> From: Melinda Skinner
> This is very sad to hear. I had believed the "big lie."
- - - -
> From: Jurretta J. Heckscher
> I have not yet had a chance to read the report, but I wonder if you could
> refresh our memories about whom to contact to register our disagreement
> with the present course of action?  Thanks.
- - - -

Thanks. You can write to Virginia's leaders, but they're hopeless. So I have 
another suggestion.

But first: It's important to reiterate that Virginia's leaders did engineer 
a national monument (i.e., a national park by presidential decree). However, 
they split it bizarrely to privilege developers,  as seen in a glance at the 
photo-plus-map illustration at http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/. The 
Big Lie, accepted unskeptically by national media, is that all of Fort 
Monroe became nationally stewarded.

Now, it's fine to omit the "development area" that's shown in the cited 
illustration, but not to omit the sense-of-place-defining bayfront. The 
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot declares that that crucial land "should be 
permanently set aside as open space and added to the park as soon as 
possible." The editors declare that protecting it “from development--any 
development--is critical to securing" Fort Monroe's integrity, lest the 
"value as a historic site, a natural resource and tourist attraction...be 
degraded."

Please note that word "degraded." In fact, please quote it from the Pilot's 
April editorial (http://hamptonroads.com/2012/04/next-step-fort-monroe) if 
you write to anyone. I'm just some science writer in Poquoson. They're 
Tidewater's leading daily. (But I do hope you cite my 
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ with its key illustration.)

So what can people do?

It looks increasingly like we need a deus ex machina, which is what I said 
in an op-ed nearly two years ago. (It's at 
http://articles.dailypress.com/2011-01-15/news/dp-news-oped-corneliussen-0116-20110115_1_fort-monroe-authority-national-treasure-91st-district 
and it's peppered with ads.) I recommended the Antiquities Act and 
intervention by the president to avoid what I called, and still call, an 
American cultural disaster. Unfortunately, that idea got exploited in a 
perverse way, I suspect mainly by former Governor Tim Kaine. He's the chief 
perp in this story (with plenty of bipartisan complicity, mind you), and he 
had the president's ear at the time. In any case, the president got 
snookered into making a fake, bifurcated national monument, with the heart 
of the historic landscape consigned to some degree of development. The 
actual degree is being kept vague, which is why the Pilot stipulated against 
"development--any development."

The only intervention I can now imagine (unless someone gets to Mrs. Obama, 
or something) could come via an unlikely awakening of the oblivious, lazy, 
press-release-believing national media.

(Energetic public attention by a Ken Burns, an Oprah Winfrey or nationally 
prominent historians would also have a chance--though Adam Goodheart, Ed 
Ayers and Douglas Brinkley have all accepted the fake, bifurcated national 
monument, in each case after talking to me and others, and in each case 
astonishing me. Jurretta might remember that I still owe her that whole 
story.)

So here's my idea for a deus ex machina: Fort Monroe needs letters to the 
editor, and the like, during the coming national focus on the 
sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. The letters could say 
lots of good things, but some might look something like what you see below 
the dashed line. The idea is to summon national accountability, and maybe 
some shaming, for the very people who tried to fool Virginia and the country 
with the Big Lie.

Thanks.

Steven T. Corneliussen
- - - - - - - -
ONE POSSIBLE LETTER TO THE EDITOR (OR FACEBOOK POSTING, OR WHATEVER):

Given the importance of the proclamation, and given that enterprising Black 
self-emancipators set into motion the politics that led to it, why is there 
so little attention to the controversy over post-Army Fort Monroe in 
Tidewater Virginia?

Along with the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot 
(http://hamptonroads.com/2012/04/next-step-fort-monroe), people there are 
demanding unification of the split national monument/park that the president 
established in 2011.

The problem, as seen at a glance in the illustration at 
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/, is that the bifurcation sacrifices 
to developers the sense-of-place-defining center of the historic landscape, 
which was the first landing place of the first captive Africans a 
quarter-millennium before the self-emancipation movement blossomed there in 
1861.

Would we ever allow condos on a Monticello hillside? Why is the country 
giving Virginia's developer-dominated politicians a free pass on Fort 
Monroe?

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