During the Cold War, my buddies and I used to throw packs of Marlboros through gaps
in the Iron Curtain at East German Vopos just to see if they’d smile. In 1989,
my wife’s brother Rolf was among those thousands of Germans who took a hammer
to the Berlin Wall, a chunk of which is now enshrined in a shadow box in the den.
In the same box is a blood-stained (?) piece of paneling torn from a bus that burned
trying to cross the border in a panic before it closed in 1948. Sharing the box
is a piece of the East German fence that my wife and I filched after the Wall came
down. Manufactured in the West, the fencing was designed in the East, so no one
could get a toehold. But if the West truly wanted the East to “tear that wall
down,” why was it building an unclimbable fence?
::
Almost thirty years ago, our neighbor across the street erected a fifty-foot-long,
six-foot-tall Wolmanized fence to keep the neighbor’s magnolia leaves out
of his yard. Since then, the tidy house and its treeless yard has changed hands
three times, but now the neighbor with the leaf-filled yard has apparently assumed
ownership of the fence. Though its ugly side is facing the magnolias, the “owner”
recently hired someone to cut the privet that had grown up beside it and pressure-wash
it on both sides! Either he’d forgotten that he didn’t build the fence,
or he’s just a Good Samaritan, but either way, the pruning and washing are
a minor mystery.
Defensive barriers often strike people that way. Just think of cemetery fences:
is the concern with those breaking in or breaking out?
In 1980, when my wife and I moved into the house we still occupy, the neighbor to
our east erected a similar fence with the ugly side toward us. One day while I was
raking leaves, he stuck his head over the fence, introduced himself, and explained
he didn’t want his grandchildren running across our yard. I thanked him, of
course, but I never saw his grandchildren in twenty years playing in his yard, so
my wife and I have concluded it was a spite fence. Spitefully built or not, we grew
so used to those pale-green boards that when the fence builder died and before the
new owners moved in, I secretly repaired the fence with a few nails and boards of
my own.
The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy has argued that anything that makes a culture
defensive is actually useful because it keeps individuals on their collective toes.
I imagine it also aids the sale of tranquilizers. Alerted by CNN to the latest “Breaking
News,” my wife and I resemble a meerkat community craning our necks to see
the television, scanning the horizon, asking, “What’s broken now?”
But as General Patton used to tell his troops, “The more you sweat in peace,
the less you’ll bleed in war.”
A baseball team that invests most of its resources in its pitching staff and neglects
the hitters is not going to win many pennants. Now imagine a bird investing 60%
of its metabolic resources instead of the usual 12% in the shell of its unborn
young. The mother surely will be weakened by this expenditure, and the young may
fail to hatch. In 1588, the British Navy defeated the Spanish Armada defending itself
primarily with thin-shelled boats. I could be wrong, but I’d bet the sixteenth-century
English defense budget was closer to 12% of GDP than 60%. Today, Somali
terrorists have adapted the ancient defensive strategy and made it “offensive.”
Once poor fishermen, terrorists now invest in thin-shelled boats which swarm “unsinkable”
tankers and hold them for ransom.
Indeed, history is stocked with stories of nations and individuals who placed so
many locks on their doors that fire fighters could not reach them when a fire broke
out. However, when a measles epidemic led Mark Twain’s mother to lock her
young son in his room, the boy “outsmarted” her by leaving through the
window to play in the bed of a sick friend. Though he almost died of the illness,
Twain defended himself saying he feared boredom and isolation more than the measles.
Indeed, humans are often assailed on multiple fronts, but there’s just so
much any defense can defend. The Great Wall of China, for example, is truly great,
stretching like a ragged web some thirteen thousand miles from the Gobi Desert to
the Korean Gulf. End to end, that’s half way around the globe. Nevertheless,
for centuries, China’s enemies have simply gone through, around, or over the
wall as the Japanese and Mongols did numerous times. Today, the acknowledged failure
is undermined in several places to allow shepherds and their sheep to pass.
After WWI, the French built the “unsinkable” Maginot Line and thought
themselves forever saved from their “cabbage-headed” neighbors. The
underground fortifications that required fifteen years to complete and cost $500
million was outfitted with wine cellars, chapels, and prophetically, a morgue. Burials
were convenient and frequent after the Germans flanked it in three days. In losing
WWI, the Germans had learned a lesson themselves after investing millions in seventy-five-ton
cannons which had to be transported by rail in five parts and then set in concrete
before they could be fired. One might call this lesson “multi-speed mobility”;
the Germans called it “Blitzkrieg.”
Untold billions have been spent on this nation’s Strategic Defense Initiative,
or “Death Star,” despite the caveats of fifty Nobel laureates. To date,
SDI has been about as successful stopping terrorist attacks as the Easter Island
statues have been staring down a hurricane.
Nature, of course, gives every species some means of defending itself from the bitter
taste of many plants to the flocking habits of many animals. In the plant kingdom,
the foxglove has evolved a taste that induces animals to go into convulsions or
die. Yet in the right doses, digitalis, made from the foxglove, is often what the
weakened human heart needs to defend itself. In the animal kingdom, a Malaysian
ant species has evolved which is capable of contracting its muscles so tightly that
it explodes in a burst of poison when its fellows are threatened. Now assuming this
ant understands what it’s doing, it is the poster child of unselfishness.
Pacifists like Gandhi often draw a comparison to judo, a sport in which an opponent’s
aggression is countered by rolling and bending like a tree absorbing the wind. But
it’s also instructive to remember what Gandhi told the Indian people: if the
Nazis ever reach our borders, let them in; they will eventually tire of killing.
Residents along the border surely had a different opinion.
I love the fact that Monaco’s army is smaller than its national orchestra
and that Austria spends more on the Vienna Opera than it does on its military, but
as much as I hate to admit it, our Mutually Assured Destruction strategy has been
a deterrent to world war since 1945. Two oceans and relatively weak neighbors have
helped “the world’s policeman” to keep the peace.
NRA zealots often say, “Don’t take a knife to a gun fight,” especially,
I would add, if the shooting has already begun. If it hasn’t, and all parties
are standing in a figurative puddle of gasoline, anything which might create a spark
is foolhardy. And while the right to defend oneself is a given, if no one has your
back, as I’ve told our children, back off.
For every password there’s an artful hacker, and for every bike lock there’s
a larger set of bolt cutters. I know this because for thirty years I rode my bike
to work and was happy to see it waiting for me at the end of the day. It was stolen
three times over ten years before I realized that a cheaper bike was the best deterrent;
indeed, as many have concluded, foresight and reason are the best defenses yet devised
by any civilization. But our first concern should be the nurturing of a culture
that is worth defending. Yet at the same time, humans have never been as noble as
when defending the undefended.
::
In 2013, I was amused to read that some Germans were defending a remnant of the
Berlin Wall in belated recognition of its tourist potential. Ironically, it seems
that every fortification not destined for a landfill is headed to a shadow box or
a museum.