Saturation Point
A target was identified, my hunger was awakened, and a mission was launched. Atop Mt. Laguna in eastern San Diego lies the decaying corpse of a military base known as a DEW Point. Using the internet I compiled my research of the site. Overhead imagery, a crude hand-drawn map of the base facilities, as well as working directions of how to get there. With flashlight in hand I headed out for the mountain-top ruins.
Once part of the D.E.W. Line (Distant Early Warning) defense system it now lies desiccated and deserted in the thin mountain air. During the Cold War the government lined the west coast with radar installations. These stations were manned 24/7, vigilantly watching for Soviet missiles and aircraft. The abandoned Air Force base on Mt. Laguna was one of these stations, now lying abandoned for almost 30 years.
“Assigned to the Air Force’s 27th Air Division at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, the F4Ds of VF(AW) 3 were controlled by the Air Force early warning radar site on Mount Laguna, code named “Anderson.” In the late 1950s the squadron averaged one or two actual scrambles and two or three training scrambles per day. VF(AW) 3 consistently outperformed Air Force interceptor squadrons in scramble time and intercept effectiveness. The squadron also maintained an excellent safety record and superb aircraft-readiness rates—benefiting from the proximity of the Douglas factory, about a hundred miles away, and a first-rate factory representative. Although frequent scrambles added some excitement, one F4D pilot with VF(AW) 3 in the early 1960s described the squadron’s existence as “a somewhat boring life of intercepting errant airliners,” a life made fun and interesting only by the antics of the outstanding pilots. The air defense mission gave VF(AW) 3 appeal with the public, although residents near North Island were wont to complain about the noise of F4D afterburners.
When unidentified air contacts were detected approaching the southern California coast, “Anderson” would sound the scramble alarm at North Island. With afterburners blazing, a pair of delta-winged F4Ds would thunder into the sky, rattling the windows of homes in Coronado. VF(AW) 3 routinely got a pair of F4Ds into the air three minutes after the klaxon sounded. In an emergency, all twenty-five F4Ds could be in the air in less than two hours. Vectored to within thirty miles of the contact by Mount Laguna, F4Ds completed intercepts using their onboard radar, attempting to identify the contact without its being aware of their presence.”
- Guarding the Cold War Ramparts: The U.S. Navy’s Role in Continental Air Defense, Captain Joseph F. Bouchard, U.S. Navy
“Anderson” consists of two general areas. One, the base proper, includes all the operational components of the radar station and it’s functioning. The other, the living area, includes housing, messing, and recreation facilities for the staff and their families. The place is like a time capsule from the ’50s. At the end of Anderson’s lifetime both the operational and living areas were crudely stripped of essential equipment and the base was abandoned. The majority of the structures still stand, quietly waiting out eternity, their meaning made irrelevant through time and technology.
The place is classic Cold War ruins. While exploring the amazing depths of the site I found myself asking the question “what would current-day America look like in ruins?” It was not just a random musing. I had recently seen the documentary Architecture of Doom, a film about the 3rd Reich and Nazi Germany. I read the well researched and skillfully written book World War Z about a global pandemic that creates millions of zombies out of infected humans that devastates the planet. Additionally, I had been on several other exploratory missions into abandoned military bases in Miramar (Green Farm & Atlas Shrugged). In a nutshell I had ruins on my mind. I think back to my trip to Berlin, remembering the vast difference between the East and the West sides of the city. One side dreary, monotonous, industrial while the other was colorful, lively, and erratic. The two sides illustrated the dichotomy between western democracy and eastern communist states. In Architecture of Doom it was explained that Hitler had a deep interest in architecture. He at one time attempted to gain admittance to school for it, but was rejected. Nevertheless, using his position and the power it afforded coupled with his own vision he dabbled in architecture throughout his life. One concept that he was intensely aware of was of the perceptions of future historians at the discovery of the buildings and monuments of his own age. Hitler knew that all empires will eventually fall, and that one day his buildings would simultaneously serve as shrines to Hitler’s own greatness, expressions of Norse mythology, as well as testament to the timelessness and magnitude of Nazi accomplishments. He even went so far as to have his architects draft images of his great structures in ruins to measure their perceived effects. It could almost be said that these buildings, statues, and structures would only actually become realized in the form of ruins, remaining merely useless historical potential to their creators and inhabitants.
This got me thinking about America. What conclusions would future historians draw from our architecture? A McDonalds every two blocks, a Starbucks on every corner. We are world leaders in obesity, a staggering 30 percent of our entire population is obese. Prisons, jails, and the vestiges of state institutions dominate every city, perhaps the cities themselves serving as prisons. We are a prison nation. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. The United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. The United States has approximately 2.3 million criminals behind bars.
The police, the government, the law has become immensely powerful. The bottom line being that criminality, corruption, chaos and war entail non-democratic tendencies. History has witnessed the rise of totalitarian systems, police states and conventional dictatorships. The systems and institutions of our own society have created this virtual police state here in the US.
