Читать книгу Up Against the Wall - Peter Laufer - Страница 11
ОглавлениеUP AGAINST THE WALL (EXPLETIVE)
The author and poet Jonah Raskin1 was mopping up his soup and salad dinner at the Casino bistro in Bodega—the Sonoma County village where scenes from Hitchcock’s “The Birds” were shot, a county once part of Mexico and these days filled with immigrants from Jalisco, immigrants documented and otherwise. We’ve been friends since he served as chair of the Communications Studies department at Sonoma State University—where I briefly taught.
We were talking about President Trump’s Mexico border wall, my study of walls worldwide and the research I was conducting into the origin of the phrase: Up against the wall.
“Did I tell you about the time,” Raskin queried me, “that I shouted, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker’ at a production of Joseph Heller’s play, ‘We Bombed in New Haven,’ and Heller added that line to the play and that it’s in the published text?” Raskin seemed pleased with his role as a literary footnote even though he added, “I didn’t get any credit.”
In fact, author Heller noted Raskin’s audience participation moment when the Columbia University student newspaper Spectator interviewed him in 1968 about his anti-war play. “As the actors came out for a curtain call,” the author of Catch 22 remembered, “a man stood up in the last row of the orchestra and yelled out, ‘Up against the war [sic], motherfucker!’ We were stunned,” Heller told the paper, “because we didn’t know who he was talking to. When we finally met the man, he explained what he meant to say was that we should take to the barricades—that we should be out fighting, rather than just sitting watching a play.”2
So what was it that Raskin advocated being up against? The war or the wall? Both? Vietnam was a shooting war and a societal wall. When I checked in with him, his answer across the years from the 1960s was unambiguous, despite Heller’s contemporaneous memory of the moment. “I yelled from the back of the theater, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker!’” Raskin told me, adding that the performance was a fundraiser for the National Lawyers Guild, “the old lefty organization that revived in the 1960s because of young lefty lawyers like my friend Bernardine Dohrn and my wife Eleanor Raskin.” He insisted he would not have even considered substituting “war” for “wall” when he disrupted the curtain call. “I don’t mess with classics of street slang. Didn’t then, don’t now.” And a classic of street slang it is.
Perhaps the phrase originated in the poem by LeRoi Jones, “Black People,” in which the text instructs: “All the stores will open if you say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick up!” During the 1967 Newark, New Jersey, riots (which he identified as “rebellion”), Jones was charged with resisting arrest and carrying an illegal weapon. At his trial later that year, Judge Leon W. Kapp read from the poem. Jones was found guilty and sentenced to three years in state prison, a sentence overturned when an appeals court ruled that Judge Kapp’s recitation prejudiced the jury.3 In a 1991 interview, Jones (by then he called himself Amiri Baraka)4 said Judge Kapp “decided to prove I had caused the riots by reading from a poem […] [a poem] not even published until after the riots were over. I objected that I was being tried for possession of two poems, and I was right.”5 Or perhaps Jones wasn’t the original author of the call to action but incorporated the line into his poem because Newark police were apt to use it when arresting black citizens.6 Whatever its origin, from the Lower East Side to Columbia University and thence across the continent, the phrase became common currency for rebellion. A posse of self-styled revolutionaries headquartered Downtown in New York City adopted it for their moniker and Mark Rudd, a leader of the 1968 student strike at Columbia, incorporated it into his open letter to the university’s president, Grayson Kirk, and credited it to LeRoi Jones (“whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot,” he added as an aside). The call became a rallying cry of the strike. And a year after Raskin’s yell, in 1969 on their Volunteers album, the Jefferson Airplane sang out, “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” for the chorus of their anthem “We Can Be Together.”
The call, without the oath, dates to ca. 1910, according to the British lexicographer Jonathon Green. It originated as military jargon meaning serious problems, according to Green’s research, “reinforced by the 1960s radical slogan, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker!’”7 And the military jargon originated with the reality that firing squad victims often are literally up against the wall.8 And up against the wall were piles of corpses during the murderous days of the Mexican Revolution when Pancho Villa, Emilio Zapata and the federales shot each other down with ease and glee, as civil war bled the country between 1910 and 1920.
Up against the wall, motherfucker: Patty Hearst apparently used the line when she famously participated in a bank robbery and called the cry out while cradling a machine gun—although it seems the coopted newspaper heiress dropped her voice at least for the final word of the order; lip readers working for federal prosecutors reconstructed the full sentence.9 I probably heard it—of course not for the first time—but repeated as Hearst’s quote during testimony at her 1976 trial, a bizarre show I covered as a correspondent for NBC News.
