Still thinking about walls. Or, more precisely, about borders. They rule politics, these days, or the talk about them does. Case in point is the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland that might reemerge if Brexit happens without some miracle solutions. I think I finally understood the problem of the Irish backstop yesterday when I read the article attached at the end.

The worry is that the decades-old conflict between unionists who are allied with the UK and nationalists who want a unified Ireland for the Irish will erupt again. Fears are that this will happen if and when a hard border is re-erected because half of the island will belong to the EU and the other half will leave because of Brexit. Lest we forgot: this conflict claimed close to 4000 lives over 30 years, and sparks of violence are already happening again in form of car bombs or other dangerous attacks.

Peace had been called by the Good Friday agreements in 1998. The border, which was heavily militarized during the conflict, both a symbol of the strife and a very real target for nationalist paramilitary groups, was eradicated, helped by membership and free flow of goods via the EU. If a hard border is re-established between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, many fear it could inflame still-simmering tensions and reignite conflict. So the backstop is the idea that refers to a guarantee that a “hard” Irish border — meaning actual physical checkpoints for goods and people trying to cross it — won’t be put in place when the EU and UK break up.

But of course there is no agreement about the backstop, with the Brexiteers furious about the possibility that it implies no clean break with the links to the EU, the EU furious that May wants to have that back door open to appease the warring Irish parties and so on. Alternatives, like technological gimmicks and/or drones instead of watchtowers, seem to be pragmatically still far from ready to be implemented. For the full argument go here- it does a better job at explaining than I can, still having trouble to connect all the dots.: https://www.vox.com/world/2019/2/18/18204269/brexit-irish-border-backstop-explained

Which brings me to one of my favorite perceptual illusions of dots that are present but that you cannot see in their totality – only those (and perhaps a few others in the vicinity) which you look at directly with your fovea will be perceived. The rest vanishes before you can connect them. The fun part in the demonstration below is interactive, though: if you change a few parameters you can make the illusion disappear or re-appear. Just like the Irish troubles – change some parameters, and it will raise its ugly head again…..Click on the link below.

https://michaelbach.de/ot/lum-NinioDots/index.html

And here is the song for Ireland….

This week I’ll tackle one or another illusion from a variety of contexts. Well, that’s the plan, let’s see how it goes.

The first one, clearly triggered by the events of last week, is the illusion that walls can provide security. I found the argument nowhere better laid out than here:https://fpif.org/the-psychology-of-the-wall/

Here is the summary of Feffer’s arguments (in Foreign Policy in Focus) to contemplate on President’s Day: In 1989, when the Berlin Wall finally came dow, there were 15 border walls around the world. Want to guess what that number is in 2019? Seventyseven. 77 walls that were erected to keep people (and things) out – and that refers only to the actual concrete objects in form of mortar, brick, razor wire, steel slats and so on – not counted are the walls that are more ephemeral in terms of barriers concerning trade, finance, movement of manufacturers or labor.

In Eastern Europe from the Czech Republic to Slovakia to Romania to Hungary you have newly established walls. Some to keep foreigners out, some to separate Roma from non-Roma populations. The Brexit debacle is another kind of wall – just a wet one, called English Channel. Spain has walled off its cities on mainland Morocco, Saudi Arabia is walled off from Iraq.

And let’s not forget Israel – if you can stomach reading the justifications (e.g.The security fence does create some inconvenience to Palestinians, but it also saves lives. The deaths of Israelis caused by terror are permanent and irreversible whereas the hardships faced by the Palestinians are temporary and reversible” – I guess they count generations of traumatized, and orphaned, West Bank children as having a temporary condition….) or are adapt at skipping, here are some intense statistics on walls, fences and security barriers supposed to protect the state. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/background-and-overview-of-israel-s-security-fence

Trump’s wall, and let’s not forget also that of his followers and a GOP that does nothing to stop him, is supposed to keep people out. Here as elsewhere we see a focus on exclusivity – keeping people out of the enclave of the rich, the institutions of the elite, and preserving privilege for a tightly circumscribed minority who is unwilling to share. The promised security then is really about the insecurity of those who see their privileges endangered by others who want to be part of the club. Privileges derived from race, gender and class, let’s face it, and from being an American.

