I once walked on the top of the wall that surrounds the most fiercely disputed real estate in the world.

Clueless American tourist that I am, I had purchased a ticket from a guy in a booth at a place called the Citadel of David. So my wife, son, and I had obtained what seemed to us to be some kind of official clearance to take a hike along the ancient rampart top. Our sunlit sojourn there afforded an elevated, comprehensive  view of the old holy city area.

As it turned out, however, our purchased tickets provided only limited access. We encountered an  impediment on the south end, somewhere near the Zion gate, which required that we  descend to the ground via a narrow stone stairway. So we wandered back through the old city, generally north by northeast, past the wailing wall (a different wall), and far beyond it. At some point in, I think the northeast quadrant of that temple area, we were able to get back up on the perimeter wall and continue walking. We were no longer in, as they say, the Jewish quarter.  But getting back on the wall required us to crawl under an immobilized turnstile in a place where nobody could see us.

This did not seem like something that officially authorized tourists would do. Nevertheless, we resumed our stroll from that point. I remember thinking that, somehow, the value of our wall "tickets" seemed questionable, or perhaps, dare I admit it, worthless. Passing from one domain to another brought us under a different set of rules.

Sure enough, a couple of military guys discovered our adventure and asked some nosy questions.  We showed them our tickets, but they were not impressed.

So we had to get off the wall again.

And this is what I thought about when I saw, last night, a scene in Simone Bitton's 2004 documentary movie,  Wall.  Many scenes in the film  showed real-life westbank residents climbing over "the wall," or through breaches in it and around barbed wire that enraps it. This movie is about the wall being built by the Israeli government to separate two ethnic groups, Palestinians and Jews, on the west bank.  

So I, subjectivizing my experience of the movie as people do, remembered myself crawling under an abandoned turnstyle in old Jerusalem, and feeling a little guilty, or threatened, or something dubious like that, about it. Although I'm talking about two different walls here, the  idea is the same: a wall is intended to keep one people group on one side, and a different people group on  the other. But one of the great lessons of human history is that where some folks build high walls, other determined souls find ways to  get over, around, or through them. A couple of relatively recent examples would be  the Berlin wall, or the Dachau wall.

Anyway, my  crawling under an abandoned turnstyle in Jerusalem was one little memory that crossed my mind. There were other memories evoked as I watched this documentary. In my mind's ear I heard  echoes of Itzhak  Perlman's wailing violin that came at the end of Schindler's List.

This potent strain of musical pathos drifted into me when Simone presented in her film an interview with an Israeli citizen, Schuli Dichter. His description of the wall in Samaria found me smitten with the tragedy of it all. With video footage of the Samarian chainlink wall, Schuli's testimony includes a mention of his home kibbutz, Maanit, which had been founded in the early 1940's by some of the first Jewish settlers in that area. Here are a few of his statements that propelled Perlman's violin strains into my mind:

"Our parents in Maanit came here from the shtetls of Lodz."  and   and "This fence has eliminated... the possibility of a Jewish home in this world."

So what has changed since Nazi walls enclosed victims 69 years ago?  In some ways, the world has seen many changes. In other ways, perhaps not so much. People build walls, and other people find ways over, through, or around them. From one side of a wall to the other, hapless human beings overcome one bondage only to encounter  another.

"Closure and enclosure are the cornerstones of our lives here," said Schuli to Simone, as he drove her through Samaria to the west bank.

That's when another memory that came crawling under my radar. It had been recorded thousands of years ago by an ancient, emotive documentarian, Jeremiah.  He wrote: "Indeed, who will have pity on you, O Jerusalem, or who will mourn for you, or who will turn aside to ask about your welfare?"

 

For several generations now, we've been gathering a pile of prosperity here in the richest country in the world. And most everybody has gotten at least some piece of the action. How many decades in a row now has it been that Americans have been steadily purchasing cars and washing machines, TVs and microwaves, air freshener and deodorant and movie tickets with popcorn? We're a pretty fat n' happy bunch. What we have here in the USA is a high standard of living, probably the highest in the history of the world.

I mean, how many people do you know who don't have indoor plumbing? How many in your circle of friends don't have a car or a TV?  We are rich, I tell ya.  Even the folks whose incomes hover around the poverty level all this stuff.

