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own, exploring what she calls the various
“fantasies of walled democracy,” such the
irrational fear “of the dangerous alien in
an increasingly borderless world.” She
adds: “The projection of danger onto the
alien both draws on and fuels a fantasy
of containment for which walls are the
ultimate icon. The protective walls of the
home are now extended to the nation, taking
to a parodic height [the political philosopher]
Hannah Arendt’s argument in
The Human Condition that the overtaking
of the political by the social in modernity
converts the national into a giant household.”
Personally, I see nothing parodic in
this. Walls as protection from whatever
one fears or despises has its origin in the
single family (if not, as old Freudians
would have said, in the womb itself). But
it is constantly adjusting to new cultural
and political changes on the other side of
the wall or cultural changes taking place
inside the pale. I don’t know whether or
to what extent this is actually true, but I
once read of an experiment in which an
American and a Japanese were asked
to bed down in separate identical bare
rooms, each equipped with only a sleeping
mat. The American always moved his
mat against one wall while the Japanese
moved his to the centre of the room. Each
felt safe and contented in his own way. Dr.
Brown notes that wall-building megaprojects
in South Asia are usually undertaken
to keep out immigrants while those in
Middle Eastern countries are generally
built to keep out terrorists. This statement
is open to so many obvious exceptions as
to be nearly without merit. Walls such as
she describes are being built to guarantee
the belief that there are two classes of
citizenship — no, of humanity — so that
the higher order of people can keep out
the one they demonize. These are different
sorts of walls than those that keep a family
together; the latter concern solidarity
and privacy rather than security. Recently
we’ve read and heard a great deal about
Osama bin Laden’s “family compound” in
Abbottabad — just as a generation ago we
heard so often of “the Kennedy compound
in Hyannis Port.” Thinking in terms of Dr.
Brown’s and Mr. Sawyer’s ideas rather
than in terms of world news, don’t both
examples use the word compound in the
same way?
George Fetherling’s latest book is Indochina
Now and Then (Dundurn Press).
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