend as a "visual pun." Crouched next to the sign with its insistent declaration-"SILENCE AND RESPECT"-she mimed defiance, cupping her right hand by her mouth as if to yell and giving the finger with her left. In an age where the ridiculous and lurid go viral in an instant, the photograph posted on a personal Facebook page caused immediate uproar. Accused of hating the military and "soldiers who have died in foreign wars," Ms. Stone received death and rape threats; others hoped she would rot in hell.1 Within days, she and the friend who took the photograph were placed on unpaid leave by their employer (they had traveled to the capital on an excursion with their firm). The two women eventually lost their jobs, despite issuing public apologies in which they tried to explain the photograph not as an act of disrespect to the memorial or to the military, past and present, but as a private joke gone awry.2
The scandal and its steep price provide more than just another cautionary tale about how social network sites blur the boundaries between personal choices and professional consequences. The incident's "mundanity" and the response it elicited flag something larger-they point to a perceived tension between military and civilian sectors in the United States, a...