On the Wall at the Border

　

　


　


Shutdown

About four days before Christmas 2018, an impasse arose between President Donald Trump and the Democratic party soon to control the House of Representatives. This impasse, leading to a government shut-down that is ongoing as I write, arose from President Trump’s demand that Congress allocate five billion dollars in funds to building a security wall on the southern border with Mexico. As everyone knows, Trump campaigned on the promise to build this wall, a rampart ostensibly designed to keep criminals, rapists, and drug traffickers from leaving Mexico and flooding into the United States. In his campaign, candidate Trump repeatedly promised to fund the wall with Mexican money, a concept that was as risible then as now.

For two years, Trump’s Republican party controlled all the levers of power in Washington but was unable to secure funding for this wall. The mid-term elections swept many Republican congressmen from office, a harbinger that it would be impossible to built the wall, even with American appropriations, after the newly electred representatives took power in January 2019. President Trump, who has no ideology but self-interest, never cared much about the Wall (now with a capital "W") and was willing to compromise by accepting a grant of 1.3 billion as opposed to his demand for 5 billion for border security. But after being thoroughly trounced by extreme Right Wing commentators, chiefly Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, Trump withdrew his compromise offer and reverted to demanding that the Wall be funded in the original five billion dollar sum. In a previous televised conference between Trump and Democrat leaders, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the President bluffed – he said that he would gladly shut-down the entire government if his Wall was not funded with a five billion dollar budget. Indeed, the President went so far as to say that he would "own" this shutdown as his creature and, even, be "honored" to take this radical and self-defeating measure. The Democrats called his bluff and the government was partially shut-down at midnight on Friday, December 21, 2018.

In light of this political context, ongoing as I write, perhaps, it is well to consider the implications of a Wall on the border.

　


The Poor Capitol
On the night before the shut-down, rain fell in Washington. Live images on cable-news of the Capitol dome showed the white iceberg of marble afloat in a sea of mist. Lights theatrically illuminating the Capitol cut bright swathes through the encircling fog and rain. The Capitol seemed embattled.

TV commentators were swift to ascribe symbolic significance to the murk, the falling sleet, the lonely rays of light piercing the gloom around the great egg-shell of the Capitol dome.


Christmas Eve
In my family, it’s traditional that, on Christmas Eve, we eat a supper comprised from various hors d’ouevres – chips and crackers with Parmesan crab dip, deviled eggs, stuffed potato fritters, cocktail wieners in barbecue sauce laced with Welch’s grape jelly, Swedish meatballs, cheese and cookies and shrimp served cold in cocktail sauce. Theoretically, these dishes are easy enough to prepare but, in practice, a great deal of chopping and grinding in the food processor is required. Cream cheese, in great quantities, has to be melted and mixed into the food. (Who eats cream cheese except on holidays?) Potatoes must be peeled and boiled and shrimp pinched out of their tail-carapaces, hamburger has to be browned and drained, and hard-boiled eggs have to lose their shells. All of this takes a long time. With my daughter Angelica, I worked on preparing these dishes from about 12:30 in the afternoon until 4:00 pm, carefully placing the finished food outside on my cold back step since the refrigerator was full.

While working on these hors d’ouevres, I listened to some CDs. We heard a Blondie greatest hits CD, a couple of Motown compilations, and a CD comprised of duets sung by Willie Nelson with other performers. Three songs captured my attention on the Willie Nelson record.

