This is how we are thinking now, because these are fearful days. There is a photograph by Sebastião Salgado that shows the wall between the United States and Mexico snaking over the crests of hills, running away into the distance, as far as the eye can see, part Great Wall of China, part gulag. There is a kind of brutal beauty here, the beauty of starkness. At intervals along the wall there are watchtowers, and these so-called sky-towers are manned by armed men. In the photograph we can see the tiny, silhouetted figure of a running man, an illegal immigrant, being chased by other men in cars. The strange thing about the picture is that, although the running man is clearly on the American side, he is running toward the wall, not away from it. He has been spotted, and is more afraid of the men bearing down on him in cars than of the impoverished life he thought he had left behind. He’s trying to get back, to unmake his bid for freedom. So freedom is now to be defended against those too poor to deserve its benefits by the edifices and procedures of totalitarianism. What kind of freedom is it, then, that we enjoy in the countries of the West—these exclusive, increasingly well-guarded enclaves of ours? That is the question the photograph asks, and before September 11, 2001, many of us—many more, I suspect, than today—would have been on the running man’s side.
Even before the recent atrocities, however, the citizens of Douglas, Arizona, were happy to protect America from what they called “invaders.” In October 2000 the British journalist Duncan Campbell met Roger Barnett, who runs a towing and propane business near Douglas but also organizes wetback hunting parties. *32 Tourists can sign up for a weekend hunting human beings. “Stop the invasion,” the billboards in Douglas say. According to Campbell, Barnett is a legendary character in these parts. He thinks it would be a “hell of an idea” for the United States to invade Mexico in return. “There’s a lot of mines and great beaches there, there’s farming and resources. Think of what the United States could do there—gee whiz, they wouldn’t have to come up here anymore.”
Another citizen of Douglas, Larry Vance, Jr., thinks Mexicans are like the wildebeest of Africa: fair game for predators. “Where a native population has been diluted by invaders it runs into a bloodbath. We abhor violence but we realize that people have the God-given right to defend themselves.” Perhaps the running man in Salgado’s picture is being chased by Mr. Barnett’s thrill-seekers, who are in no doubt that they are the defenders of the right, or by supporters of Mr. Vance’s organization, the Cochise County Concerned Citizens—that’s four C's, not three K's. The Mexican view of things is different, as Campbell reminds us:
“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” is the much-used remark by Mexicans who have made it. To an extent this is true: the settlement of the Mexican-American war of 1846–48 meant that, for the sum of $18,250,000, the whole of California, most of Arizona and New Mexico and parts of Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Wyoming passed to the U.S.
But history, as they say, is made up of interviews with winners, and nobody’s asking the wall-jumpers and wetbacks for their worldview right now. And if, in the aftermath of terrorist horror, many more of us are prepared to accept the need for a border gulag-world of sky-towers and manhunters; if, being afraid, we prefer to sacrifice some of what freedom means, then should we not worry about what we are becoming? Freedom is indivisible, we used to say. We are all thinking about dividing it now.
Think for a moment about this image of a running man, a man who has nothing, who is no danger to anyone, fleeing the land of the free. For Salgado, as for myself, the migrant, the man without frontiers, is the archetypal figure of our age. Salgado has spent many years among the world’s displaced peoples, the uprooted and the re-rooted, chronicling their border crossings, their refugee camps, their desperations, their ingenuities: creating an extraordinary photographic record of this most important of contemporary phenomena. The pictures show that there has never been a period in the history of the world when its peoples were so jumbled up. We are so thoroughly shuffled together, clubs among diamonds, hearts among spades, jokers everywhere, that we’re just going to have to live with it. In the United States, this is an old story. Elsewhere, it’s a new one, and it doesn’t always go down well. As a migrant myself, I have always tried to stress the creative aspects of such cultural commingling. The migrant, severed from his roots, often transplanted into a new language, always obliged to learn the ways of a new community, is forced to confront the great questions of change and adaptation; but many migrants, faced with the sheer existential difficulty of making such changes, and also, often, with the sheer alienness and defensive hostility of the peoples among whom they find themselves, retreat from such questions behind the walls of the old culture they have both brought along and left behind. The running man, rejected by those people who have built great walls to keep him out, leaps into a confining stockade of his own.
