The Tortilla Curtain: Nightmares about Possible Worlds

A lot of alternative-future fiction is nightmares about what could happen if we project current trends forward into the future. We could also call these alternative-fiction nightmares “prophecies,” because that is what Old Testament prophecies were: they were not predictions about what would actually happen, but speculations about what might happen if current (to the prophets, sinful) conditions continued.

Rolando J. Diaz wrote a collection of stories in 2007 called Tales of the Tortilla Curtain. In his stories, set in the middle of the 21^st century, the Tortilla Curtain was an actual very high wall that ran along the entire border of Mexico and the United States, like an unhealable wound. It had every imaginable type of technological gadget for detecting anyone trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico, and then eliminating them. This would include land mines and automatic machine guns that would pulverize anyone crossing the border without prior authorization. Most of the border enforcement was coordinated by Dusty, the name by which the Data Systems Tracker was known. It was an artificial intelligence that pretended to be friendly. (Diaz wrote before AI became an everyday term.)

 

 

In story after story, the reader starts to get inured to clouds of blood and piles of torn, rotting corpses. This was a nightmare reification of the animosity that conservative Americans felt, then as now, toward immigrants from Mexico, originally walled wetbacks because they would swim the Rio Grande. American seldom felt animosity against the equally illegal, though extremely rare, frostbacks from Canada. Rolando’s stories pose the question, just how far would we go to lash out against people we with would not come to America? Would we be willing to kill them and to leave their bodies for work crews to shovel into trash trucks? To (if we were Hispanic Americans) shoot our own relatives?

The immediate cause of Rolando’s nightmare was the reaction of white Americans against Arabic people after nine-eleven, as we now call it. If white Americans could so passionately hate Arabs, then might they also hate Mexicans?

Note that Rolando wrote and published these stories not only before the first Trump administration but before the first Obama administration. Rolando could not have imagined (or maybe he did, but could not have actually foreseen) that Trump would campaign on the promise of actually building such a wall—thousands of miles and billions of cubic feet of concrete, with advanced technology. Such a project was always impossible and unaffordable, and once Trump got what he wanted—election—he conveniently forgot his promise. It became a metaphorical wall, at most consisting of extra electronic surveillance along existing fences.

And now, during Trump II, the reality may be less violent than Diaz described in his nightmare—not as many piles of dismembered body parts—but is more pervasive. The anti-immigrant hatred is not just along the border. It extends throughout the country, even most infamously in Minnesota, where ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in case any of you do not know) considers detaining even legal immigrants, and shooting and killing even white American citizens, to be an acceptable cost of their war against illegal immigrants. The federal government, with Trump’s enthusiastic support, pays ICE agents very well, gives them lots of benefits, allows them to wear face masks to hide their identity, and then lets them do whatever they want (though pretending to disapprove), up through and including killing people. Diaz’s wall was bleeding violence along the Mexican border; the real Trump wall cuts right through the heart of America.

It is possible that part of Trump’s Wall includes hostility toward other countries, not just our possible enemies, but also our allies. It seems to be part of his policy to make wild threats (We will take over Greenland! We will annex Canada!) against our friends. He backs off from them, but our allies have not forgotten. European leaders are still meeting to make preparation for a possible American takeover of Greenland, for example. This week, Marco Rubio is coming to France to discuss European support for the Iran War, which America started without even consulting our European allies. At the time of this writing, I do not know what might come from these meetings. It would be justified if the European leaders told Rubio, you started this war, you finish it, if you can.

In one of Diaz’s stories, an American citizen of Mexican origin was detained because he did not carry his passport with him when he happened to be arrested by federal agents. This raises an important question: do all Americans need to carry proof of citizenship (a driver’s license won’t qualify) at all times? Or, maybe, only if you have dark skin? (Which, incidentally, Diaz does not have.) This is starting to sound like the old Soviet Union, Comrade Trump.

Throughout Rolando’s book I found empathy. I would like to add one real story to Rolando’s fictional ones: the story of the little girl Josseline Janiletha Quinteros, who died in the desert in 2008 while coming to America to look for her mother. Alas her photo is no longer available.

Reading Diaz’s collection of stories made me shiver because his 2007 nightmare has elements that feel frighteningly like today’s news. An Old Testament style prophecy.

The Evolution of Wierdness

Weirdness cannot be defined, but whatever it is, it evolved, which means it provided an evolutionary advantage at many times during human evolution.

One reason it cannot be defined is that what one culture, in space or time, considers weird, another culture may not. One example is psychopaths. In most cultures, most people dislike psychopaths. They are very, very smart, and almost always use their intelligence and their charisma to advance their own interests. We tend to think of the psychopathic mass murderers and other criminals, but many psychopaths (who constitute about one percent of the population) pass as ordinary people and may be surprised by their own (often genetically-based) diagnosis. A lot of politicians and preachers are psychopaths, who cultivate the goodwill of others for their own financial or sexual benefits. And they also like to shame you for suspecting that they are committing acts of evil. It takes highly-developed social intelligence to recognize a psychopath. See the book by Kevin Dutton: The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us about Success. New York: FSG, 2012.

