Pubdate: Sun, 5 Sep 2010
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Page: A33
Copyright: 2010 Los Angeles Times
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/bc7El3Yo
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Richard Rodriguez
Note: Richard Rodriguez is the author of many books, including 
"Brown: The Last Discovery of America." He works for New America 
Media in San Francisco.

THE 'GREAT WALL OF AMERICA'

Between cynicism and hypocrisy lies the 2,000-mile U.S.- Mexico 
border. America is raising a wall in the desert to separate Mexican 
drug exporters from American drug consumers, to separate Latin 
American peasants who will work for low wages from the Americans who 
would hire them.

The Great Wall of America, straddling less than half the length of 
the border, descends into canyons and across the desert floor. For 
the Mexican, it represents a high hurdle. For the American, it is an 
attempt to stop the Roadrunner's progress with an Acme Border Sealing Kit.

In some places the wall is made of tennis-court-style cyclone fencing 
or dark mesh of the sort used for barbeque grills in public parks. In 
other places the wall is a palisade of 20-foot-tall bars that make a 
cage of both sides. The most emphatic segments are constructed of 
graffiti-ready slabs of steel.

On the Mexican side, if you stand with your back to the wall, you 
will see the poorest neighborhoods, built right up to the line. These 
frayed, weedy streets have become the killing fields in an 
international drug war; they are more daunting than the dangers of 
climbing the wall.

The traditional Mexican accommodation to moral failure -- the bribed 
policeman -- has degenerated to lawlessness in places such as Juarez 
and Tijuana, where police kill federal soldiers who kill police who 
kill drug gangsters who kill other gangsters of the sort who did 
kill, apparently with impunity, at least 15 teenagers celebrating a 
soccer victory. Punch 911 and you get the devil.

On the American side, if you stand with your back to the wall, you 
will see distance, as the United States recedes from the border. 
There is a shopping mall with big-box stores half a mile away. There 
is a highway that eventually leads to suburban streets laid out in 
uniform blocks, and cul-de-sacs where Mexican gardeners are the only 
ambulatory human life.

The suburban grid belies America's disorder. Grandma's knockoff Louis 
Vuitton handbag is so full of meds it sounds like a snake rattle. 
Grandma shares a secret addiction with her drug-addled dude of a 
grandson, whose dad prowls the Home Depot parking lot in his Japanese 
pickup, looking to hire a couple of Mexicans to clear out some dry scrub.

 From a distant height, America's wall might seem a wonderful stunt, 
like Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Running Fence" of 1976 -- a 
24-mile-long curtain that ran over the Northern California foothills 
to the sea. Before it was dismantled, "Running Fence" rippled and 
swelled with breezes off the Pacific.

David Tomb, an artist known for his studio portrait paintings, has 
for several years been hiking the Southwestern borderlands, drawing 
the birds of the region. Tomb tells me he has noticed how often the 
American wall interferes with the movement of the many animals that 
inhabit the desert and canyons -- wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, 
even snakes. His bird subjects are able to fly over the wall, as are 
butterflies, as are Piper Cub cocaine consignments.

In the remotest regions of northern Mexico, the terrain is so 
treacherous that nature itself forms the wall against America. 
Desperation moves migrants to attempt ever-more-treacherous terrain 
to achieve U.S. soil.

In recession America 2010, the lament most often heard is that the 
middle class is losing its grip on the American dream. (We have 
redefined the American dream as the ability of a succeeding 
generation to earn more than its preceding generation.)

On patriotism-for-profit talk radio and television, the illegal 
immigrant is, by definition, criminal. She comes to steal the 
American dream. But in my understanding, the dream belongs to the 
desperation of the poor and always has. The goddess of liberty in New 
York harbor still advertises for the tired and the poor, the wretched 
refuse. I tell you, there is an unlucky man in the Sonoran Desert 
today who will die for a chance to pluck dead chickens in Georgia or 
change diapers in a rest home in Nevada.

Great empires expand beyond their own borders. Empires in decline build walls.

As it stands, the Great Wall of America is a fraction of the length 
of the Great Wall of China. China's dragon-spined ramparts, once a 
wonder of isolation, are now a draw for tourists, even while China 
trespasses its own borders to forge the Chinese century. The dragon 
flies to Africa and to Latin America. While American soldiers die in 
Afghanistan, the Chinese venture to Kabul to negotiate mineral rights.

The nearer precedent to the American Wall may be Israel's wall in the 
West Bank. More than 400 miles long, the Israeli "barrier" -- in some 
places a fence, in others a concrete mass nearly twice the height of 
the Berlin Wall -- was constructed, according to Israeli officials, 
to deter terrorists. After Sept. 11, the fear one heard in America 
was that agents of violence from the Middle East might easily 
disguise themselves as Latin American peasants and trespass into our midst.

What more obvious reason is there for a wall than protection? Any 
nation should police those who come and go across its borders. But in 
the United States, as in Israel, the wall has created a new anxiety. 
Once the wall is in place, anxiety about the coming outsider changes 
to an anxiety about who belongs within.

The question that has lately been debated in the Knesset is bluntly 
stated: Who is a Jew? In Israel, the answer to the question concerns 
religion and citizenship. But it entails further practical 
considerations. Israel has decided to rid itself of 400 children of 
illegal foreign workers (some of whom built the West Bank wall), 
children who were born in Israel, speak Hebrew as their mother tongue 
and know no other country.

The question that has lately been taken up by U.S. senators is 
bluntly stated: Who is an American? Republicans have proposed 
excising the part of the 14th Amendment that guarantees citizenship 
to anyone born on U.S. soil. GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South 
Carolina refers to foreign women who come to this country to "drop" 
their babies. Graham chooses diction that describes inhuman beasts of burden.

I cannot guess whether this new nativism -- though it overrules 
nativity -- is serious business or merely a play for reelection. The 
irony remains: The land of the free that the wall was built to 
protect -- the literal "homeland," soil so infused with sacred legend 
it was deemed by the makers of the Constitution more important than 
blood in determining citizenship -- is threatened from within. And 
the wall that is supposed to proscribe the beginning of America 
becomes the place where America ends.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake