I was encouraged by Ginger Thompson's use of the term "wall" on the front page of today's NY Times www.nytimes.com (registration required) as in "Washington's plans to deploy troops and build more walls along the United States border." Yet other articles in the same issue referred to these same edifices as "fences." Right-wing gasbag William Safire took this misleading nomenclature to a new level when he referred to Israel's partition wall as an "anti-terrorist fence" in last week's NYTimes Magazine. I grew up in the country, and I know what a fence is. It is something you put up to keep cows and horses in the pasture, pigs in the pen, and deer out of the vegetable patch. Now that I live in the city, I know what walls are for: they are to keep me out of rich people's palatial estates. In other words, fences are for animals; walls are for people. More below:
American Heritage Dictionary defines a fence as "A structure serving as an enclosure, a barrier, or a boundary, usually made of posts or stakes joined together by boards, wire, or rails." The same dictionary defines a wall as "A continuous structure of masonry or other material forming a rampart and built for defensive purposes." I think most people know the difference without looking it up.
Whenever the forces of political extremism use such Orwellian new-speak, they are trying to hide their true purposes. It is easier for the American people to swallow the idea of a fence than a wall for obvious reasons: we don't like the associations with the Berlin Wall. We don't like it because the Berlin Wall divided families and separated people from their loved ones, workplaces, and cultural institutions that gave their lives meaning. In addition, it symbolized the Soviet occupation of East Germany and the failure of the corporate state.
However much we deny it, our own wall does those same things. It divides families. It separates people from their loved ones, workplaces, and cultural institutions that give their lives meaning. It symbolizes America garrisoned. The capitalist utopia envisioned by the Heritage Foundation is no less totalizing than the socialist utopia that was envisioned by Lenin and Stalin. What the two ideologies have in common is that they both subsume the autonomy of the individual to the needs of the corporate state. This government's persistent and ongoing attacks upon freedom of speech and individual privacy rights are both functions of the corporate state--as is the construction of walls.
It is the right and duty of any sovereign state to control its borders. However, we have created serious strains upon our southern border through our disastrous foreign policy in Latin America. We have "intervened" in just about every Latin American and Caribbean country--many of them numerous times--to protect the financial interests of US-based multinational corporations. We have underwritten right-wing coups against any Latin American government that tried to place the interests of its citizens above those of US energy companies and agribusinesses. In the process, we have enforced a regime of economic ruin and ecological devastation upon the indigenous populations culminating in the current wave of economic refugees. The answer is not more walls. It is better policy.
When the White House cabal weakens air standards it calls that the "Clear Skies Initiative." When it invades and occupies a foreign oil-producing country, it calls that "Operation Iraqi Freedom." And when it militarizes our southern border with walls, guard towers, and razor wire, it calls that "a fence." Those who refer to these walls as fences are both lying about the structure and its purposes, and dehumanizing Latin American immigrants by discursively classing them as livestock.
If the truth were told, Americans love walls. They help assuage our fear, and we have probably built more than the emperors Hadrian and Huangdi combined. After all, we have the greatest prison population--and the highest incarceration rate---in the world. We love walls, but we like to call them fences.