Mono Vista Campground
Lee Vining, California
Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 4:30 pm PDT

Weather: Sunny and Warm; Intermittent Breezes
Temperature: 67F
Altitude: 6875 feet

The picture was taken this morning at our previous campsite in Lone Pine. That's Mt. Whitney in the distance, the highest mountain in the lower 48 states.

We played tourist this morning and drove here to the Mono Lake area this afternoon over two high passes and some stunning scenery. This morning, however, ranged from the trivial to the traumatic.

We started out driving around the hills west of Lone Pine where many of the old western movies were made. The campground had a guidebook telling us where to go to see the major location shoots. Since I used to watch Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, etc., as a kid, the countryside looked very familiar. We then went to the Lone Pine Movie Museum, filled with memorabilia of movies made in the area. They had the car Bogie drove wildly down a mountain road just west of here in "High Sierra," as well as stage coaches, costumes, movie posters, etc. Very well done, and the introductory 20-minute film was terrific--ending with "Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?" by the Statler Brothers!

Then we drove to Manzanar National Historic Site, the remnants of a Japanese-American internment camp a few miles north of Lone Pine. There is a typically well done National Park Service Visitor Center, with a film and exhibits, and a video clip of President Reagan signing the apology and reparation payment legislation in 1988--years after many of the victims had died. He said, quite correctly, "it was just an awful mistake." The more I read and looked at those pictures, the more I wanted to scream. FDR is a hero of mine, but this was one major disaster of a decision he made. Putting a human face on the whole experience brought it all into perspective:
a. These people were forced at gunpoint from their homes, many on 24-hour's notice--2/3 of them American citizens, the rest legal residents!
b. Many of the young men volunteered for the Army, but were turned down until 2 years into the war. The exhibit also told the story of a U.S. Army soldier who won the Medal of Honor (posthumously) in Italy, while his mother was forcibly detained behind barbed wire in the California desert.
c. Not one person detained (imprisoned?) in one of these camps was every convicted of espionage, sabotage, or conspiracy against the United States. Not one!

Then I started mentally reviewing our history. Do we really always believe in our Constitution or just during the good times? It seems whenever we're really stressed as a society, the Constitution takes a major hit--French threats (1798) result in the Alien and Sedition Acts; Indian threats and we "remove" the Cherokee (1832), Creeks (1834), Navajo (1868), Nez Perce (1877) etc.; Bolshevik Revolution and aftermath (1919-20), the Palmer Raids looking for communists and anarchists; Pearl Harbor (1941), Manzanar and 12 other internment camps; the 1950's Soviet threat, McCarthyism and communists under everyone's bed; al-Qaeda (2001 and after), imprisonment without charge, torture, abrogation of treaties. What's going on here? Can't our Constitution take the heat? Appropriately at the Manzanar exhibit, there is a prominently displayed quote from Benjamin Franklin, something like, "Those who would give up an essential liberty for some temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." He's talking about us, folks! Think a minute: do we really think those guys in Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787 would discard any of the fundamental rights of citizens because somebody attacked or threatened them. I think they were made of sterner stuff and believed in what they were doing. Do we?

Sorry about that--I do get wound up. But I do believe this torture business is far from over and that Obama is playing it very coyly, waiting for a groundswell as more and more of the details come out. And every time Cheney talks on the subject, he digs himself a deeper hole.