To borrow corruptly from the Bard, “A wall by any other name would still be a wall.” Whether a barrier, a fence (barbed wired or not), circles of razor wire, steel slats, stone, hog panels, rock, solid cement, a line (as in the Maginot Line), with or without turrets and machine gun emplacements… it’s still a wall.
I know, you’re as sick as of hearing about “the wall” as I am, and probably you’re as confused as I am about whether and how much wall we have, whether and how much wall is currently under construction, whether and how effective it is, whether there is a need for more wall, how much it would cost, and whether it would be worth it.
Perhaps the wisdom of the ages regarding walls might be of some use here. Let me share with you a few facts about walls. There are as many and as varied a number of walls as man’s imagination could create. A few of them you’ve heard of. Many you have not. I’ve edited the list down to a few that I have visited and have some limited personal knowledge of and a few that neither you or I have ever heard of. To make it interesting, I’ll give you a few factoids about each, and if any evidence exists of their efficacy.
- The Great Wall of China: Of course you know that it is not one continuous wall. It is a series of walls measuring some 13,000 miles built over hundreds of years, which now exist in various levels of repair. The leaders of the Ming dynasty are credited for doing the most worthwhile wall building in the 14th and 15th centuries. It seems they were concerned about border control and invasions of the “Mongol hordes” from the north. Sounds a little like the Trumpster’s concern about the illegal, ferocious “caravans” from the south and “border security.” I’ve actually visited The Great Wall twice. The first time was on the coldest February day in memory. Upon arrival at the Badaling gate, I urgently sought to relieve myself of the mugs of coffee quaffed in route. At the direction of the nearest chicom soldier (i.e. Chinese communist), I headed for an opening in the wall that purported to have the needed facilities. As I entered the cave-like room I was accosted by an overpowering, unimaginably foul smell that words cannot adequately describe. But I can say the smell stopped me in my tracks. I was on the horns of a very delicate dilemma. I had no good options. Finally, I backed out to semi-fresh air, took the largest gulp I could handle, squinted my eyes, and made a short dash to the relief trench. I did my business until my lungs were exhausted then barely made it to the exit. If only we could only capture that smell and position a number of canisters with remotely operated spray nozzles, we would have the ne plus ultra of border security. However, this thirty foot high wall of stone did work, but only for a while. Ultimately the Mongol hordes went over, under and around the wall and had their way with the Mings. I suspect they cut a wide swath around the slit trenches.
- The Berlin Wall: Actually, the official name of this now well-known structure was the Anti-Facist Protection Rampart. And you still get different stories about whether it was built to keep people in or to keep people out. In either case, it didn’t work well for very long. It was built of concrete, wire mesh, concertina wire, and contained what was euphemistically referred to as a “death strip” or a buffer space that warned anyone entering of possible death or worse. The wall part of the wall actually located in Berlin was only part of a longer (155 km) security barrier populated by continuous military patrols and frequent manned guard posts. And still people got through. Some 5000 courageous souls made it through at great risk, over and under the wall in Berlin and environs. Many others died trying. When I first visited the wall shortly after its destruction in 1991, it was nothing more than a symbol of hatred and oppression.
- The Wailing Wall: Actually this is only a part of the larger and longer Western Wall of Jerusalem. It is a mere 187 feet long and 19 meters high, but if you’ve ever been there, you will never forget it. I don’t remember the details of my visit, but I do remember that the protocol for visiting was quite elaborate and had to do with where you stood and what you wore on your head. It has, at various times, been claimed by everyone in the neighborhood, and is considered by all to be a holy manifestation for reasons that I’m not qualified to explain. I know all Jewish men wore a yarmulke, and men and women were separated. It was accepted practice for all visitors to place a note or a prayer on a small slip of paper in a crack in the wall. Most, if not all, of the Jewish supplicants were also bowing repeatedly so as to touch their forehead against the wall. One could mistakenly presume this is where “beating your head against a stone wall” came from. But it’s actually only an orthodox method of prayer. I believe, but cannot confirm, that this is one of the oldest of the well known walls of the world , its construction having been started in 19 BCE by King Herod.
- The Siegfried and Maginot Lines: This is where the definition of “wall” gets stretched a bit, but I include them here to provide evidence of a point of view regarding the efficacy of walls. These walls (Lines) were built by the Germans and French respectively at about the same time during the run-up to WWII. Both of them were advertised as being the ultimate in “border security,” but neither of them worked when they were most needed. Both were cleverly designed by the best military and engineering minds of their times. They were built and improved over time, but required tending by thousands of military and civilian personnel. And they were no small potatoes either. The Siegfried Line was over 630 km in length, and the Maginot Line covered the entire length of France’s border with Germany. Unfortunately, it did not also cover France’s border with Belgium. The Lines were composed of thousands of reinforced concrete bunkers, pill boxes, trenches, and fortresses often reinforced by armor-plating and rows of tank trapping “dragons teeth” also made of concrete. Many of the structures were interconnected with other barriers and even tunnels. All to no avail. When Germany attacked France through Belgium for the second time in thirty years in May of 1940, they just ignored the Maginot Line by going around it. The Germans called it a “flankenmanover.” I call it poor planning by the French. In 1944 when the Western Allies were finally in a position to attack the Rhineland, they had to go through what German propaganda had advertised as the “unbreachable bulwark.” It turned out, however, that when assaulted 120,000 troops plus division upon division of armor, nothing was unbreachable, albeit at a very high cost.
There are many other walls that one could describe here, but I will only list them in passing for your edification: The Stone Wall of Croatia, 15th century; the Sumerians’s Amorite Wall, 21 BCE; the Long Wall of Athens, 461 BCE; Goren Wall, 5th century BCE; Hadrian’s Wall,12th century CE; and the walls in Israel… the West Bank Wall, the Gaza Wall, and the Lebanon Wall, which have a mixed reputation for keeping people in or out, depending on your perspective.
The final wall that I will describe is one in which I had a very personal stake. I call it Sandra’s Wall, named after, you guessed it, my darling wife S. Some years ago it was determined by the powers that be that we needed a new manse. Not really a new house, but something different from the one in which we lived and seemed perfectly satisfactory to me. Nevertheless, we purchased another house and S. conspired at length with our friend and general contractor to redo, expand, and generally change what I thought to be a perfectly good house. It might have needed a touch up here and there, but nothing more. I won’t bore you with the details of the process which seemed to never end, but I will mention the wall. The entrance to our garage was a longish drive from the front of the house which closely paralleled the property line. An older, somewhat tatty low wall was already there, but it was determined that a new, grander fence (wall) was in order, and so we promptly inquired of our neighbor if he would be interested in participating in the project. S. received a very curt “no,” with a warning that he expected to approve the design, and he would make sure that we followed the rules of the city for fencing. Seemed pretty ominous to me, as the neighbor was a well-known real estate developer with a reputation for litigation when something didn’t suit him. To her credit, S. did the research and ultimately designed and built a mighty fine wall, I mean fence. Exactly eight feet tall (a limit imposed by the city), solid concrete footing on our property, haydite block covered with stucco tinted the color of our main house. Looked good to me. Not so much to the guy next door. He approached S. in a huff one day saying all the wrong things to her about the fence that she had designed and paid for. When she finally got to the bottom of his real complaint it was that our fence (wall) blocked his view from his kitchen counter when he was having coffee in the morning. I never did find out the exact wording of her response, but I have a hunch that the F word was in there somewhere. We never heard from the neighbor again. Disproving another trite aphorism that “Good walls make good neighbors.”
I don’t know how the fight over Trump’s Wall is going to work out, but if history serves, we shouldn’t expect too much for too long.