The success of psychopaths depends on the social situation. Adolf Hitler was a psychopath, and he got millions of people to follow him. After Germany lost World War Two, many Germans felt mentally liberated, and wondered, What were we thinking, to follow this jerk? Germany was not a nation of psychopaths, but maybe the Nazis were a party of psychopaths.

But there are many other ways of being weird. Most of us are a little weird in a few ways. But I mean clinical weirdness. One example is Williams Syndrome [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome]. People with Williams Syndrome have distinctive facial characteristics, and medical problems such as heart conditions. They have diminished intelligence, overall. They are extremely talkative, and effusively express their emotions. They are almost always cheerful. I have never knowingly met one but I get the impression that it would be really hard to not like them.

One word you would not associate with Williams Syndrome is suspicious. In order to become socially powerful, within your society, you have to be suspicious of the motives of other people in your society, and certainly of people in other societies. People with Williams Syndrome will walk right up to you and trust you. This is socially awkward. But openness and the willingness to trust is an essential component of altruism, of social bonding. It’s just that these people have too much of a good thing.

Another reason weirdness cannot be defined is that each kind of weirdness has its own social and genetic basis. Williams Syndrome is associated with a specific genetic deletion that affects a specific part of the brain. There is no set of terms in any language that exactly matches the symptoms of this deletion. And, in fact, characteristics resulting from mutations can be highly modified by upbringing and social circumstances. I am thinking of a person who acts as if she has Williams Syndrome, but who looks normal, and is brilliant.

Throughout human evolution, behavior patterns have sometimes been useful and sometimes not. Since each behavior has a different set of causes, human behavior has proven to be immensely variable. This has happened not because natural selection has done a bad job on human behavior, but because both the source and the target of human behavior is constantly shifting.

We can be glad we have empathy and altruism in the human species. And maybe Williams Syndrome is the price we pay for it.

Next, I will write about the evolution of nerds. Or not. Maybe I am a bit too close to the subject to be objective.

Biblical Deserts

There are many references in the Bible to deserts, none of them good. One of them is an Old Testament prophecy that Handel used in The Messiah: Make straight in the desert a highway for our God (Isaiah 40:3).

Clearly, Old Testament deserts are things that we should get rid of. And the Old Testament describes the reclamation of desert areas as the work of God. One of these passages follows immediately after the above quote.

When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights and fountains in the midst of valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane, and the pine together, that men may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it (Isaiah 41: 17-20).

The deserts, or wilderness areas, are not to be confused with thriving, highly-evolved desert ecosystems. In natural deserts, the plants have many exquisite adaptations to deal with heat and drought. Succulent plants store water, desert bushes have very deep roots, and desert plants even have special forms of photosynthesis that allow them to make food under all but the driest conditions. Some desert plants are small and tender, and have astonishing flowers, and they appear totally out of place in a dry desert. The way they survive is by living their whole lives, from seed to seed, in the brief rainy season. These are the deserts we need to protect, such as in Saguaro National Park (Arizona) or Anza-Borrego State Park in California. These are not the deserts to which the Bible refers.

 

The deserts of the Bible are the lands that have been corrupted by human civilization. Poor farming practices swept away the natural plant cover and caused soil erosion, leaving a barren landscape. That is why cities that were once thriving consisted only of collapsed walls surrounded by bare soil. This is what the earliest Sumerian cities looked like even at the time Isaiah wrote his prophecy. There was plenty of degraded land even around Jerusalem that everyone who heard Isaiah’s prophecy could readily see. To this day, most of the land around the Mediterranean remains partially degraded from millennia of human abuse. Today we think of Italy and Greece as dry shrublands; but they used to be, according to ancient writings, covered with thick forests.

If you are someone who is involved in any stage of land reclamation, to take a landscape that has been devastated by decades or centuries or millennia of human mismanagement, and turn it into a thriving ecosystem, you are doing some of God’s work. Although I do not believe that the modern nation of Israel is in fact God’s own special country, it is obvious that modern Israel has done a lot of reclamation, making what had been a devastated landscape bloom. They have been pioneers of soil conservation and dry land agriculture. Drip irrigation was invented in Israel. The joke goes: on the cover of the birthday card it says, In honor of your birthday, a tree has been planted in Israel. Inside the card it says, Wednesday is your day to water it.

The lands that have been reclaimed from human-produced deserts do not look like natural deserts. Just read the list of plant species in the passage above. Cedar, acacia, myrtle, olive, cypress, plane, pine. There is no natural ecosystem where you will find all of these trees together. They have to be planted in a garden that has displaced the degraded land.

None of this is miraculous. It is just good, hard work based on scientific studies (many of them Israeli). Isaiah says that God has done this. But it was not miraculous. God works through us, in this case through scientists and farmers. In order to see it as God’s work, you have to do what Isaiah said: to see and know, to consider and understand together. A quick glance at the trees is not good enough to see the work of God through mankind.