Mending “Mending Walls.” Parts 1 and 2.

Posted on ManuelPosted in Blog, Jim Baird

Jim Baird, my good friend and mentor, wrote this and it’s so good I had to include it in my blog.

Because of popular demand, I asked him to expand on the subject which he did. I include part 2 (10-27-19) at the end of part 1, and can be thought of as more on the subject, only it digs deeper.

Mending “Mending Wall”

          Many people interested in the proposed border wall have stated “Robert Frost said, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.'”  Robert Frost didn’t say that line, he wrote it.  A character in Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” said it, and if you read that poem, you will find it unlikely that Frost agreed with the statement.

          The poem is about two New England land owners who meet in early Spring to repair the wall between their properties. The soil is rocky and hard to grow crops on, and stones to make a wall are always handy.  The speaker in the poem explains why the wall needs to be repaired: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall/  That sends the frozen groundswell under it/  And spills the upper boulders in the sun/ And makes gaps even two can pass abreast . . . .”  The speaker notes that there are apple trees on his side of the wall and pine trees on his neighbor’s side, so there really isn’t a need for a wall, as there would be if his neighbor’s land were a cow pasture.  “My apple trees will never get across/ And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him./  He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ ”  The first speaker tries to understand that comment by asking: “‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it/ where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.”  The other man makes no real reply: “He will not go beyond his father’s saying/  And he likes having thought of it so well/ He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

           The neighbor, if he actually had been thinking, might have pointed out that fences are helpful to surveyors, tax assessors, and people trying to find something, but he doesn’t, which reveals that “Mending Wall” is not about its announced subject but about an attitude that shuts out new ideas and defends itself by repeating mottos that are half thought out or not thought about at all. This point is much more important than an argument about fixing a wall.

          People who use such slogans are using a technique that was the way you proved things in the Middle Ages, when very few people could read or write, and books, the source of much knowledge, were scarce.  Someone who could read would repeat: “Galen says this, Aristotle says this, Sophocles says this; they’re famous, so they must be right.”  Now, few people choose to read or write in this world of sound bytes, tweets, and emojis, so the best they can do in this case is to prop up their viewpoint is to quote a poem which they haven’t read, ignoring the context in which the line appeared.  Perhaps people coming to this country fleeing hunger, collapsing economies and governments, violence and terrorism both state-sponsored and drug-related and seeking basic human rights don’t belong here, but those who think so had better not use a poet to back their play—-those guys are sneaky.

Jim Baird

Part 2

“Mending Wall” 2

          My dear friend Manuel Taboada has posted some of my work on his website, and he tells me that there have been requests for “‘Mending Wall’ 2.”  The first of my writings he issued was also the first essay I wrote for the Denton Record-Chronicle. The title in the newspaper was not the original title, which Manuel restored: “Mending ‘Mending Wall.'”

          That title was catchy but inaccurate, because the poem does not need a repair job.  I wrote that piece because one line of it is quoted repeatedly by those in favor of the border wall, always mentioning author Robert Frost as if, because a famous person “said” that, the statement adds weight to their arguments, which are usually in favor of building the wall.  In the original essay, I did not present my own opinion on this subject, because I only had enough space to point out what the poem actually said and to show that the way the line was used added no logical strength to the case for the wall.  I was tired of hearing this mistake and also rose to the defense of Robert Frost, who, along with a number of my other friends such as Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain (who are also Manuel’s friends) lives here in my house.

          I can restore one cut I made to the original essay in order to get it down to five hundred words, which limit Manuel said the paper established.  (My latest essay ran twice that length, so I guess they like my stuff.)  I described a cartoon by the great Bill Mauldin that showed two Soviet soldiers standing in front of the Berlin Wall, its grey cinderblocks crowned with broken glass and concertina wire.  One says, “Well, good fences make good neighbors.” I noted that Mauldin, unlike most who quote the line, had read the poem and understood it.

          The Berlin Wall–that other famous barrier was built in 1961 and torn down in 1989, earlier than the lives of many who read this, so I will have to explain that so many people were escaping from Soviet-controlled east Berlin to west Berlin (an internationally run city well within Soviet-controlled East Germany) that the Soviets put up that wall in a matter of days, shocking the world with this crass act which dramatically and visually showed the failures of a totalitarian system that  later collapsed along with the wall which sustained and symbolized it.

          That paragraph was one sentence.  Faulkner lives at my place, too.

          But since so many of you want to know more on this point, I will tell you that I am against illegal immigration, but I don’t think that a wall is the way to curtail it.  An alcoholic friend said, “There is no way to keep an addict from his drug.” If we build such a wall, the only positive impact will be the growth of the construction companies that erect it with taxpayers’ money. Most people in Mexico and the rest of Central America are poor and have no prospects of improvement in their own countries, so they come to a land with a thriving economy and lots of jobs. Every other commercial on Spanish language television is for companies that help foreigners here send money back home, an admirable act.  If a wall is built, people will jump on boats to get around it, burrow under it, blow holes in it with dynamite, and catapult over it.  Can’t build a wall in the Big Bend because it’s a national park, so maybe everybody will flood through there. There is no way to keep a desperate person from attempting social and economic advancement.  If you don’t let such a person get a job, the economic advancement may come from sticking a pistol in your face and demanding your dough.

