REPRESENTATIVE DINA TITUS/VIA TWITTER
It just doesn’t get better than this. On Friday, as you may have read, President Obama signed a proclamation establishing the Basin and Range National Monument, some 704,000 acres of land in Nevada that includes all sorts of fossils as well as Michael Heizer’s gargantuan work City, which he has been building since 1972. Nevada Senator Harry Reid had been lobbying for the protection, which prevents development on the land, and he is pumped: “This is going to be an attraction. It is going to be world famous. World famous!” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. (Some locals are less excited: “It’s disgusting. It’s loathsome. It’s illegal. It’s unfair,” a county commissioner told the paper. “We feel like we’re not citizens.”) In any sense, judging by the photo above, it looks like all the involved parties were on hand for the big moment and had a pretty great celebration: Govan! Obama! Reid, sporting the nice shades he has worn for the past few months because of a “gruesome exercise accident!” (Or was it a mob beatdown, as some right wingers have speculated?) Heizer himself, holding his fresh new hat! Nevada Congresswoman Dina Titus! A prime Childe Hassam painting at back right! Below, a bonus photograph of the action from Titus’s Twitter account.