It’s not all that often you see your favorite desert campsite being discussed by the Supreme Court and the nation’s media. But mine is, this week, if for reasons not directly related to desert conservation.
In other words, the case of the 75-year-old Sunrise Rock war memorial cross on Cima Dome in Mojave National Preserve has made it to the nation’s highest court this week. The media has taken notice, to the point where the LA Times is running a serial dialogue on the topic.
At issue, roughly speaking, are First-Amendment protections against government support for religion on the one hand, versus preservation of local historical sites on the other. One version or another of the Sunrise Rock cross has stood on Cima Road for a double-digit percentage of the Mojave Desert’s Anglo history, since the 1930s. For decades, World War One veterans and their families gathered for Easter services at the base of the cross.
Shortly after the land became part of the Mojave National Preserve, then-Assistant Superintendent Frank Buono joined forces with the ACLU to sue for removal of the cross, arguing that its presence on land administered by the National Park Service constituted endorsement of a religion by the federal government. Since then, a land swap has been engineered which would trade the acre of land surrounding the cross for five other acres of inholdings in the Preserve, with the idea that giving the land to the VFW makes the federal case moot. Others aren’t buying that argument, as the cross would remain a prominent feature of the landscape with nothing to indicate it’s not part of the Preserve. So far the courts have agreed with that latter argument and blocked the land transfer.
SCOTUS is hearing arguments this week not about the constitutionality of the cross itself, but over Buono’s standing to sue and the legality of the land transfer. I have my own nuanced opinions about the cross, which in any event aren’t particularly relevant to the protection of the desert landscape.
The carving out of a chunk of property in the middle of the Preserve for political reasons, whatever those reasons may be, is far more troubling. The Preserve, like a lot of protected land, is already checkerboarded and cherrystemmed far beyond the degree to which it should be, and poking another hole in that Swiss cheese is just a bad idea.
Which is why Garrison Keillor’s “focus on the important shit” editorial in the New York Times pissed me off. From that editorial:
The so-called cultural wars over abortion and prayer in the schools and pornography and gays, most of it instigated by shrieking ninnies and pompous blowhards, did nothing about anything, except elect dullards to office who brought a certain nihilistic approach to governance that helped bring about the disaster in the banking industry that ate up a lot of 401(k)s, and all thanks to high-flyers in shirts like cheap wallpaper who never learned enough to let it discourage them from believing that they had magical powers over the laws of economics and could hand out mortgages by the fistful to people with no assets and somehow the sun would come out tomorrow. The anti-regulation conservatives enabled those people. We’re still waiting for an apology.
And now here comes the Supreme Court, about to rule in the case of a little plywood cross erected, as it turns out, on federal land in the Mojave Desert as a memorial to war dead — could there be anything less pressing right now? But we shall have great legal minds wrangling over something that doesn’t make a dime’s worth of difference to anybody whomsoever.
Keillor is a skilled writer: you’d have to be to make a fortune writing the same story over and over again once a week for decades. Since that one endlessly-repeated story is set in a fictitious landscape, however, he may have forgotten something about actual landscapes, to wit: it’s risky to pull little colorful details about those landscapes out of your ass, because they may turn out not to be precisely true. for instance, that little plywood cross he finds so unimportant is actually a seven-foot welded steel-pipe cross drilled permanently into a giant granite boulder. And the issue the Supreme Court is considering is, as I said above, a bit more wide-reaching than Keillor implies, having to do with the carving up of units of the National Park Service to suit the wingnuts’ cause du jour.
The point of Keillor’s editorial was to bemoan shallowness in the body politic, but it turns out there isn’t a whole lot of depth to the creator of Lake Wobegon, either. Maybe he’s like one a them Dry Lakes we have in the Mojave. You know: crusty, a bit salty, and generally irritating.
Anyway, what’s most striking me about this issue is the way people are talking about the land itself. Take this introductory piece from the Riverside Press-Enterprise:
“For three quarters of a century, a cross has stood high atop an outcropping of rocks in a far-flung and sun-blasted expanse of San Bernardino County’s High Desert.”
Or this from PBS:
“If you ever wondered where the middle of nowhere really is, it just might be right here: the Mojave Preserve in southern California.”
Some of you desert rats might have the same reaction to this that I do: a sense of surprise at hearing your favorite places referred to as “desolate.” Sunrise Rock, to me, is a lush and welcoming environment: full of shade and green, familiar and comfortable, with butterflies and rabbits and — as often as not — quiet pools of water among the rocks.
It comes as a bit of a shock to hear this idyllic landscape described as “sun-blasted,” “desolate,” or “barren.”
