Up Against the Wall. Peter Laufer
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plastered over with whitewash and bring it down to the ground, so that its foundation is laid bare; and when it falls, you will be consumed in its midst. And you will know that I am the Lord.” And I appreciate the observations of the Dalai Lama who reminds us that nations belong to their citizens. Not to the leaders. Not to the presidents, not to the prime ministers.
As I write in my book, Let’s Move On: Beyond Fear & False Prophets, what good are walls around nations now when airplanes and drones can fly over them? People get very creative when faced with walls. Homemade bombs put holes in walls. Those seeking refuge or reunification with their families slip through the holes or tunnel under the walls or risk their lives on barbed wire to get over those walls.
When I was the president of Mexico we were working toward trying to abolish the concept of borders. What prevented us from doing it? Selfish nationalists who think that the rest of the world is no good. So they decide to build walls. Walls are for the fearful. You do not start building walls in the Land of the Free. The United States doesn’t keep its people behind concrete and barbed wire.
In Up Against the Wall, journalist Peter Laufer makes use of his longtime experiences studying borders and barriers to help us recognize the differences between personal walls such as those around my grandfather’s home and those like Donald Trump’s “impenetrable” wall along the Mexico-United States borderlands. Laufer reports on failed border walls turned into tourist attractions like the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall and the Berlin Wall. He shows readers new walls built on national borders since the Berlin Wall came down. He traces human migration as an unstoppable force when it’s driven by survival. And he documents stories of those who want to stay home and migrants who want to return to their friends and families and customs. Why should you trade enchiladas and tacos for hot dogs and hamburgers?
Up Against the Wall puts contemporary walls into historical context. It’s a guide for both policymakers and those thinking about migrating. And it’s a primary text for those who seek to understand the history, the philosophy and the psychology of borders and walls.
In one of my infamous videos posted on YouTube I showed a simple drawing to the camera and spoke directly to Trump. “It’s a ladder, Einstein,” I said about the picture. “You’re going to build a $25 billion wall that can be defeated by a twenty-five-dollar ladder?”1 In the following pages Peter Laufer climbs up a metaphorical ladder and looks out over our walls—the ones we may need, the nonsensical ones and the evil ones. We meet the characters who build them and those who break them down. Laufer doesn’t only present the problems, he offers creative solutions. And we come away from his book, I hope, with a better understanding of what the Dalai Lama and I talked about when we met: We eight billion people own this world. It doesn’t belong to one person or to nations, but to everybody.
Our family hacienda is now a boutique hotel; its profits help us fund the development work of Centro Fox—aiding those in need. The hotel is filled with reminders of our family’s and our nation’s past including a stark undated and uncaptioned black-and-white photograph taken on the hacienda grounds probably during the dark days of the Mexican revolution. Uniformed men with rifles are waiting for an order from their commanding officer to shoot, his sword raised high about to make the deadly signal. The guns are aimed at a man in civilian clothes, his hat doffed and held by his side, his eyes open and stolidly meeting the aim of his executioners.
The image is a sober reminder of what it means to be Up Against the Wall.
Guanajuato
2020
UP AGAINST THE WALL (EXPLETIVE)
The author and poet Jonah Raskin1 was mopping up his soup and salad dinner at the Casino bistro in Bodega—the Sonoma County village where scenes from Hitchcock’s “The Birds” were shot, a county once part of Mexico and these days filled with immigrants from Jalisco, immigrants documented and otherwise. We’ve been friends since he served as chair of the Communications Studies department at Sonoma State University—where I briefly taught.
We were talking about President Trump’s Mexico border wall, my study of walls worldwide and the research I was conducting into the origin of the phrase: Up against the wall.
“Did I tell you about the time,” Raskin queried me, “that I shouted, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker’ at a production of Joseph Heller’s play, ‘We Bombed in New Haven,’ and Heller added that line to the play and that it’s in the published text?” Raskin seemed pleased with his role as a literary footnote even though he added, “I didn’t get any credit.”
In fact, author Heller noted Raskin’s audience participation moment when the Columbia University student newspaper Spectator interviewed him in 1968 about his anti-war play. “As the actors came out for a curtain call,” the author of Catch 22 remembered, “a man stood up in the last row of the orchestra and yelled out, ‘Up against the war [sic], motherfucker!’ We were stunned,” Heller told the paper, “because we didn’t know who he was talking to. When we finally met the man, he explained what he meant to say was that we should take to the barricades—that we should be out fighting, rather than just sitting watching a play.”2
So what was it that Raskin advocated being up against? The war or the wall? Both? Vietnam was a shooting war and a societal wall. When I checked in with him, his answer across the years from the 1960s was unambiguous, despite Heller’s contemporaneous memory of the moment. “I yelled from the back of the theater, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker!’” Raskin told me, adding that the performance was a fundraiser for the National Lawyers Guild, “the old lefty organization that revived in the 1960s because of young lefty lawyers like my friend Bernardine Dohrn and my wife Eleanor Raskin.” He insisted he would not have even considered substituting “war” for “wall” when he disrupted the curtain call. “I don’t mess with classics of street slang. Didn’t then, don’t now.” And a classic of street slang it is.
Perhaps the phrase originated in the poem by LeRoi Jones, “Black People,” in which the text instructs: “All the stores will open if you say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick up!” During the 1967 Newark, New Jersey, riots (which he identified as “rebellion”), Jones was charged with resisting arrest and carrying an illegal weapon. At his trial later that year, Judge Leon W. Kapp read from the poem. Jones was found guilty and sentenced to three years in state prison, a sentence overturned when an appeals court ruled that Judge Kapp’s recitation prejudiced the jury.3 In a 1991 interview, Jones (by then he called himself Amiri Baraka)4 said Judge Kapp “decided to prove I had caused the riots by reading from a poem […] [a poem] not even published until after the riots were over. I objected that I was being tried for possession of two poems, and I was right.”5 Or perhaps Jones wasn’t the original author of the call to action but incorporated the line into his poem because Newark police were apt to use it when arresting black citizens.6 Whatever its origin, from the Lower East Side to Columbia University and thence across the continent, the phrase became common currency for rebellion. A posse of self-styled revolutionaries headquartered Downtown in New York City adopted it for their moniker and Mark Rudd, a leader of the 1968 student strike at Columbia, incorporated it into his open letter to the university’s president, Grayson Kirk, and credited it to LeRoi Jones (“whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot,” he added as an aside). The call became a rallying cry of the strike. And a year after Raskin’s yell, in 1969 on their Volunteers album, the Jefferson Airplane sang out, “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” for the chorus of their anthem “We Can Be Together.”
The call, without the oath, dates to ca. 1910, according to the British lexicographer Jonathon Green. It originated as military jargon meaning serious problems, according to Green’s research, “reinforced