The police have transformed from a protective force into a controlling one. Policemen are not minions of a totalitarian regime like in 1984, or even the henchmen of corporations like in Robocop, but something much more subtle and insidious. They are the new modern tax collectors. With an ever growing body of legislature, the penal code becomes the new tax code in such a way that the two become inseparable. Public safety is merely the excuse to enact more and more rules through which the state can tax it’s citizens. With a sluggish, ineffectual, unsympathetic, and overeburdened legal beurocracy there is no way, without substantial finances with which to hire a lawyer, to be heard. Truly this is taxation without representation. Citizens are subject to excessive fines and penalties for any indescretion while the opressive economic structure acts as prison. The people are thereby ’imprisoned’ in their own country under the burden of oppressive economics and consumerism.
The growth of corporate power is understandable in this system. Financially preying upon an already captive citizenry would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Advertising is ever-present. Ironically, the billboards and signs only seem to advertise foreign products: the US itself has become a victim of junk culture and economic imperialism. It seems that the US has become utterly commercialized. Consumption is not only the financial foundation of the society, but also the social foundation; even on a crude material level. Imagining the most vicious capitalistic extension of these ideas being a vastly overpopulated world where businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge trans-national corporations. Advertising becoming hugely aggressive, and through advertising the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market. However, the most basic elements become increasingly scarce, including water and fuel. It seems the end-state of this course is not far off. Today corporations have adopted neo-aristocratic protocol and constructed monstrous buildings, insipid monuments over soulless commercialism in a dying world.
America is experiencing escalated urbanization. Los Angeles, for example, is a true mega-city. Perhaps the commercial marketing impulse makes the new American Dream unachievable outside the cities, maybe people have simply become dependent on (and even addicted to) the comfort and convenience a city provides. Be that as it may; the urban areas are overcrowded. The logical result of over-population in such a large city is shortage of living quarters and redundancy of manpower; the living and working conditions of the common man becoming close to unbearable. The overcrowded streets display a wide array of ethnicities, nationalities, religions, cultures and sub-cultures. The American society has finally become truly multi-cultural — if was it not for the fact that it had ceased to be a culture a long time ago. The streets seem to be dangerous, ruled by prowling police cars and sibilant street gangs. Criminality has become more widespread and more violent; the population of violent prisoners rising from just under 200,000 to well over 700,000 in the last 20 years alone. The city is repressive and unfeeling. The vast mazes of dark streets bathing in neon light are true asphalt jungles, well worthy of any film noir classic. The cities are like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.
Street dwellers are apathetic and indifferent. I myself have been drunken, assaulting, and even brutally antagonistic in dark alleys with no response. Humans are hunted like animals through the streets by police, who makes no attempt to conceal their savagery. There are plenty of by passers and spectators who not only fail to interfere, but even to react at all. The mega-cities seem to have killed the inhabitants with anonymity and gloominess, as well as crushed any trace of empathy and compassion in their souls. They have become isolated, barren islands in a frozen ocean of concrete and steel.
Maybe the earth itself could be considered human architecture in modern times. Without getting all hippie and gay, I would not be the first to detail the depiction which illustratetes the possible impact of environmental problems.
Take a look inside any home in America and you will find a space filled with gadgetry and junk, some of it decades old. Cobbled-together mechanics and electronics which once were temporary have become permanent, a succession of technology piled upon itself like layers of strata. Level after level built up like ruins of ancient cities built on again and again. Every surface piled upon like an exhibit from the kitchen debate bulging and tumorous with consumer cancer.
Evaluate the average American life. Technology is profoundly present. People have adapted to this technology, not vice versa: the machines have become subjects instead of objects. There is an omni-presence of annoying noises, blinking diodes, feeding displays and monitors, hissing gauges and sensors, beeping alarms, winding piping and circuitry; everyone seems to be accustomed to this never-ending sensory stress. Americans have become completely dependent on technology: in their working places, in their homes, in everyday life. Man has ceased to be a human being, and has become an organic component in the societal machine.
Here in ”Anderson”, amongst the decaying wreckage of the ’50s, I truly come to grips with how far America has departed from what could be considered her unique and difinitive values. Here in this rotting cadaver I can almost put my finger on the spot where the dream died. The place feels hopeful and nascient like a summer camp. The structures are modest and functional. The layout is comfortable and despite being a completely abandoned ghost town it has a real sense of community. The place is morbidly ironic. There is a hopefulness in the crumbling buildings, a sense of purpose in the disintegrating roads. The base club, now moldering and putrescent, is lively. The chow hall, now withered into spoilation, seems full and healthy. Only the operational area of the base lays gaping and desolate like the jaws of an empty skull. What happened to all the people who lived here? Where did their lives lead them? With respect to the ideals of the age when this place was created they are forever lost in time. A line requires two points, as does a path or a journey. Everything needs a beginning in order for it to have an end. If the starting point has been erased, that point destroyed, then the destination becomes irrelevant, meaningless, intangible. Maybe I don’t have to wonder what the ruins of the lost culure of ”America” would look like at all, maybe they’re here already.
View the gallery below of the journey into “Anderson”, the abandoned Mt. Laguna military base (as well as a few happy-snaps from along the way).
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