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As we gather round our turkeys—and have a chuckle at the video of Sarah Palin blathering her nonsense oblivious to a farmhand gruesomely dispatching turkeys in the background—those of us inclined to find an urge to gratitude might give thanks that recent events have testified to the security of our democracy, and some might also be thankful for the unverifiable results of the efforts of the Department of Homeland Security. Oh, and thank you John McCain.
A few postings back I introduced you to a person I referred to (to borrow from Mike Myers) as “Fat Bastard.” I had met him on a ship I was sailing in and he regaled me with his Republicanism (large R), which included that he had just purchased large home in a “gated adult community” near Pensacola, Florida. [give link] I try not to think of this guy very often, but he came to mind the other day when I was watching the news about the possible appointment of the new head of “Homeland Security” under the Obama administration. Forgive the delight in anticipating the departure of “the screaming skull,” Mr. Chertoff, a man possessed of the uncanny ability to determine when there might be a terrorist attack with his own intestines (he would say “gut feeling”). But I am going in a different direction with this.
“Homeland Security” has always reminded me of terms like “The Fatherland,” throughout history a call for the defense of the local soil, or, just as often, a justification for what the Nazis called lebensraum, a grasping need to annex the other guy’s fatherland. You know what I am referring to—the proprietary idea of a territory that belongs to a people by right, by conquest, by divine beneficence, or by the fact that they have the military might to possess it. It is a term of blurred meaning when we consider places such as Alsace-Lorraine, the Sudetenland, Tibet, or the West Bank, among numerous others. Somehow, the idea of an obese lawyer from Minnesota adding a gated piece of Florida to his personal “fatherland” is . . . what? Inspirational, I guess.
Well, that’s the question, both for gated communities and the “homeland.” But, first, since I am an urbanist, we must consider that a form of gated community has a long history in the development of the city. For several thousand years villages, towns and cities were typically enclosed within a wall of some sort. For a long time social organization was based on clan and blood relationships, local gods, and suspicion of outsiders. The “homeland” was intra muros and a city, as an old Scots proverb says, was a safe a place as the willingness of its residents to ma its walls.
That all changed with ballistics; once artillery developed to the pint where it could reach well beyond city walls it became necessary to change homeland security tactics. The walls came down, many becoming boulevards (from bulwarks, another name for walls) and it became necessary to have forces that could quickly deploy to meet the enemy well into the field and the “homeland” now extended well into the hinterlands of a city. As time passed, first the airplane, then the ICBM, made the very centers of cities, what had once been the safest place to be, the crosshairs of the most terrible weapons in human creation.
911 changed the concept of homeland even further; suddenly it was no longer a redoubt, no longer an invincible acropolis, but vulnerable. The xenophobic warnings of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s poem seemed prophetic:
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them press a wild, a motley throng—
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Fearless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Sythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav,
Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are these,
Accents of menace alien to our air . . .
Strange that Aldrich mentions nobody from the Arabian and Baja peninsulas; well it was the 19th Century, before the oil was discovered. Our new xenophobia is reserved for the sons of Allah and the heirs of Montezuma, the former desirous of winning their martyrdom by destroying our temples of commerce, the others would usurp our happy occupations of backbreaking and low-paid stoop labor.
And so, the new Gated Adult Homeland Community (GAHC) becomes our contemporary acropolis against all that is the “motley throng” (Mexican gardeners and he pool boy who looks vaguely Middle-eastern, are vetted and admitted exceptions). And yes, the GAHC also repels the young as well, they being memento mori to a cohort of codgers who are one-square dance step, or one shrimp cocktail away from the “forever homeland.”
The “homeland” is not only a mental construct, it is a mentality. But it has long been irrelevant. It is laughable that the millions of travelers taking their shoes off and putting their four-ounce bottles of whatever in plastic bins, has anything to do with homeland security. The walls of the homeland are easily breach thousands of times each day by air travelers and those who find a way through, around and over our border fences. Each day, I watch from my deck as container ships with less than ten percent of their cargo inspected pass within a few hundred yards of the U.S. Navy nuclear submarine base and two aircraft carriers.
There is not homeland security because there is, in reality, no homeland and no security. To hold the idea that either is a valid, operational concept, is dangerously silly. To even have had a debate in which a candidate for president was excoriated as a capitulator and a defeatist for being willing to talk with an adversary is an indication that the fiction of homeland security remains active in the minds of blind bullies.
In a world obsessed with its “homelands” we miss entirely the point that we have come to share a global destiny. Homelands will not insulate their citizens from the pollution and over fishing of the oceans and seas, global warming will not respect the boundaries of the fatherland, the economic crisis has already shown the wages of global investment schemes—who knows where their pension is vested. The “homeland” is like an atomic bomb shelter from the 1950s, an ante-room to an urgent fate of death by radiation sickness.
As to the security of the GHAC? Well, it hardly matters. Each day they “ring out the dead” and the survivors gather to discuss the most pressing concern of their day—their bowel movements. So much for their ersatz secure homelands; it is in some respects a redundancy—Fat Bastard is already dead—he just doesn’t know it.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.27.2008)