Good Fences Make Good Neighbors - Despite The Political Cant, Keep 'Em Out Is The National Meme

Marfa Potter supervised the construction of a stockade fence around her property, a seven-foot tall perimeter exactly like that around Fort Apache.  Better safe than sorry, and although the Andersons had been good neighbors, they were moving out soon, and who knew what was next.  University Park was one of Washington, DC's most affluent neighborhoods, so there was no danger of undesirable buyers, but still, fate is not always kind.   

The generous loans offered by the District of Columbia to 'less fortunate' families of the city, an affirmative action housing program didn't even come close to the nearly two million dollars these homes cost, and 'affordable' housing was still a thing for the outer suburbs.  No, that was not the issue.  It was just...

Here Marfa paused, for she never could articulate why exactly she wanted to fence herself and her family in. Perhaps it was her mother who hated her next door neighbors and wasn't happy until her father accepted her ultimatum to move 'away from prying eyes' and build her a proper house.  

Neighbors simply couldn't be trusted, her mother said, and there were more cases of bad neighbors than good.  The Phelps' dog - a barker, yes, but not an incessant one - had been poisoned, found stiff and legs up in the rose bushes behind their house; and all signs pointed to the recluses across the street, Arabs of some sort or Turks which was enough in those days to suggest guilt.  Marfa's mother spread the rumor up and down the street, and from then on neighbors kept an even greater distance from the outsiders. 

The Foxes were drinkers, Harold Arlen was a philanderer, and Lou Ann Michaels a tart, and the nightly fights, often from all three houses, could be heard from Commonwealth Street to Barker Road especially during the summer during which, in the days before air conditioning, all the windows were kept wide open. 

The move to the West End did not turn out quite as her mother had hoped.  The next door neighbor, no longer in tooth-by-jowl proximity - she lived across the small road between the houses - had a bulldog and a deaf son, and if she wasn't yelling at one, she was yelling at the other. Her voice carried, loud and clear, and even the traffic on Lincoln Street could not dampen it.  It was like living next to the Madwoman of Chaillot.  

When Marfa accompanied her father to visit poor relatives in New Haven, all living in tenements smelling of garlic, cod liver, and coal oil, the fighting in the narrow hallways or out the windows was impressive. There was nothing Streetcar Named Desire romantic about it. She could never forget the mayhem, the noise, and the sound of shattering crockery.

So, now that she had married well and was living well, she had the means to assure that such memories would not be revisited and that she would have the quiet, secure, and private life she had always wanted. 

Now, the neighborhood of University Park, if residents had been asked, would have been quite happy to erect a walled perimeter around it - a pipe dream of course, but an expression of their concerns about being intruded upon - invaded - by the undesirable elements which were edging closer.  

The high school built decades ago to serve the well-to-do residents of the neighborhood and nearby Foxhall and Cleveland Park had become more fitting for an inner city neighborhood than for wealthy Ward 3. Its nastiness drove homeowners in the vicinity away, property values dropped, and less desirable families moved in. Marfa's far western side of University Park would soon being gradually encroached upon. 

The irony of all this was that the neighborhood was solidly progressive.  'Democracy Matters, Hate Has No Home Here, and Black Lives Matter lawn signs were everywhere. No American flags flew because they were the presumptive banners of Trump supporters.  The progressive meme of Diversity Equity Inclusivity was universal in University Park, and residents were up in arms about the ICE storm troopers rounding refugees and political asylees, locking them in gulag-era holding pens and then deporting them.

Yet when the DC Council declared itself a sanctuary city and unveiled plans to build residences for these foreign visitors in every ward,  especially Ward 3 where a number of old department stores had been abandoned and the owners were looking for buyers or public support, residents were up in arms. 

When Marfa and her neighbors got wind of the city's plans to built a refugee, affordable housing, affirmative action high-rise in University Park, all pretentions, all suppositions of inclusivity and racial and ethnic harmony were dropped, and residents began to meet in opposition to the city.  

A lot of shuckin' and jivin' went on in these neighborhood meetings as residents stumbled over themselves trying to justify keeping illegal migrants out while still promoting inclusivity.  It was a question of architectural and zonal integrity, they said.  Such a building would destroy the architectural fabric of the area, and high rise buildings - other than the luxury condos built along Washington's Rodeo Drive at the north end of University Park - would be disruptive to the historic cast of the area. Etc. etc., all transparently xenophobic arguments. 

Photographs of the highly-publicized wedding of footballer Travis Kelce and superstar Taylor Swift in New York's Madison Square Garden went viral - not inside pix which were copy protected and private, but of the phalanxes of New York City police, the extensive impenetrable barriers, and the photo ID security checkpoints. 

Swift was an outspoken critic of Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant, closed-border, punitive policies, a supporter of Defund-the-Police movements, and a vocal advocate of open, ID-less voting so the security measures at the wedding venue seemed hypocritical at best. 

Bernie Sanders, socialist Senator, and espouser of all progressive causes - especially the concentration of wealth and America's mindless contribution to climate change - flies to environmental meetings in a private jet, owns three homes, and as a net worth in the millions. 

So given the universal hypocrisy and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) American zeitgeist, it is hard to criticize Marfa Potter or the residents of University Park.  Living on two planes was completely normal for them.  They saw no contradiction in preserving their hard-earned rights and privileges while arguing for macro socio-economic change.  Holding two opposing points of view at the same time was a sign of intelligence, after all. 

They would be quite happy to have Barack Obama move in next to University Park and no fences would have to be built because he was one of them - a good black man, a responsible one, married with children, a lawyer. In other words, not just any black man.  This not only showed their racial tolerance, they said, but pointed to the way to a universally inclusive world. 

Not only were University Park residents not unhappy that their tax dollars were being spent on the poor in the inner city, they felt these taxes were a form of reparation.  It didn't matter if the investment did no good - it did not - but that they were doing their part to repay the legatees of slavery for the inhumanity of white oppressors. 

Not one resident of University Park had ever set foot in Anacostia or any other of the persistently dysfunctional, crime-ridden, pestilential slums across the river, but that wasn't the point.  It was the principle of the thing.  

So, Marfa and her neighbors piled one hypocrisy atop another until there was only mountain of intellectual debt.  No one could take them seriously, nor could anyone suffer the larger political insanity of the progressive Left any longer. 

Marfa finished the fence. It blocked the sun so her skip laurels and rhododendrons died, but the privacy was worth it until the new neighbors, parents to two teenage boys moved in.  This couple left the house to the boys on weekends and their parties went on all night. 

She thought up all kinds of devilish things to do to these inconsiderate, intrusive neighbors.  She remembered what her mother had planned to do to Mrs. Helander's rose bushes and Mrs. Phelps' Studebaker - but felt impotent, put upon, and defenseless. Privacy was a chimera; but every weekend her heartburn increased, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and she began to hear noises when there were none.  She triple-paned all the windows, banged pots and pans in the garden when the next door parties began and became a nervous wreck. 

'Harry', she said to her husband just like her mother said to her father decades ago, 'I can't take it', but up and leaving a two million dollar house for a 'better one', even in this wealthy corner of Washington, was not that simple; so Marfa was left to her madness and her hate - which actually stood her in good stead with the neighbors who hated Donald Trump but not with the admirable, vicious, untamed, venomous hatred of Marfa Potter. Hate is fungible.  It bleeds like bad coloring.