First of all, the planned Sunday dedication for the new MLK memorial on the National Mall has been postponed due to Hurricane Irene; it will be at some point in September or October instead, and lots of people are disappointed.

But the presses got rolling before the storm clouds, and today's New York Times features two prominent disses of the memorial, one from a social/historical perspective and one from an aesthetic one. Cornel West writes on the Op-Ed page:

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. ...King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice.

West's comments provide the context for what Edward Rothstein calls out as kitschy over-monumentality—does it seem like the monument is the artifact of a culture that doth protest too much? (Because it's done so little?) Why is King's sculpture so BIG?

[The statues] of Jefferson and Lincoln are a mere 19 feet tall; Dr. King looms 30 feet up...And the mound’s isolation from any other tall objects, its enormity and Dr. King’s posture all conspire to make him seem an authoritarian figure, emerging full-grown from the rock’s chiseled surface, at one with the ancient forces of nature, seeming to claim their authority as his. You don’t come here to commune with him, let alone to attend to the ideas the memorial’s Web site insists are latent here: “democracy, justice, hope and love.” You come to tilt your head back and follow; he, clearly, has his mind elsewhere.

It is difficult to know precisely why all this went wrong, or why this memorial never alludes to the fundamental theme of Dr. King’s life, equal treatment for American blacks. It strives for a kind of ethereal universality, while opposing forces pull it in another direction.

Here's Politico on the Made in China factor.