Shi Huangdi's Fence

Once upon a time there was a man whom history records as Shi Huangdi, meaning First Emperor, who ruled the country then known as the Middle Kingdom, and today known as China. Shi Huangdi, being the first emperor, had a great many problems, such as deciding what the Imperial Colors should be, and the official Imperial Title, and whether he was a God or not, and what design he wanted on his plates. He also had another problem. Just about as regular as spring cleaning, the northern barbarians would trample over his country and raid all the villages. Sometimes they even threatened an Imperial palace.

"This is it!" he finally howled after a particularly vicious raid in which the barbarians knocked over his trash cans and walked off with his lawnmower, "I'm buildin' a fence."

So began the story of the Great Wall of China, which cost a lot of money, a lot more lives (even then, lives in China were cheap), and was about as effective as a tuna sandwich. Barbarians quickly found that, without large concentrations of Chinese with sharp pointy things on the wall, it was easy to slip over it, or slip around it, or simply bribe their way through it. As a barrier, the Great Wall of China, which took about two thousand years to finally assume its current form, was never very effective. For all of Shi Huangdi, and later the Ming Dynasty's investment into traditional slave labor, they just couldn't keep the barbarians out.

If several thousand miles of stone and earth fortification eventually failed to hold off a few bands of marauding barbarians, I fail to see how seven hundred miles of fencing is going to hold off a horde of hungry Mexicans. Perhaps Washington should ask Rumsfeld to repeat his speech about people who don't learn the lessons of history.