Walled Off
This Week: Barriers, Borders and Walls O My! — with Greg Grandin, Valeria Luiselli and John Lanchester. Listen today at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
Our show this week was a thematic one, stitched together with interviews from an historian and two novelists. Each of these guests could have been a show of their own, of course, but with some tip top editing from Conor, Rebecca and yours truly, we made a point and an interesting radio and podcast hour.
Greg Grandin started us off. His new book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America is a modern revision of the idea that the frontier made us who we are.
The United States even before it was founded as an independent republic had expansion built into its premise. It moved west from the British Isles across the Atlantic to the New World settlement and then west across the Appalachia trans Mississippi and onward to the Pacific.
But then there was a way that that that movement was ideologized, was turned into a myth and there’s different components of it. One of the most important consolidators and synthesizers was Frederick Jackson Turner who delivered a paper in Chicago called the significance of the frontier in American history. And in it he argued against a kind of establishment Boston Brahmin way of thinking about everything that is good about the United States was exported from Europe.
Turner argued that everything that was good about the United States was created in the New World particularly on the frontier. The experience of settlement itself was was that it was a kind of machine for creating what we think of as American individualism and American democracy and a unique sense of political equality.
My question was whether Grandin would have written the book without the Trump election. He said no, that it was Trump’s campaign pledge that crystallized the point on the night in June, 2016, when he descended the gold escalator in Trump Tower with his promise to build a great wall. The power of that symbol has stuck, as we know, but ironically as Trump upended the frontier myth replacing it with his own new myth, he exposed the deep currents of nativism and racism that were always part of the frontier story and put those front and center in his wall spectacle.
So Trump signals the end of one story — frontier fatigue, Chris called it, and the beginning of another, but what is it?
I mean there’s two ways of thinking about Donald Trump; there’s the one in which he is completely exceptional in United States history and his form of extremism and nativism which we’ve seen but we’ve only seen at the margins represent an interruption in a larger history of tolerance and openness procedural democracy. Or you could see him as the fulfillment of the darkest impulses of the United States’s settler-colonial history of racism that was always present, an extremism that was always on the verge of manifesting itself.
The book is worth reading; here’s a Nation article Greg Grandin wrote in last week’s issue.
We went to the border with Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli. I’ve been raving about her novel Lost Children Archive. Chris interviewed her in Brookline recently, and she talked both about her novel and about her study of migrant children at the border. It’s chilling.
Chris summoned the New England farmer in Robert Frost’s famous poem, mending his wall spring well aware of “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down.” “Before I built a wall,” he says, “I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.”
Coming up: Bauhaus
Bauhaus in the haus. We’ve been doing our homework, visiting the Harvard Art Museums 100th anniversary exhibit, the Gropius House and the MFA’s exhibit on Bauhaus prints. Tamar Avishai, host of the Lonely Palette podcast is collaborating with us on this show.
Coming soon: Esperanza Spalding
We’ll run Chris’ interview with Esperanza in two weeks, and in the meantime you can still get tickets for her concert at the Berklee Performance Center on April 14th.
More OS links
Sexism and Rock&Roll. Just so you’re not surprised if (when) Donald Trump is re-elected — Dave Eggers’ report from El Paso. The Daily interviews an AIDS activist on the recent advances on cures for HIV. Briahna Joy Gray interviews AOC at SXSW. Richard Brody calls Jordan Peele’s Us a “colossal cinematic achievement;” Josephine Livingstone and Manohla Dargis are similarly wowed. Behind the righteous facade of the Southern Poverty Law Center. @berlantbro interviews Lauren Berlant in The New Inquiry. The Rick Steves profile you’ve been waiting for.
That’s all for this week. Like, subscribe, and consider donating to Open Source.
❤ The OS team