I remember, a dozen years ago, getting stuck in traffic on I-15 along The Strip in Vegas on my way from the Arizona Strip to the Preserve. There had been a very bad accident in front of us. We didn’t move at all for an hour or so. After ten minutes or so, people started getting out of their cars to stretch their legs. I started talking with the guy whose truck was right in front of mine. He’d spent the previous week enjoying himself in a cheap hotel off The Strip, taking in a show or two, and dropping a significant amount of money at the gaming tables. I told him what I’d been doing — sleeping under the stars thirty miles off the pavement — and was surprised when he expressed the same reaction to my activities that I’d kept to myself about his: wondering why anyone would enjoy spending that kind of time in what was obviously a wasteland.
The conservative groups rallying to support the cross make a desolation-related argument. If people are going to object to a seven-foot cross out in this desolate stretch of barren and sun-blasted uselessness, they argue, then why not object to a cross four times its height at Arlington National Cemetery?
That argument is a bit of an affront to my own religious beliefs, to tell you the truth. I’ve lived a few minutes from the Arlington National Cemetery, and I’ve lived a few minutes from Sunrise Rock, and only one of those two landscapes is sacred enough on its own that adding a cross to it is beside the point, and the tame, well-manicured graveyard in suburban Northern Virginia isn’t it.
Oh yes…I forgot about that deal on the table when you posted initially. I have to admit, I’ve never understood the acrimony about this cross on either side. There is plenty of cultural history across MNP; I guess I’ve always considered the cross just another part of it. Now it’s been turned into a pawn to further someone’s agenda, and that’s BS.
For me items like that have always been a great hook to help people understand that area is not the barren wasteland they may think it is. Showing friends Vanderbilt and Ivanpah, Kelso, Essex, Lanfair, Goffs and the other human history out there makes it easier for them to appreciate the natural history as well. Come for the food, stay for the fun! Many people need a stake in the action to care enough.
Not to say I’m all for continued rich civilization out there (the phone booth was fun, though.) I just don’t think we should rip up the history that’s already present. It has to be possible to satisfactorily keep the cross, keep the history, AND keep the wild.
I’m pretty much there with you. The continued hunting in the Preserve bothers me a hell of a lot more than the cross does.
Must man leave his mark wherever he goes? The cross is no different to me than the photo of vandalism on “real grunge rock” on Jim’s blog. Are there not enough other places for people to practice their superstitions that they have to co-opt my cathedral with painted steel pipe?
Where, in the hue and cry emanating from this far dry place, did the “war memorial” get lost? Sure, the cross is a Christian symbol but it is also a symbol wholly appropriate to the Great War, to the blasted trenches of northern France, the memorial object. A cross was presented literally millions of times during those five years as a means of comfort to those who lost limb and life and to those left behind. If this cross on this rock in this desert is really there to facilitate meditation on civilization’s insanity circa 1914 then it works for all of us. Given the direction of the current discussion, especially concentrating on the letter of the law, it may be necessary to provide more material at the site to help us keep our focus.
I second Jim Stanger above:
Black dog, from what I have read this is no longer represents a war memorial to most people, but instead has become principally a religious icon. And if the religiosity of the memorial is not what is important, then it should be replaced with something more suitable to conveying it’s original purpose. When one of the most important days to people to “congregate” at this memorial is Easter Sabbath for a sunrise service and not Memorial Day, then the site has lost it’s original significance. Only my opinion, but then I am a godless heathen after all.
Interestingly, plaintiff Frank Buono — a devout Roman Catholic — specifically objects to the notion that the cross is a secular symbol, calling that an erosion of his own rights to his own religious beliefs. In that PBS video I linked, he asks — quite reasonably, I think — “yes, it’s a commonly understood symbol of sacrifice, of death. How did it get that way? Based on what?” (Paraphrased.)
It’s an interesting argument. I’m not sure I buy it: the Vatican doesn’t own the rights to a geometric figure. But it’s interesting, and worth exploring.
And NWP has a very good point about Easter.
Should the court eventually rule that the cross stays, I’m not going to waste much outrage on it. Then again, I’m not really a member of any group that has been systematically oppressed by Christians — aside from being a former Catholic school student, I mean — who might reasonably wish for a war memorial that didn’t almost expressly disinclude the tens of thousands of war dead and veterans who were of faiths, or non-faiths, not represented by the cross.
One can reasonably argue that the cross is intended to represent those people in good faith anyway. One can also reasonably argue that the Mormons baptize gentiles posthumously in good faith. It seems to me that the arbiters of the fairness should be the people directly affected.
And all that said, I’d rather have the cross there on NPS land than have the Preserve partitioned yet further.