Borderline Crazy

It's enough to make a cartographer froth. People of various ranks and pursuits - politicians, diplomats, patriots, disgruntled denizens - markers cocked and ready, are expressing the urge to redraw lines across the globe. Secessionists and vivisectionists each, they all seem to have a solution to or an ambition toward the world's border woes and whims.

The Chinese recently found nostalgia by throwing their hats back into the subcontinental territorial pissing ring: Sun Yuxi, China's ambassador to India, decided (or was told) to reiterate that nation's claim to Arunachal Pradesh, for some time now a part of the Indian republic. And what China wants, China is known to often take. India should worry. Further west, a man of some influence is suggesting the balkanization of Iraq. Peter Galbraith has proposed trisection as triage in that beleaguered - and rather buggered, I might add - nation. The son of the eminent North American diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith suggests Iraq be carved up and divvied among its severely dysfunctional religion(non)mates. This isn't the first time a Westerner came and diddled with the lines in that part of the world. If that happens, who will ultimately win the spoils of oil will make for some interesting wagers.

Borders, of course, are just lines in the sand for the people who live near them. Relatives, friends, lovers and business opportunities poke holes in the premise of forced divisions. Fences, imaginary and real, are no barrier to determination, much less desperation. Or brutal ambition. Just ask the Janjaweed, who've expanded their marauding map to beyond the confines of western Darfur in Sudan to Chad, causing disastrous repercussions in the Central African Republic. And the world that likes to stand on pulpits and heave such headline-friendly sentiments as "Never again!" watches fecklessly from the sidelines as it happens over and over again.

In contrast to the shape-shifters, however, stand the fence-makers. Some Americans found in the recently electorally disgraced President Bush their champion to concretize the division between their blessed land and their free-trade pardners to the south with a 700-mile "great wall" (made in China?). But some walls can only hold so long; even as the great barrier chief has made wall-building his legacy, score one more for the wallbangers. Standing as the antithesis to Bush's army of homophobes who would like to exclude gays from the joys of marital bliss and discord, South Africa's parliament just approved same-sex marriage. And who could be next? New Jersey. New Jersey! The odorous state's supreme court has set the stage (in fuchsia and winter green, I'm told) to make it official. What about their easterly neighbors? That's a nyet, I'm afraid. Did someone say "liberal" New York? Some divisions, it seems, are broader than one imagined.