The first was Townes van Zandt’s "Pancho and Lefty", a ballad first recorded in 1972, but made famous when performed as a duet by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard eleven years later. The song is enigmatic, parallel lives of the kind invented by Plutarch. In the lyrics, we learn that a Mexican bandit named Pancho terrorizes the border country. The bandit is betrayed into the hands of the Federales who kill him. The song’s chorus is "All the Federales say, they could have caught him any day/ They only let him hang around out of kindness I suppose." The life proposed as parallel to Pancho is that of Lefty. Lefty lives on the road, a life that makes him "hard and lean" but gives him "breath like kerosene." He dies alone in a hotel room in cold Ohio. The songwriter tells us that the ballad laments the deaths of both Lefty, the lonely alcoholic loser, and Pancho, the flamboyant Mexican bandit. By drawing a comparison between the two men, Townes van Zandt implies that both were bandits of a certain kind, both betrayed, and that the bright light and heat of Pancho’s Mexican desert is a wasteland that symbolizes both the aspirations and the doom of the other outlaw in cold and gloomy Ohio. Obviously, a summary of this sort doesn’t do justice to the fusion of melody and lyrics in this great song, but the point of the ballad seems to be that Mexico, perceived as place of flamboyant freedom, is central to Lefty’s dreams. (Of course, the song obliquely alludes to the great Lefty Frizzell who died of alcoholism in Nashville when he was 47.)

Ray Charles’ duet with Willie Nelson on "Seven Spanish Angels" is also a ballad, this song inspired, it seems, by Hollywood Westerns. Although the song sounds ancient, it was written and first recorded in 1984. In this Tejano-inspired ballad, an outlaw and his lover flee a posse sent to return them across the Rio Grande into the United States. The lovers are trapped in an abandoned mission at the "altar of the sun" – a box-canyon that comes to be named "the valley of the gun." After saying their farewells, the outlaw fires at the posse who shoot him dead. The girl, unwilling to live without her man, picks up the outlaw’s rifle and brandishes it at the lawmen – they kill her as well. At that moment, there is "thunder from above" as the seven Spanish angels, presumably stucco decorations in the old Mission, carry the girl to heaven. This is kitsch but of a very high order and, in fact, the song is very beautiful, particularly with wordless cantabile lament, almost a kind of yodeling with which Ray Charles decorates the song. The lovers flee to Mexico to escape the law but are mercilessly hunted down in an apocalyptic landscape of hovering angels, sacrificial Aztec altars, and blazing rifles. (The song seems a gloss on Raoul Walsh’s great 1949 Western, Colorado Territory, in which fleeing lovers die in a hail of bullets under the inscrutable walls and towers of an ancient cliff dwelling. The bandit’s money, left at a ruined mission, is used to restore the church’s campanile and the bell tolls for the doomed lovers in the final shot.)

By contrast, Willie Nelson’s duet with Carlos Santana "They all went to Mexico" (1983) seems upbeat and jaunty. But, when you study the lyrics, "going to Mexico" means "to die." The singer remembers his old mule and dray, his hound dog, his friends and the women he’s known, "all the jaunty crew" on motorcycles with side-cars "who have gone to Mexico." This song contains a few Spanish lyrics – for instance "buenos dias got to go" and, also, has conjunto stylings. Death means Mexico and, of course, in this context, Mexico means freedom.

These three songs moved me. Christmas is a sentimental holiday. I ran out of cream cheese and, of course, didn’t have waxed paper for the potato fritters (who keeps that stuff around?) and, so, Jack and I drove to the grocery store to buy these things. I thought about the songs and the Border Wall and Mexico.

　


The Big Bend
It’s more than 300 miles from El Paso to the Big Bend in the Rio Grande, Rio Bravo del Norte, "the wild river of the north." As you approach the river across immense golden waves of chaparral, the country grows more savage: the chaparral dissolves into eroded badlands and strange islands of mountain hover in the heat shimmer. The Rio Grande cuts through some of these mountains, hacking deep red and yellow-orange canyons in the rock. The road narrows and becomes bumpy with patches and potholes. In the distance, the mountains are like great skeletons defiantly displaying raw, stony ribs and skull-shaped peaks. In the little village of Study Butte, we stopped for provisions at a small Mexican grocery. The hamlet was mostly abandoned, a scatter of fractured adobe houses, thorn corrals and fences, and the smashed scaffolding of mine works on the sandy hillsides, hooks poised overhead like a black scorpion’s sting. In the grocery, a little Latino boy, apparently sent to the market by his mother, was buying a sack of about 30 dangerous-looking jalapeno peppers.