Here is the worst-case scenario of the frontier of the future: the Iron Curtain was designed to keep people in. Now we who live in the wealthiest and most desirable corners of the world are building walls to keep people out. As the economics Nobel laureate Professor Amartya Sen has said, the problem is not globalization. The problem is a fair distribution of resources in a globalized world. And as the gulf between the world’s haves and have-nots increases (and it is increasing all the time) and as the supply even of essentials like clean drinking water becomes scarcer (and it is getting scarcer all the time), the pressure on the wall will build. Think of Lessing’s ice, inexorably moving forward. So if we send representatives to tell the future who we were, what story will they have to tell? A story, perhaps, of a jeweled people, sitting tight on their treasure hoards, “wearing bracelets, and all those amethysts too, and all those rings on their fingers with splendid flashing emeralds, [and] carrying their precious walking sticks, with silver knobs and golden tops so wonderfully carved,” and waiting for the barbarians, as Cavafy tells us—Cavafy again, that Borgesian mythomane who is also one of the great poets of miscegenation—
Because the Barbarians will arrive today;
Things of this sort dazzle the Barbarians.
At the frontier there has always been the threat, or, for a decadent culture, even the promise of the barbarians.
What are we waiting for all crowded in the forum?
The Barbarians are to arrive today.
Within the Senate-house where is there such inaction?
The Senators making no laws what are they sitting there for?
Because the Barbarians arrive today.
What laws now should the Senators be making?
When the Barbarians come they’ll make the laws.
. . .
Why should this uneasiness begin all of a sudden,
And confusion. How serious people’s faces have become.
Why are all the streets and squares emptying so quickly,
And everybody turning home again so full of thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some people have arrived from the frontier;
They said there are no Barbarians any more.
And now what will become of us without Barbarians?—
Those people were some sort of a solution.
“What will become of us without Barbarians?” J. M. Coetzee’s novel also called Waiting for the Barbarians offers a dystopic gloss on the Cavafy poem. Those who spend their time on guard, waiting for the barbarians to arrive, in the end don’t need any barbarians to come. In a dark variation on the ending of the “Conference of the Birds,” they themselves become the barbarians whose coming they so feared. And then there are no solutions.
“Why should this uneasiness begin all of a sudden?” It’s not so long since the American frontier was a location of freedom, not unease. Not so long since Sal Paradise took off into Mexico with his pal Dean Moriarty to begin that part of his life you could call his life on the road. To re-read On the Road now is to be struck, first of all, by how well it has lasted: its prose sprigh
tly, leaner, and less prolix than expected, its intense vision still bright. It’s a celebration of the open road, and of the open frontier as well. To cross into another language, another way of being, is to take a step toward beatitude, the worldly blessedness to which all dharma bums aspire.
I have always mentally paired On the Road with another classic modern fable of the U.S.-Mexican border, Orson Welles’s great film Touch of Evil. The Welles picture is the dark flip-side of the Kerouac book. Like the novel, the film takes the openness of the frontier for granted: its story is made possible by the frontier’s unpoliceability. However, the movie’s bums are not of the dharma variety. Its characters are not blessed, or even seeking enlightenment. Welles’s frontier is fluid, watchful, constantly shifting focus and attention: in a word, unstable. In the famous opening take, when minute after minute passes without a cut, the inhabitants of Welles’s transit zone engage in a cryptic dance of death. The frontier’s everyday life may look banal, meaningless, and above all continuous, but it begins with the planting of a bomb and ends with the radical discontinuity of an explosion. This frontier is anonymous, denaturing; it strips humanity bare. Life, death. Not much else matters, except, maybe, alcohol. Marlene Dietrich says it best when she delivers the flawed hero’s epitaph as he floats facedown in a shallow canal: “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?”