The Right. Feffer argues, “wants that wall to prevent all these privileges — individual, communal, national — from leaking out. It’s the architectural equivalent of a gun. It’s for defense, a way for people to “stand their ground.” But it’s also compensation for powerlessness and lack of control. As with guns, the sense of safety and security is almost entirely illusory.”

Add to the illusion that walls provide security the establishing of the illusion that it is about security and you have last week in a nutshell!

Music is a really funny song by a young Egyptian songwriter which should lift our mood for the week!

Youssra el-Hawari – The Walls
يسرا الهواري – السور
Essour

In order to prevent protests, SCAF, the military government ruling over Egypt following Mubarak’s ousting, erected large walls in the city of Cairo. These walls have become a site of resistance in the form of graffiti and the like, and in this song, an even simpler expression of discontent.

Here is the translation from the Arabic:

– The Wall

In front of the wall
In front of the ones who built it
In front of the wall
In front of the ones who erected it
And in front of the one who guards it as well
A poor man stopped to pee
On the wall and those who built it, erected it, and guard it
On the wall and the ones who built it, the man peed

Money has been on my mind. For one, the Jewish Museum in London is going to open a new exhibit mid-March, called Jews, Money, Myth. From the catalogue: ….it examines the origins of some of the longest running and deeply entrenched antisemitic stereotypes: the theological roots of the association of Jews with money; the myths and reality of the medieval Jewish moneylender; and the place of Jews – real and imagined – in commerce, capitalism and finance up to the present day. 

The exhibit will feature international art works, including Rembrandt’s Judas returning the 30 Pieces of Silver, manuscripts, board games, cartoons and whatever cultural objects and commissioned videos you can think of that reflect on the theme. Will it enlighten those who hold deep beliefs about Jewish money secretly running the world? Will it harden the attitude of those who feel victimized by the stereotypes? Will it speak to the fears of those who think highlighting the topic will only strengthen anti-Semitic thinking? We should revisit this in the summer….

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/31/london-jewish-museum-to-explore-tropes-about-money

Just as the stereotype persists that Jews have too much money or use it for nefarious purposes, so does our ignorance about he consequences of the lack of money. This could not have been more clear than when I realized, with shock, what is happening in Florida right now. Here we were all celebrating the restoration of voting rights to convicted felons, miraculously voted in during the midterm elections.

Never mind that certain felons were permanently barred from the return to civic rights – those convicted for murder or sexual offenses. And that 400.000 are on parole or probation, which also excludes them. It still leaves about 1.1 million people who could theoretically register to vote.

As the ACLU chapter of Florida reports, registration requires that your sentence is completed. That, in turn, involves paying off all the fees and fines accrued during the judicial process. They estimate that 560.000 or so of the ex felons have fines that they are not able to pay off, simply because they are too poor. The idea that you can reenter society after having payed for your crime in prison is clearly attenuated by the requirement that you pay for your imprisonment. What a travesty.

And one, by the way, by no means restricted to Florida: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/opinion/election-voting-rights-poverty.html

At least we now have initiatives that combat the lack of money at the beginning of the criminal proceedings: The Bail Project. It fronts money to people too poor to come up with cash bail. The money is released when the accused show up in court, being available for the next case. Do people show up, you wonder? It looks like 96% of them do. More importantly, 90% of those held on bail plead guilty. When bail is paid, it turns out 50% of the cases are dismissed, and less than 2% receive jail sentences. Compare those two outcome in light of prison overcrowding (never mind in light of what it does to the life of a person.) You can check out the details (and donate….) here, including the organization’s 5-year plan to open offices across the country: https://bailproject.org 

Photographs today are from Miami in honor of the restored voting rights, but also sort of related to money: a lot of traditional neighborhoods there as elsewhere in the country are gentrified with the help of “art washing” – the influx, often supported and financed by real estate developers, of artists and galleries who make the neighborhood more attractive, draw in tourists and investment and displace the original poor tenants (until the artists are driven out as well….)

