Our century
Some years ago, George Steiner characterized the then just past one hundred years as:
"The Century of Barbed Wire".
Clearly, since
his pronouncement preceded "the millennium" by a couple
decades, the description cannot apply to precisely that high-school-history-class historical
time-line time-span from 1900CE thru 1999CE.
Steiner's periodization begins approximately with Joseph Farwell Glidden's
patent application, 1873 -- yes, barbed wire was an American invention, but,
apparently, too late for employment in the first modern war: America's Civil War (1861-65).
Today, this epoch has yet to show any signs of closure (contrast with: enclosure...).
From the taming of "the Wild West", now over a century ago,
to the continuing containment of one's local penitentiary population today, across a
universe (polymorphous perverse?) of various kinds of internment camps, in which Stalin's Gulag Archipelago was only one
galactic cluster... barbed wire has been keeping people in where they wanted to get out, and
keeping them out where they wanted to get in (international borders;
the island "compounds" of the very rich
amidst the sea of the poor; "secret" research stations...).
Not all uses of barbed wire have been baleful (it comes in "bales"...). But, for better and
for worse, if barbed wire has not exactly "changed" the world (for there are other
ways to do most of the things it does), it has at least exacerbated it. As Marshall
McLuhan said: "the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale
or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs" (Understanding Media, p. 24).
It seems reasonable to hypothesize that barbed wire -- beginning with
the hostilities it enflamed between cattlemen and farm settlers in the 19th century
American West --, has not been a "cool" -- esp.: cooling (as opposed
to "chilling"...) -- medium.
Note (04 Feb 2000): I have added
a picture of the barbed wire protecting my own back yard,
running atop the chain link fence which separates my house's
back yard from the parking lot of the shops and professional offices immediately behind.
Note (16 Sep 2001): I have added
a reproduction of Robert Capa's photograph of Leon Trotsky lecturing on the Russian
revolution, Copenhagen, Denmark, 27 November 1932. This photograph, the negative of which
is damaged and therefore the print is covered with splotches and fissures, seems to me one of
the defining images of the 20th century: a broken picture of a broken man
lecturing the broken dreams of a broken century. |