James E. Young
speaker
89 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 16 Feb
James E. Young’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's not just unprecedented, but it actually doesn't make any memorial sense.
The greatest memorials really are living memorials, the spaces in which life continues, life and love, culture, love of culture.
I hope, in fact, that when I am commemorated after I'm gone, it will be in some loving, festive way, just like this, celebrating life, marking death with the celebration of life, you know, and the arts in this case.
And I think one of the most wonderful ways to remember somebody is to remember their love of life and the arts.
And they took a long time, as you said.
And were also fairly controversial at the same time.
And that's a normal part of the memorial process.
What I love to do with memorials is to kind of restore their origins and how they came into being and what the debates were, as petty as they may have been or as substantial as they may have been.
In order to enliven an otherwise pretty deadly edifice, a memorial without its own history attached can appear quite obsolete and sealed foreign to subsequent generations.
So by restoring how they came into being, we really can reanimate them with their origins and make them all living memorials that way.
I think you will have a presidential memorial, a national memorial, one day.
The meanings and understandings of these past administrations and presidents really do evolve over time.
And I think his time will come eventually.
It could be maybe in the next administration, now that our attention is on presidential memorials once again.
Absolutely.
And fortunately, we have it on sound and on film and on tape.
The I Have a Dream speech, probably, I think, our greatest national memorial, in fact, ever.
It raises the bar, actually, to remind us, using the Lincoln Memorial and the steps as a background, which is also really, really special.
People ask what makes the Lincoln Memorial so special, and it's really the quietude and the Emancipation Proclamation in the background that brings it to life.
And that solemnity, that gentleness, the stillness inside that makes that memorial work so well.
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