Los Angeles National Cemetery – 1
Posted on January 14, 2003
in Photos
We detoured from our visit to the gigantic living tombstone on Wilshire to visit one of the Cities of the Equally Dead: the Los Angeles Veterans Cemetery. It was a practice run to check a new compact flash card and to reawaken my photographic eye which had been asleep since late November. As I looked at the rows upon rows of identical tombstones, I could not help but remember a quote from Claude Levi-Strauss:
“The function of repetition is to make the structure of the myth apparent.” Over and over the white stones and the flat bronze markers repeated the same word “Valour” regardless of whether the deceased had lost his life in battle or due to cirrhosis of the liver from an alcoholism taken up to forget the horror of battles waged on soil mostly not American.
Tomorrow night, we head up to LAX and spend the night in a Motel 6, prior to our departure for Mexico City, by way of Houston. Our route takes us through three of the worst cities for air pollution on the continent. My eyes already burn in the foreboding.