Even without the expletive, the up against the wall imagery is clear: stuck, nowhere to go (except—with luck—through it, under it or over it). Language, especially slang, mirrors reality. Balls to the wall. Hitting a wall. Breaking through the wall. Climbing the walls. Off the wall. Back to the wall. Banging your (my?) head against the wall. “Walls have an aroma of betrayal and death about them,” is Professor Raskin’s point of view. He tracks his awareness of walls to the short story “The Wall”—the 1939 Jean-Paul Sartre existential study focuses on firing squad executions, the victims up against a wall. “I’ll think about how I’d like to get inside the wall, I’ll push against it with my back […] with every ounce of strength I have,” one of the condemned tells others in his cell, “but the wall will stay, like in a nightmare.”10 Intriguing: my Casino rendezvous with Jonah Raskin in Bodega occurs proximate to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Running Fence” site—the artists’ 1976 installation of an 18-foot-high and 24.5-mile-long fence made of nylon. The piece ran from U.S. Highway 101 to the Pacific across Marin and Sonoma counties. This too was no impenetrable wall. The design allowed for cars and trucks, livestock and wildlife to cross the fence path.11
Good fences make good neighbors? Robert Frost takes on the aphorism in his classic 1914 poem “Mending Wall.” Working with his neighbor to fix their common stone wall he muses the now-classic wall critique, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What was I walling in or walling out, / And to whom was I like to give offence.” And then he knocks down the concept of walls with his coup de grâce. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down.” And yet walls remain ubiquitous—the metaphoric, the exclusionary and the confining.
Encountering Borderlines
The first time I encountered an obstacle separating my home state California and our southern neighbor Mexico was back in my high school days. Two chums and I were on a road trip in a rattletrap VW Beetle, vagabonding along the Pacific for a summer adventure. Just below Ensenada we were stopped at a roadblock by federales who demanded travel documents. They looked at our papers and ordered us to turn back toward the States. Gringos under the age of 18, they informed us, were forbidden to drive further down the Baja coast without a letter from their parents authorizing the trip. In those pre-Internet days we couldn’t send an instant text missive back home for the required permission slip.
These days of course it is the U.S. government working overtime controlling the border with Mexico.
“I will build a great, beautiful wall on our southern border,” thundered Donald Trump, first as a candidate and then as president, and his followers bellow back, “Build the wall! Build the wall!” On the east side of San Diego, just over the border from dusty Tijuana shanties, test prototypes were built in 2017 to show the world how that wall might look: monoliths of steel and concrete launched skyward. The Trump wall samples stood tall as political threats, reminiscent of the bloody gash the Iron Curtain made across Europe.
But along much of the Mexican-U.S. border—a sprawling land mass where the First and Third Worlds meet—there’s been a hefty impediment preventing easy access into most of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas since not long after my underage friends and I were kept out of Mexico. For some miles it’s a fence, in other places poles stuck close together. Harsh weather and landscape do the job for long stretches of the boundary. And in especially well-traveled urban zones it already was a wall long before Trump grabbed the border as a cause célèbre. Not that any of those variations along the dividing line keep the hearty and determined from crossing the frontier.
“They use a ladder.” I met U.S. Border Patrol officer Eduardo Olmos at a place where the borderline is a steel wall. A seasoned expert in border security work, he was matter-of-fact about the simple tools and techniques used by border jumpers to get over the existing wall. “They put a carpet or a blanket on top of the concertina wire, and then they’ll have a rope ladder on the other side.” Olmos explained defeating walls with the same simplicity employed by Vicente Fox. A hop, skip and a jump from Mexico into California.
We humans have been building walls—physical and conceptual—since Adam and Eve were forced across the line out of Eden. Not all walls are of the brutal Berlin Wall-type, designed to keep us in or out against our will. Consider the front door of a home or the bathroom door inside it—just pragmatic, not necessarily exclusionary. Walls originally created for tribal protection eventually become curious relics, even tourist attractions. Think of the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall against the “barbarians” and medieval European city walls. Consider the Maginot Line—some 200 miles of fortifications built by France—a failed attempt to stop Hitler’s invasion. And the Ringstrasse now serves as Vienna’s hub, encircling its old city where protective walls stood until they were deemed obsolete. Austrian-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef replaced the ramparts with broad boulevards; the city grew and prospered (Figures 1.1 and 1.2).