This week was mostly devoted to how to find things that are lost or stolen: archeological treasures, land, art. The academic discussion around textual archeology, learning from past texts, literary or otherwise, eventually had me think about maps.

Maps, you know, those paper things that half of us can read and half of us cannot, that pointed the way to our destinations before the arrival of talking machines that tell you how to proceed – and then reroute. Maps, now seriously, that were supposed to adhere to “the empiricist paradigm of cartography”—that “cartography’s only ethic was to be accurate, precise, and complete.”

https://persuasivemaps.library.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/PJM%20Persuasive%20Cartography%20Portolan%20%23100%20Winter%202017.pdf

Since the 1970s, this view has been strongly challenged, and there are many enlightening efforts to reveal what maps are often really all about – persuasion to accept a particular view of the world, and not just geographically. For example, in 1992 the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in NYC put on a show about “all maps –whether rare or familiar, new or old, Western or non-Western — are more than simply guides to help you find your way. Like advertisements and other forms of graphic design,maps express particular viewpoints in support of specific interests. Depending on their function and purpose, all maps present information selectively, shaping our view of the world and our place in it.”

One of the best collections of these type of maps can be found at Cornell, see the link attached above. A great discussion of what is on offer – and what is at stake – can be found here:https://persuasivemaps.library.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/PJM%20Persuasive%20Cartography%20Portolan%20%23100%20Winter%202017.pdf

The author argues that persuasive cartography is as old as mapping itself. Its scope ranges from religion, imperial geopolitics (think colonialism), slavery, British international politics, social and protest movements to, of course war. It was made explicit in the 1920s (and later taken on in force by the Nazis) when in reaction to the shameful defeat in WW I German cartographers decided to go for the “Suggestive Map,” cartographic propaganda which they thought had given the British a strategic advantage.

“The goal of suggestive mapping was to achieve political objectives (while avoiding lies, which could be easily exposed) by appealing to emotions and rigorously excluding anything that didn’t support the desired message. Its maps were intended specifically to engage support from the general population, and they were often “shamelessly explicit. The movement produced “striking” results: by the early 1930s “there was a ‘virtual flood’ of suggestive maps in Germany; entire atlases were devoted to them, and they appeared in “every public lecture, every newspaper, and in countless books.”

In the 1970s Brian Harley and many other progressive historians pointed to the fact that persuasive cartography was not restricted to a particular nation or political movement. “Social purposes between the lines” were typically the goals of the authoritarian elite, who used maps to legitimate their power and manipulate the weak.” If you look closely at the maps I am posting today instead of photographs, you’ll get the point.

A great overview of myths, lies and blunders on maps can also be found here:

https://hyperallergic.com/348907/the-phantom-atlas/….

and that is before we even get to maps of fantasy worlds…..

Music today is about a traveling man who could not have been saved by the best maps in the world: The flying Dutchman. If you are not up to listening to 3 hours of Wagner, there is a hilarious 3 minute version ….

The real thing is attached here. As typical for Wagner (reminded by the spoof above): the men need redemption, the women do the sacrificing. And that pattern is pretty well mapped out…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9b97PZUykE

And here is the last poem one of my favorite poets ever worked on:

MAP
Wisława Szymborska

Flat as the table
it’s placed on.
Nothing moves beneath it
and it seeks no outlet.
Above—my human breath
creates no stirring air
and leaves its total surface
undisturbed.

Its plains, valleys are always green,
uplands, mountains are yellow and brown,
while seas, oceans remain a kindly blue
beside the tattered shores.

Everything here is small, near, accessible.
I can press volcanoes with my fingertip,
stroke the poles without thick mittens,
I can with a single glance
encompass every desert
with the river lying just beside it.

A few trees stand for ancient forests,
you couldn’t lose your way among them.

In the east and west,
above and below the equator—
quiet like pins dropping,
and in every black pinprick
people keep on living.
Mass graves and sudden ruins
are out of the picture.

Nations’ borders are barely visible
as if they wavered—to be or not.

I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world.

_

Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh
NewYorker April, 14th, 2014