          So why not get in by the naturalization process, which many of my Hispanic friends used in the past, leading to their own disapproval of immigrants sneaking over the border?  If you want to live in the United States, show that you respect the country and its laws by using those laws to become a citizen.  There is a big problem with this approach, though.  The United States assumes that Mexico is in good shape, and no one needs to leave it, unlike, say, a Guatemalan, whose country is fraught with corruption and violence.  But because the United States would get a lot of blowback from Central American governments if it officially stated that their governments have cratered, it doesn’t recognize that fact.  It may still be in the interest of the United States to maintain relations with those shredded states, if there is any money to be made there.  So you have to get in line and wait for years (nineteen for Mexico, I’m told) while we work through the quota allowed from any presumably functioning country.  Now if you escaped from North Korea, you would whisk right in, get citizenship, and be invited to tell your story on the Today show with Dennis Rodman offering a rebuttal.

          There are two expressions popular in Mexico that most El Nortes have never heard.  One is “Poor Mexico–so far from God, so close to the United States.”  That remark has been attributed to Porfirio Diaz, the dictator whose crimes and brutality launched the Mexican Revolution that drove him from power in the early 1900’s.  He meant that Mexico, mostly undeveloped when he made that remark, would always be in the economic orbit of the United States unless, of course, it made use of its own resources in its own way.  More on that point some other time.

          The other is “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”  This Mexican folk saying refers to the result of Mexico’s defeat in its war with the United States (1846-1848).  Mexico ceded to the United States a huge amount of its northern territory, including what is now California, Nevada, and Utah, some of Wyoming and Colorado, and most of Arizona and New Mexico.  Well, you may say, they lost the war, so they had to give us something.  But the war was considered even while it was happening as a trumped up attempt to acquire that territory.  President James Polk sent an army to the banks of the Rio Grande to defend our interests.  Texas declared its independence from Mexico in March 1836, and the Texicans soundly defeated the Mexican army the next month, but Mexico never recognized the resulting Republic of Texas, which the United States annexed in 1845, and furthermore insisted that the Nueces River, not the Rio Grande, was its border with Texas.  The official reason for sending the army was to defend our territorial interests, but Polk had drafted a letter to the army commander telling him to provoke an incident to get the war started.  Before he could send it, word arrived that a contingent of the Mexican army had attacked across the Rio Grande.  Relieved, Polk ordered the army to retaliate.

          Many (including Henry David Thoreau and Abraham Lincoln) opposed the war, calling it unjustified and a move from a republican to an imperialist stance, and historians are divided on whether Polk was a good president or a scoundrel.  You know where we came out on that; there are a lot of Polk Streets in Texas.

          I think most who cross the border are motivated by a desire for a better life, but the few who know history feel that their efforts to enter the United States are not only necessary but justified.  You’re thinking, come on, that was a hundred and sixty years ago.  Losers have long memories.  The Serbs explained their genocide of Bosnians in the 90s as payback for a battle they had lost to them six hundred years before.

          Given this history and current conditions, illegal immigration will continue despite all efforts to stop it. One method might work; shoot everybody on this side of the border who can’t produce a green card or proof of citizenship.  Fortunately there is still enough vestigial belief in Emma Lazarus’s declaration  (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.”) that we haven’t embraced that solution.

          I really do see everything as related to everything else, so it is very difficult for me to draw a line between topics and shut up.  I’ll just echo Herodotus, who, when he had covered a subject, wrote, “That’s all I’m going to tell you about that.”

Notes —

The original article was about using a quotation properly, so I want to nail down the sources of the quotations I used.

2  – “no way to keep an addict from his drug” — My best friend Foy Campbell, in conversation, circa 1994.  He died in  2010, in part from the result of alcoholism.

    – “nineteen years” — My friend Francisco (Frank) Perez, in conversation, 2018.

   –  “Poor Mexico” — Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations “attributes” this line to Diaz, but “attributes” is a way of hedging.  There is no written source for this, but people during his lifetime said that he said it.  Even if he didn’t say it, it presents a popular viewpoint like the folk saying that follows it.  How familiar is that quotation, though?

3 – “drafted a letter” — This is the most controversial statement in this essay.  My teacher at the University of Texas, Robert A. Divine, said this during the 1959 Fall Semester of his honors class, Basic Books in American History.  Divine was one of the best teachers I ever had; perfect prose rolled out of him, and you wanted to write down everything he said.  He earned his doctorate at Yale in 1954 and in 1959 was already on his way to an outstanding career at Texas, where, among other things, he became the Director of the International Studies Program.  He retired in 1995 and donated his papers to the Briscoe Center for American History.

      “Mending ‘Mending Wall'” was a reminder that we shouldn’t quote things casually, but in a forthcoming Denton Record-Chronicle essay (“A Hallowe’en Miracle”) I write that sometimes we do have to trust people.  The final answer to the question of whether Polk wrote such a letter lies in the records of the debate about him mentioned above or perhaps in the Briscoe Center.  Robert Divine is one of the most trustworthy people I’ve ever met.

      I got a long memory, too.

4 – Emma Lazarus’ poem is on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

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