Walls serve as stereotypical backdrops for executions—both in real life and cartoons: the condemned are literally up against the wall. A drawing by Dan Reilly for the New Yorker magazine is a prime example of the firing squad wall used for a joke. The victim is tied up and blindfolded as the officer in charge tells him, “I’m sorry, we’ve had to drop the traditional last cigarette, on account of complaints from the firing squad about secondhand smoke.” Franz Joseph’s younger brother, the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, sailed to America from the security of his walled Miramare Castle redoubt in Trieste and declared himself Emperor of Mexico. Mexicans decided otherwise and a firing squad executed him up against a wall, a finale memorialized in a series of captivating Manet paintings.
Perishable Walls
After extraordinarily heavy rains in Tuscany, a 65-foot section of the San Gimignano city wall—built some 800 years ago—collapsed. A few days later I met with the town’s mayor.
“In the Middle Ages,” Giacomo Bassi told me when we met in his city hall office, “walls could have a real function. Without them there was death and destruction.” The city walls provided protection. “But walls built today,” he said, “have another meaning. Exclusion.”
It’s a message President Reagan understood when he pointed at the Berlin Wall and preached, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” I lived in Berlin when it was divided, when East German soldiers armed with rifles and shoot-to-kill orders cordoned off West Berlin. And I returned to join the throngs that chipped away at the concrete after the wall was breached—pieces of it I brought back to America remain in my office as reminders. Today a few preserved lengths of the wall lure busloads of the curious, visitors anxious to understand how the divided city coped. I listened as a smiling tour guide enthusiastically informed his clients, “Here you can actually see a part of the Berlin Wall!” And while the tourists took their selfies it was easy to imagine how even today’s harshest fortifications will eventually devolve into educational delights complete with nearby ice cream and T-shirt stands.
Tuscany’s graceful old walls, alive with flowers blooming between stones, now shade visitors at gelaterias and osterias, upscale leatherwork shops and haute couture outlets. Repairing the wall damage was Mayor Bassi’s priority when we talked. Visitors to San Gimignano’s walls fuel the little city’s economy. “We are going back in history,” Mayor Bassi said, worried about the worldwide resurgence of obstacles. “We no longer need walls.” Travelers and migrants, he insisted, should be free to cross borders. It’s an appropriate attitude for an official whose city lies on a pilgrimage route from England to Rome.
Yet we are living at a time when a new generation of walls separates us. The Hungarian border fence along its line at Serbia, created to stop refugee traffic from Syria and Afghanistan. The Israeli underground wall, designed to prevent tunneling under the wall that already exists on its 40-mile border with Gaza. The Indian wall of barbed wire along its border with Bangladesh, strung to keep out unwanted migrants. Morocco’s sand and land mine wall against incursions from Western Sahara. The ugly concrete wall in Lima, Peru, built by a wealthy neighborhood fearful of the poor folks from across the street (pocked with doors to allow maids and cooks and gardeners access to their jobs on the rich side). The list is long and global. The Canadian border with the Lower 48, touted as the longest international border in the world free of a military defense, is hardened with police, various types of bulwarks and mandated formal border crossing points where official documents must be shown by cross-border travelers—even those who live in villages that straddle the border with no physical barrier face a conceptual wall delineated by signposted warnings that they must cross their own town only at official control points.
Walls Surround Us
Some walls are metaphoric and transcend a physical barrier. After the Berlin Wall came down Berliners on both sides of the destroyed barrier noted the “wall in the head” because of the east-west cultural divide that developed during the years the city was separated, a divide that did not disappear with end of the wall. We create walls of silence when we socially shun others. We build invisible walls based on our expectations of personal space in crowds or when we meet others. In some cultures, at least prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, friends and acquaintances kiss their hellos and are almost lip-to-lip in conversations, while in others folks maintain a judicious distance when talking and rarely touch each other unless their relationships are intimate.
Venice is a walled city, walled off by nature: water. The Grand Canal and its tributaries protected its Roman settlers from the marauding Attila the Hun. Other walls we build in our relentless attempt to control nature. The seawall at the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, for example—a failed barrier designed to hold back tsunamis. The Netherlands and Singapore hope seawalls keep rising waters from inundating their cities. Nature again reminds us who is boss with walls of flames such as the devastating fire in my home California county of Sonoma, fire walls that destroyed thousands of homes in just one deadly night. Surly homeowners create spite fences, walls of trees and bushes planted to block the views of neighbors they dislike. The paranoid and worried among us build walls around themselves, living in gated communities where the houses are equipped with panic rooms—hardened interior walls—in case those gates fail.