Later, we drove down to the river crossing near the Mexican village of Boquillas del Carmen. The sheer escarpment of the Sierra Madre Occidental rose three-thousand feet above the level, barren desert, slit open where the Rio Grande had sawed through the mountain. We paid some thugs to watch our cars in a little parking lot enclosed in a bamboo glade. A man rowed us across the river and offered to take us to town on the back of several leathery-looking burros. We elected to ride instead in a battered pick-up truck through the bamboo stand and up the hill to where the adobe village was set on a bony vertebrae of chipped rock. The village was surrounded by wrecked cars on all sides, smashed and cannibalized pickups and VW buses. The teacher dismissed the students at the Benito Juarez Elementary School so they could beg and an American guy, apparently something like the town mascot, invited us to drink tequila with him in the Cantina. He seemed too shady and so we decided instead to walk a little along the village’s ruinous main street. The mouth of the huge canyon loomed over the village like an awful destiny and the top of the great escarpment was curdled with clouds entangled around stony pinnacles. Another guy dragging a goat on a rope led us to a shack, sold us a handful crystals that he had "found in an old cave." We paid ten dollars American for the crystals. An old lady seemed to be laboriously dying in an adjacent shack. On the way back to the rowboat on which we crossed the Rio Grande, we saw innumerable dusty white crystals of the kind that the man with the goat had just sold us. They were lying everywhere on the ground.

Once mines occupied the great level terrace atop the mountain range in Mexico. The ore was cut out of the ground, hauled to gondolas, and, then, dropped several thousand feet to the desert floor in the United States. The ruins of the aerial tramway were visible as outcrops of rusting metal, twisted iron towers, embedded in the face of the cliffs. Some cracked stone slabs rimmed with ocotillo marked the ruins of the processing plant on the U.S. side of the river. It was all just too remote to be economically viable. Amidst the prickly pears, peccaries were snuffling and grunting.

In the evening, we drove to Terlingua. The isolated ranges of mountains hung in the sky like fairy-tale castles. In Terlingua, some entrepreneurs had built a Mexican restaurant in the wreckage of an old church. The church had thick walls, six to eight feet of adobe and packed mud, and it was cool and dark in the café. The sun set over a graveyard all rugged with lathe crosses, and heaps of stone marking the places where bodies were buried. Broken mine-works stood like gaunt sentinels on the hilltops and the town was mostly abandoned. Dogs trotted along sand lanes between collapsed adobe houses.

The café played jazz interspersed with radio reports as to the traffic on the principal LA freeways. I suppose that the point was to demonstrate to you that this place was the exact opposite of Los Angeles, a tranquil oasis in the desert where you could sip your margarita and watch the sun outline the hulks of mountain ranges, stranded in the desert like vast battleships, and listen to the coyotes howling in the badlands.

I wished I could cross the river into Mexico and spend a few days exploring the huge sierra looming over the Rio Grande. But the National Park rangers told me it was too dangerous there – the canyons were full of bad hombre, drug-traffickers and smugglers and outlaws.

　


Oaxaca

Many years later, I was in Sicily. It was the last night of our tour and we were dining in an expensive restaurant in Palermo. The famous "golden conch" of mountains surrounding the harbor were lit by the setting sun and, indeed, seemed to be gilded like the saints and halos of the madonnas in the churches.

We were traveling with very wealthy people. Wealthy people are often competitive and the topic of conversation at our table was travel. "Tell us your most memorable travel experience," someone asked. And, so, everyone, it seemed, was obliged to provide an answer. Not surprisingly, some people in our group had seen the blue icebergs, big as mountains in the Antarctic ocean, and others had climbed Kilimanjaro or walked on the Great Wall of China or snorkeled on Australia’s barrier reef.

