The 'Great Wall of America' and the threat from within


Los Angeles Times


By Richard Rodriguez
Story posted 2010.09.05 at 12:06 AM PDT






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...link to complete article