Walls can be art. On the west side of divided Berlin—where access to the wall was not restricted by the well-armed guards, ferocious guard dogs and automated machine guns of East Germany—the concrete barrier became a miles-long canvas for painters, the politics of control a common theme. Likewise, the Palestinian side of the West Bank barrier built by Israel is fabulously graffitied by Banksy—particularly arresting is his “Girl Frisking a Soldier” imagery. Sculptor Andy Goldsworthy created his long, meandering stone wall installation in upstate New York countryside. Graffitists and muralists find opportunities for their work on urban walls worldwide. Decorated sound walls muffle highway noise. Phil Spector produced his Wall of Sound to back up singers with his trademark cacophony and the Grateful Dead built the group’s wall of sound, the massive array of amplifiers and speakers the band required to blast its music to huge crowds of fans. Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” offers an operatic ode to desperation. Libraries and bookshops show off their colorful walls of books. Walls figure in jargon and slang: “Throw it at the wall and see what sticks,” which also describes a folk technique for testing when spaghetti is properly cooked.
“We construct borders, literally and figuratively,” Frances Stonor Saunders explained in a 2016 lecture at the British Museum (before Brexit recreated a border), “to fortify our sense of who we are. And we cross them,” said the journalist and historian, “in search of who we might become.”12
All this wall thought brings me back to the Mexican border with California and the slabs of steel and concrete soaring into the desert air as examples of a future American dream wall—the Hollywood stage set of samples built in 2017 to show the world examples of what Trump envisioned for his dream of a fortress America. Or an American nightmare, depending on one’s point of view. “These prototypes,” Border Patrol officer Olmos told me approvingly as we stood in their shadow, “are going to make our job efficient.” His piercing eyes glinted against the bright sunlight as he looked along the border wall toward where it disappears into the Pacific. Much of the pre-Trump wall is made from surplus Vietnam War-era landing mats—steel mesh that’s relatively easy to compromise with a Sawzall or an axe. “They use whatever tools they can get their hands on,” Olmos said about his nemeses who break through the barrier. The risk of capture is worth taking because the wall crashers know Eduardo Olmos and his patrolling colleagues—despite their fast trucks and sophisticated surveillance tools—cannot be everywhere. The wall is vulnerable.
“We humans are resourceful,” I suggested to the patrolman, “especially if we’re trying to get somewhere.”
“Very resourceful,” he agreed. “We have video of a smuggler making a cut in the wall with an axe in a minute and twenty seconds.”
Barely Touching through the Wall
We drove in the patrol wagon along the north side of the wall down toward the Pacific and Friendship Park. There, for a few hours on weekends, family and friends separated by the border can meet and communicate through the wall that separates the Tijuana and San Diego sides of the park. The wire mesh is too tight to touch anything other than finger tips.
At the gathering place I met Sergio Bautista. Smiling, he was talking through the tiny holes in the wall with a woman on the Mexican side, a woman who appeared only as a shadowy outline through the dense mesh barrier between them. Bautista had flown across the States from Chicago to spend just over an hour with his friend, their first visit in thirteen years. The park opening hours are severely restricted on the California side by U.S. border authorities. I did not want to infringe on their limited time together, but after their visit Bautista and I talked. “It’s just so difficult,” his emotions were mixed: happy for their time together, frustrated by the strained circumstances. “It’s pretty hard just to be able to touch the tips of your fingers, your little fingers” (Figure 1.3).
Heading back to the airport for his flight home, Bautista was conflicted. There are problems in Mexico he’s happy to keep far from Chicago. “Drugs and cartels and all the killing.” But not his friends and family. “We just want to be with the ones we love.” His brilliant smile flashed and his brown eyes sparkled, despite the dire circumstances.
Don’t Fence Me In—or Out
Across cultures and time, we humans have built barriers in vain attempts to keep the Other away from us. The good news is that such fortifications eventually fail. Survival often requires migration. And in today’s world of easy jet travel and the Internet jumping borders it’s increasingly difficult for arbitrary authorities to wall us off from one another.
Looking back at the wall on the Mexican border as I drove north I found myself singing the old Cole Porter song that speaks to a mythos of the Wild West, legends all but lost in densely urbanized and fearful Southern California.
“Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above/Don’t fence me in!”
Trump’s dream of a wall is a monstrosity that never will be built from the Pacific to the Gulf, if for no other reason than its ludicrous expense.
“Let me ride through the wide-open country that I love/Don’t fence me in!”
Instead of a wall, billboards facing south should line the border calling out “¡Bienvenidos!” because the U.S. southern border, like San Gimignano in Italy, is on a pilgrimage route. Pilgrims head north seeking asylum from crime and failed states. They head north hoping for a better life. They find safety and security. They find good jobs with good pay, jobs that need workers.
So it’s always been, as it always should be. And so it will be in the future, regardless of walls—or no walls.