When it was my turn to speak, I began to tell our companions about the Day of the Dead in Oaxaca. After a few preliminary comments, I said that people spend lots of money to go to exotic places, but that no place was stranger and more fascinating than Mexico. "And it’s right across the border," I said. The rich people in the group looked at me skeptically. Then, one of the ladies said: "Well, that’s not okay with me. Mexico takes advantage us and they flood our borders with immigrants that we have to support. So I understand why it might be attractive to travel there – after all, it’s cheap – but I’m not willing to so much as buy a Margarita in that country. It’s a matter of principle. They violate our laws and it’s just not okay."

I was surprised at her attitude. After all, we had been traveling in Sicily, a part of the world not exactly known for its rectitude and obedience to the rule of law. Like many ignorant people, the woman was completely convinced by her own opinion and I decided that the better part of valor was discretion and, so, I held my tongue.

This colloquy took place about three years before Donald Trump ran for president.




The last free decade
A couple days ago, I heard some critic on a Criterion commentary track claim that the last time anyone was free in this country was during the late sixties. The notion is questionable. However, it’s worth noting that Sam Peckinpah made his most well-known movies at that time and these works characterized in some ways the radical libertarian tendencies in our culture. Peckinpah’s greatest movies, The Wild Bunch, Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, and Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, all take place in what one writer (David Thomson, I think) has called "a sun-bleached dream of the old Southwest." Certainly, the Mexican border looms large in these Westerns. Freedom lies south of the Border. When a man crosses into Mexico, he enters an ancient, enchanted world – a place driven by codes of honor that can’t be reduced to mere law. Mexico signifies for Peckinpah the promise of liberty that has been lost north of the Border – the Mariachi bands playing by the fountain in the dusty park, the ruined missions, the dark-eyed Indian maidens, the volcanoes and the mountains and the tropical fruit of the land ripe for the taking, the pyramids soaked with human blood and the treasure of Sierra Madre.

　


Songs

The songs that I heard on Christmas eve have a similar meaning. Mexico means escape from the constricted Anglo-Saxon world, flight to a place that is profoundly pagan because Roman Catholic, a land full of ancient powers and gods. Of course, the real Mexico is not precisely like this – although, in some ways, the country is, indeed, an approximation of the way Americans from el Norte conceive of it. The idea of Mexico is the idea of valor, courage, independence, freedom from the law, a sort of radical liberty in which each man is able to make his own way notwithstanding the powers in authority – officials are corrupt and can be paid-off and, so, you can flourish if only you have the guts and stamina to survive in this barren, but beautiful, land. Mexico is the place outside the law, but, also, the golden land where a prospector hewing stone in the oven of mountain mineshaft might begin as a pauper and end as a millionaire. People in Mexico live according to their own code. Bandits and outlaws flourish. The persecuted gunman and his moll from Cincinnati or St. Louis or Chicago can buy a villa in the mountains, pluck tropical fruit from their trees, and live in peace happily ever after. At least, these kinds of immigrants are welcome south of the Border – the American dollar buys much, including freedom from America.

9-11

Things changed after 9-11. The charm of the exotic turned into fear. Dark-skinned people are terrorists. They are swarming across our borders. Everyone is afraid.


The Wall
Mexico’s promise of liberty has as its inverse the threat of death. The bandit fleeing across the border is generally stopped on this side of the Rio Bravo del Norte and gunned down. The prospectors laden with gold looted from the Sierra Madre run afoul of bandits who kill them for their boots. Peckinpaugh’s "wild bunch" dies in a hurricane of gunfire. In the American imagination, "going to Mexico" sometimes meant death – but it was worth risking death to pursue this dream.

Mexico has always been the American dream materialized. It’s the frontier.

The hideous secret of Trump’s wall is that it has already been built in our minds. And, even, more frightening: the wall exists not to keep Mexicans out, but to imprison us. We’re the refugees against whom the Wall will be built


December 25, 2018