It's no coincidence that an expensive, heroic movie about the attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years ago is being released this Memorial Day weekend. Nor is it a coincidence that during the last couple of weeks, as Memorial Day approached, Congress voted overwhelmingly to give a final green light to a World War II memorial that's been designed for the Mall in Washington D.C.

Ground was broken last fall, but actually constructing this memorial has already taken longer than World War II itself did. The fight over the World War II memorial is about exactly where it should be built and how it should look. The same thing happened with all the other memorials put up in Washington during the last two decades: the FDR Memorial, the Korean War Memorial, the Holocaust Museum -- all during the 1990s - and the Vietnam War memorial during the 1980s.

And that's because public memorials are hybrids - both sacred objects and also secular ones. They are pieces of design installed in living cities. And the issues we wish could somehow be left off the table when it comes to war memorials -- issues like abstraction versus realism, good taste and bad taste -- loom large. And so war memorials become lightning rods for culture wars.

The first time it happened was 20 years ago, over the Vietnam memorial. The designer had imagined a black granite V, minimalist and somber. Conservatives saw this as another example of the liberal cultural conspiracy. They demanded something traditional and figurative. And a couple of years after the memorial wall was dedicated, the conservatives got their three life-sized realistic sculptures of infantrymen -- that adjacent bit of John Wayne and Norman Rockwell they thought they wanted.

I say "Thought they wanted" because once the Vietnam memorial was open, once tens of millions of Americans made their pilgrimages and experienced the space and stroked the wall, who failed to be moved? Go there today, and it's not liberals and art snobs ignoring the old-fashioned statues in favor of the magnificent, heartbreaking black wall.

A tragic memorial for a tragic episode -- that Americans of this day and age are able to pull off with conviction and deftness.

But plain old-fashioned military heroism? We have problems these days knowing what to build to commemorate that. In the debate over the World War II memorial, a few of the arguments are ideological -- some people want a more "celebratory" design. But the debate is mainly aesthetic, not political, and this time, I agree with the opponents.

The site for the World War II Memorial on the Mall is wrong, both too intrusive and too small, just 7 measly acres to commemorate an epic and noble war. And worse, the design is deeply unimaginative -- abstract, but a kind of dull Soviet-style abstraction, two giant arches and 56 granite columns surrounding a pool.

It's a pity. Elsewhere in our culture just now we have arrived at a moment of extreme appreciation for the victory of the Second World War, a kind of spontaneous national standing ovation. Movies like Pearl Harbor and the forthcoming Band of Brothers do not flinch from depicting the bloody nightmare of combat even as they glorify that most extremely old-fashioned of old-fashioned virtues -- doing one's duty. Books like The Greatest Generation and its sequels have sold millions of copies not because their author is a TV star, but because they provide a way for us to finally salute the achievement of our forebears. Of people like my father in the Philippines and my father-in-law in Normandy.

These days, when it comes to celebrating military heroism, we're more comfortable with memorials in the form of software -- films, books -- than old-fashioned marble-and-bronze memorial hardware.

I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.