Sometimes Walls Fail; Other Times, Brains

If you're going to write a Style front-pager around a premise, it would be nice if it were true.

Joel Garreau has The Walls Tumbled By Time mocking President Bush's signing the law for a wall along parts of the Mexican border. The subhed reads From China to Berlin, Fences Have Failed to Exclude or Contain. That will be news to the hundreds of thousands of East Germans who wanted to leave and couldn't (Garreau does note fragments of the wall have the "palpable chill of evil." He doesn't add "because the wall excluded and contained.") Naturally Garreau doesn't mention the San Diego border wall as Sen. Frist wrote last month:

When Congress mandated the construction of a 14-mile fence in San Diego, a drastic downturn occurred in illegal immigration. While law enforcement apprehended 200,000 border violators near San Diego during 1992, the number dropped to 9,000 last year. Since other areas remained unsecure, however, illegal immigrants have continued to come to San Diego.

Naturally Garreau doesn't mention the wall in Gaza:

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy declared last week he has changed his opinion on Israel's controversial separation barrier in light of its drastic effect on terror, forcing French authorities to clarify their position on the issue.

The barrier, which separates the West Bank from the rest of Israel, has garnered much criticism for creating a ghetto-style situation for the Palestinians and for allegedly appropriating Palestinian land on the Israeli side.

But although the French government has been critical of it since the start of its construction four years ago, Douste-Blazy has now reversed the feeling.

“I have significantly evolved on the matter of the separation fence” said Douste-Blazy on French Jewish television TFJ on Thursday. “Although the wall was a moral and ethical problem for me, when I realised terror attacks were reduced by 80 percent in the areas where the wall was erected, I understood I didn’t have the right to think that way.”

Walls work. Depends on the wall and a lot of other things including the society that builds it.

And unless Garreau envisions Mexicans organizing Panzer divisions or a massed amphibious assault, it's hard to see what the Maginot Line or Hitler's Atlantic Wall and Normandy have to do with anything.

And what partisan for reality cannot but love this:

Once walls existed to keep one culture from taking over another culture, but in this case, that battle has long since been lost by both sides. There is a broad swath of North America from the Pacific to the Gulf, and from Denver to very deep into Northern Mexico -- as far as Cabo San Lucas and San Luis Potosi -- where it is increasingly difficult to know where abstractions like the United States and Mexico begin and end.

Maybe some of the millions of illegal Mexicans can help him out on that. They seem capable of detecting non-abstract differences. Otherwise they'd be streaming to Guatemala.

Abstractions

Abstractions

Abstractions

Abstractions