Get a war memorial we don’t have to fight over

San Diego Union Tribune
by Logan Jenkins, December 21, 2009

Of all the possible responses to the 20-Year (and Counting) War over the fate of the Mount Soledad memorial cross, the most poignant, it seems to me, is the plea for a re-imagined monument on the federal land.

This is the romantic’s last gasp at reconciling polar opposites. The idealist’s squaring of the cross circle.

Just imagine:

Lawsuits terminated. Peace declared in our time. The skyscraping cross shipped to the lawn of a nearby church. A modern monument cuts the festering Gordian knot that has formed around the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Sam Dolnick, a World War II veteran and a self-described “humanistic Jew,” revived this utopian theme following a recent 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing, which pitted lawyers for the ACLU and the 114-year-old Jewish War Veterans of the United States against the federal government.

This was the latest grind of the wheel as the La Jolla cross slouches toward Washington and its ultimate date with the Supreme Court.

“The difficulty now is that although the fight is against the use of a specific religious symbol to represent all religions of those who died in service, no other symbol is suggested to replace the Christian cross,” Dolnick wrote in a letter to the editor.

Dolnick’s idea, which I had heard at least once before, is to remove the cross and put in its place an artistic replica of the battlefield memorial for a fallen soldier: an upright rifle with a helmet on top and boots on the bottom.

Putting aside the obvious objection — how would the other military branches feel about an Army-centric memorial? — Dolnick’s notion is sweetly futile, a perfect mission for a Jewish Don Quixote.

“It has been my experience over 91 years that when something is objected to, if nothing is suggested to replace the objected item, nothing is ever accomplished,” the La Mesan wrote.

In other words, you can’t beat something with nothing.

The trouble with the 56-year-old cross is that it’s really, really something. In fact, it’s not just one thing. It’s two things.

You could say that it’s both giant and windmill.

As a symbol, the Mount Soledad cross is, at its core, ambiguous. That’s its slippery genius. Even on sunny days, it’s shrouded by a perceptual fog.

On the one hand, it’s a religious symbol, arguably the most freighted in human history. It directly evokes Christ’s Passion. Believers see His suffering in the archetypal outline.

There’s a visceral reason Easter sunrise services are held at Mount Soledad. (You know a giant rifle wouldn’t draw the devout to reflect upon the resurrection.)

The cross is, at the same time (and even in the same mind), a culturally comfortable symbol of death, a 29-foot sentry for a universal military cemetery within which are buried veterans of all — or no — faiths.

In the past 20 years, as combatants have squared off in a long succession of courtrooms, the cross’s connection to the death of veterans has been reinforced by commemorative plaques at its base.

The majority of San Diegans, I suspect, can live with the inherent ambiguity, the coexistence of the divine and the secular, the manifest constitutional violation (an exclusive religious symbol on public land) and the manifest cultural amelioration (a familiar historical emblem that honors the war dead of any or no religion).

The other day, I heard from Al Rodbell, a Carlsbad writer who suggested that my crass view of the cross — I told him that, at this point, I really didn’t care what happens to it — was colored by the fact that I had been sheltered from the “virus” of anti-Semitism.

Rodbell began a follow-up letter to me with a shocking string of profanities hurled at Jews for centuries.

If I were Jewish, if fate had not knit me as a blue-eyed born into a Presbyterian family, I would feel differently about the Christian cross on federal land, he suggested.

Maybe so.

My experience with religious and ethnic prejudice in America has been largely vicarious. To comprehend bigotry, I’ve had to read books, watch movies, marry into a Jewish family.

Still, the cruel irony of a Christian cross looking down on a town that, when the cross was built and afterward, strongly discouraged Jews from living there is not lost on me.

Say or think what you will about the Mount Soledad cross it’s not modern in concept. It’s not cool.

In urging a crusade for a replacement of the Mount Soledad cross, Rodbell asked me to imagine “a soaring work of art, abstract enough to represent the force of religion, the toll of war and the aspiration for peace. It would be a small example to the city, the country and perhaps even the world that there are ways to transcend the limits of a given political system. … The hardpan of congealed conflict has to be plowed, which will take many passes; and then perhaps, just perhaps, a symbol the entire city could be proud of could grace the highest point of ‘America’s Finest City.’ ”

Support the Evolution of the Soledad Cross. Peace on Earth.

As a Christmas message, a gift borne by two Jewish wise men, it has a certain ring to it.