Some kind of a man. This crooked policeman had some good in him somewhere. A whore loved him, sort of. So what, he’s dead. A man steps across a line, he suffers the penalty. This man got away with it for a long time and then did not get away with it. What else is there to say? The frontier watches the come-and-go of life. It does not judge. Another man, the dead man’s antagonist, a Mexican lawman, comes to this border town with an American blonde. He, too, has crossed a line: the frontier of the skin, of racial difference. The blonde is his transgression, his crime against the natural order, in which such women are off limits to such men. She is therefore also his weakness. He is an honest man, but when his wife is attacked—drugged, framed—he stops being a lawman, puts down his badge, and becomes merely a man fighting for his woman. The frontier has stripped him of the law, of civilization. This is normal. The frontier strips you down, and then you are what you are and you do what you do. This is how it is. What does it matter what you say about people?
The world-weariness—the word-weariness—of all this is profoundly at odds with the eager, voluble world of the Beats, and the related world of the rest of literature, in which there is nothing more important than what you say about people, except how you say it. Gravel-voiced, shoulder-shrugging Marlene Dietrich saying good-bye to dead Orson echoes and invokes an older American idea of the frontier, that laconic world where actions spoke louder than words, the Boot Hill, OK Corral, Hole-in-the-Wall, outlaw frontier of which we perhaps still think most often when we combine the words “American” and “frontier,” the westward-moving front-line, first of Natty Bumppo and later of Davy Crockett—but also of John Ford and the monosyllabic John Wayne. The West as it has come down to us is a myth of a largely pre-literate, almost pre-verbal world, a world of “kids”—Sundance, Cisco—who barely even needed names, and of “Bills”—Wild, Buffalo—for whom an epithet was enough, and at least one Bill, or Billy, who managed to be a Kid as well. Yet these men’s reputations were constructed by writers, whose names we have not remembered: fabulist Boswells to the Wild West’s desperado Johnsons, print-the-legend glamorizers who called themselves reporters. What does it matter what you say about people? Plenty, it turns out, if you’re in the legend business. The American frontier affected to despise words, but it was a landscape built of words. And it’s gone now, but the words remain. Animals, as they pass through landscape, leave their tracks behind. Stories are the tracks we leave.
The actually existing American frontier was officially declared to have disappeared forever in 1890, when the superintendent of the census reported, “At present . . . there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” Just three years after this somewhat dry funeral oration, the Frontier Thesis was born. At a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago on July 12, 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner, the thirty-two-year-old son of a journalist and local historian from Portage, Wisconsin, delivered his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which would later be called “the single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history,” and suffered the traditional fate of the pioneer: that is to say, his ideas were completely ignored. Not for long, however. His star rose rapidly, and even though he never delivered the big books based on his ideas about the frontier—books for which he nevertheless signed contracts and accepted advances—he proved a skillful academic careerist and, after being courted by colleges from Berkeley to Chicago and Cambridge, he ended up on the faculty at, if I may mention the word, Harvard.
According to the Turner thesis,
the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development . . . [which] has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.
Turner characterizes the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” a formulation that will not endear him to a more culturally sensitive modern audience. Less contentiously and more interestingly, he says that “at first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.” The frontier, he proposes, is the physical expression of Americanness. “The universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them.” The frontier is created by this inherent Americanness, but it also creates much of what we recognize as quintessentially American. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people.” And: “The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier. . . . Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to localism.” And also: “The frontier is productive of individualism . . . [so that] the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy.”
All this adds up to nothing less than the American character.
To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier. The people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. . . . Movement has been [America's] dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.
The Frontie
r Thesis offers a triumphalist vision of America’s coming-to-be with which it’s easy to take issue, and since Turner first presented it, almost every single one of its ideas and assumptions has been contested. Most obviously, was there ever really such a thing as a frontier of free land, a virgin territory against which pioneer America measured itself? What, then, of the conquered and even annihilated Native American tribes—even before the coming of political correctness, I found it odd to speak, in the American context, of “Indians”—who were there long before the frontier’s inexorable line began to step across their land? *33 Turner concedes that what the settlers found at the frontier was “not tabula rasa,” but his evident contempt for the displaced “savages” colors, and damages, his argument, or rather gives it a darker meaning he did not intend. “The American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.” This optimistic formulation sounds almost imperialist now. If the original inhabitants of America were trampled over and brushed aside as the frontier snaked west, then should the rest of the world, that “wider field,” now feel apprehensive of America’s intentions?
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