It's remarkably simple, really.

Constructed in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, generally referred to as the “Wall,” consists of two black granite wings, each almost 250 feet long, which meet at an obtuse angle that is submerged into the landscape of the National Mall, a green space between the Lincoln and Washington Memorials and some distance behind White House, in Washington, D.C. The form of the Wall, designed by Maya Ying Lin, is minimalist in nature, not only because it includes the right angles, hard edges, shiny surface, and repeated increments of Minimalism, but because even though it is a war memorial, unlike most, its only ornament and representation is the seemingly endless list of 58,226 names of American service men and women killed in Vietnam.

American Culture has almost from its beginnings claimed what may be the Western world's primary Judeo-Christian metaphor — that of the Garden of Eden. The vastness of its wilderness, the newness of its culture, and the plasticity of its identity allowed both its citizens and many outsiders to embrace their vision of America as a manifestation of humanity's earliest boon from its deity. In the 20th and 21st centuries, this metaphor has continued to be called forth at moments when the country's soul was perceived as being tested by the failure of American capitalism in the Depression, the country's tentative stretches toward Empire in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and the Faustian unleashing of the atom at the end of the Second World War.