The walls we build between us…a case of Life imitating Art
Art is a gift that is so often connected to a truth that may otherwise be ignored. Some, like the amazingly prescient anthem, Why We Build the Wall written by Anais Mitchell for his later multi-Tony musical Hadestown, reteach time-honored truths that continue to resonate. The musical that first premiered in 2006 began a 13-year journey to Broadway that coincided with Donald Trump’s ascendance to power. Hadestown is a retelling of the Greek myth of two lovers, Orpheus and Eurydice that embodies Oscar Wilde’s rather bold assertion that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” I will spare you a retelling of the myth but you can reacquaint yourself here.
Mitchell’s reimagining takes place in the Underworld where the doomed are walled in by a barrier of their own making. The play reimagines the myth with a river that requires crossing (Styx), a pair of doomed lovers, and musical numbers that seem to call out issues of our times. With the 2015 Trump candidacy, a wall across our southern border became an issue used to rally hate and mistrust of immigrants with the real purpose of sowing discord among us. In Why We Build the Wall Mitchell captures almost perfectly the irony of a people being urged to build a wall to keep out others while dividing those under its shadow. The thematic walling in of the town’s residents foreshadows our own measures under the Trump Administration to intimidate border crossers by stoking fear and unleashing long-simmering prejudices that threaten our democracy. The liberal use of euphemism and misrepresentation merge art and reality:
What do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done
My children, my children
And the war is never won
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free— Why We Build the Wall, by Anais Mitchell
In the play, Hades convinces the inhabitants of the Underworld that they need a wall to keep them free while preserving his dominion over them by exacting their permissions in an effort to ostracize “the enemy.” They are enticed to act against their own interests by foisting the lie that they could be freed by their fears.
It reminds me of arguments made throughout my life to maintain a constant war footing by manufacturing imminent dangers in far-off places. We no longer differentiate between wars that are necessary and those that are gratuitous. America has fought its share of both. “Forever Wars” have become a by-product of a cold war that was fueling a raging post-World War II economy. The constant choosing of sides that have sent our young to die in God-forsaken lands have had the effect of a zero-sum effort of making friends by making enemies. The profits of war, as we were warned by President Eisenhower in his farewell address, benefit borderless corporations whose allegiance was to investors and their bottom line-Ike’s military-industrial complex. Projecting power in the name of ensuring security became a business model that was addictive to multinational corporations. Even before Eisenhower’s warning, going back to the World Wars that killed millions and destroyed much of Europe, these corporations sold loyalties to the highest bidders. They still do. The corporate world was not at war so much as it was in the business of war. American corporations like GM, Chase National Bank, and IBM all provided materials that were used by the Nazis to help in the administration of the Holocaust. The loss of life and American fortune in distant wars for specious causes have been proxies for economic gain and corporate greed. George Orwell wrote of fictional “forever wars” as part of a national state of being, a means of control.
The argument they offer is that a state of war prevents larger conflicts. Better to fight in far-off places than fight at home. And yet, that is what happened here a year ago on January 6th. Finally, after wars on terror, WMDs, and communist expansion, the war has come home and the enemy is within. After years of co-opting the word, waging figurative wars on poverty, drugs, or other societal “evil” the term has become degraded. The horrors felt by combatants in our real foreign excursions are anesthetized as we are distanced from the real wages of war. We are soothed and our consciences eased by the thought of fighting in far-flung territories where we never hear a bomb drop, never witness a village devastated. Even our newly developed “high tech” weaponry sells us comfort in promoting their accuracy, their precision while desensitizing us to their destruction. We marvel at the efficiencies of weapons that are mobilized by keystrokes rather than pulling triggers. The detachment almost makes war palatable. Orwell describes a truth that underlies our most recent wars:
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.’
— George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938
The truth is that like the inhabitants of Hadestown we have leaders who feel the need to manufacture enemies for the purpose of maintaining control. The Biden doctrine to end the forever war in Afghanistan has been redefined as a disaster because of the mayhem we left behind, yet detractors forget the mayhem inflicted on our own nation-a cost born by our fighting men and women separated from family and comforts of home, not to mention our treasure. The wall that has been built between friends, family, and neighbors at home is paid for with the loss of trust in each other and a dangerous mistrust of our leaders and institutions:
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us freeBecause we have and they have not, my children, my children
Because they want what we have got
And so, as we contemplate the lies told in service of Donald Trump and his maniacal lust for power, it is good to have perspective to understand how we got to this place in our history. Why do we build the wall, might better be phrased for whom do we do it? And again, Orwell like Anais Mitchell state for us a truth hidden from us in plain sight:
“Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
The Orpheus and Eurycides myth in the end is about a deeply felt love that is undone by momentary doubt. His mission to save his beloved by cheating death is defeated by the inevitability of fate. The allusion to our current politics is both revelatory and apparent.
Originally published at https://vincerizzo.substack.com on January 12, 2022.
