Hopewit

  “… Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.”   Robert Frost’s iconic poem, “Mending Wall,” takes us into the New England countryside and two properties where two owners get together every spring to repair the stone fence between them. Had they livestock, the narrating owner conjectures, the adage, “Good fences make good neighbours,” would suit. But here, one has fruit trees and the other a pine orchard, so why keep the fence/wall? Clearly, those who constructed the Berlin Wall had a good idea what it was they were “walling in or walling out.” Or attempting to. Visiting a family in East Berlin in 1988, we learned that the wall was much more than concrete, machine guns and guard dogs. Through the legal system, the wall cut through the school curricula, through personal freedoms of religion, movement, thought and speech. Bu...

  An episode of Real Time with Bill Maher  included commentary on a “man in the street” survey of   American adults. The question, “Which country is home to Queen Elizabeth?” yielded answers of “Egypt?” “Brazil?” The question “Which is the largest city in the world?” brought answers of “Asia,” and “England.” Clearly any such a survey report would have been edited and, conceivably, just the silly answers included in the published version. Surely a few would have known that Elizabeth is (was) at home in France! Maher’s comment was something like, “The USA is a country of morons!” Clearly, we’re not equally endowed with whatever equipment and experience allow one to be knowledgeable and “intelligent.” We used to have words in English to scale a person’s level of mental endowment: genius at the tip-top, moron at the bottom and between the extremes: idiots, imbeciles, and the mass of the average. Another measure used a number scale for scores achieved on a standardized te...