In the developing nations of the world, folks don't have all this booty yet.  

In the formerly-third-world places--India,  Brazil, South Africa, and even in China, the streets and malls and markets are teeming with millions of people who have yet to acquire the wealth-multiplying trappings of  middle-class comfort. These are great, teeming markets yearning to be full. They're the next wave of aspiring consumers, like your kids in the supermarket with miniature shopping carts and little flags that read "shopper in training." So many of these minions have yet to buy that first washing machine, that first microwave, that first automobile. 

 But they will eventually, as their collective economic tides swell and their proverbial boats rise. Then the enterprisers among them will form companies and employ neighbors and friends to manufacture goods to meet the escalating demands of prosperity. But it's not likely their new acquisitions will originate in Dayton or Birmingham or Oxnard where the costs of affluent American labor render finished prices prohibitive.  

 We've got a high standard of living in this country that has propelled us, for lo these many decades, ahead of the the thundering herd. But now our opulent baggage has landed us in the dust as the pack passes by. We've priced ourselves out of the world market. But don't go blaming our politicians or our business leaders. This is just the way things work in a world where energetic workers and smart managers are free to make a better affordable mousetrap. It had to happen sooner or later; it's been a long time coming. We had an incredibly long ride on that post-wwtwo wave while it lasted; now it's time for us to paddle out and catch the next set.

Here's what needs to happen: find a way to pump some of the hot air out of our expansive, expensive American standard of living. Position us, once again, as lean and mean, efficiently productive contenders in the world marketplace. We've already, you know, burst one bubble. Can't we puncture another one? Dean Baker  opined yesterday that economists should have identified our "over-valued dollar as a main cause of imbalances in the US economy."

As it turns out though, the reserved Fed has issued a prescription for our economic obesity. They have  found a way to trim the fat real quick. And it just might work.  It's called: the devalued dollar.

If Joe Sixpack and Jane Doe found, rather suddenly, their wallets full of greenbacks that had the purchasing power of, say, 60% of last year's dollar--the effect would be just like knocking our standard of living down by 40%.  That might be enough of an overhead reduction to get us back in the game of competitive manufacturing. Then maybe we can again crank out washing machines or widgets or memory chips or hula hoops or solar collectors as inexpensively as they will in Manila or Mumbai or Mombasa. 

 Devalued Federal Reserve Notes will be a mixed blessing. On the down side, they'll  mean less buying power for us yankee producers. But hey, we've got plenty enough stuff to last us for awhile anyway. 

Folks would have an abundance of dollars again; everybody could get back in the game, pay off some debts, maybe take the kids out to eat.  

Now, if that "over-valued dollar" could be knocked down a notch or two so that it is no longer so uppity, what would it take to accomplish such a feat?  Everybody take a 40% pay cut?

No way. It'll never happen. Too complicated, and politically impossible. But there is a fix. It might hurt a little bit, but it would work pretty quickly, though not quite as fast as instant breakfast or drive-up food.

Make dollars. Print so many of them that Uncle Tim can push a big stack of chips out on the table to stay in the game. The bluff might just work if he keeps a poker face, although it's Uncle Hu's face that the world will be watching.

 

We Americans put a lot of stock in our news, you know. For most thinking people, news is a significant part of the daily routine, and a big chunk of our collective memory. For those who are not into news, other media devour mega megs in our national psyche.

 Back in the day, some studio in Hollywood made a movie, and I remember Dolly sang a song that went something like this: "Working nine to five, what a way to make a living..." I don't remember much about the flick, but I do remember the song. Funny how some things stick with you while others don't. We have those jangly little memory bits, and we have the really big ones too.

You probably remember where you were when President Kennedy was shot, or when Martin Luther King, Jr. caught the assassin's bullet. Those were dark days, times of nationally-shared tragedy.

 For my parents' generation, the big event must have been  the Dec. 7 attack on Pearl Harbor.  Four years of blood and sacrifice eventually paid off with the defeat of a lethally potent,  triaxial  fascism, and then two brighter, if not quite so memorable commendations--Victory in Europe (May 8, 1945) day and, Victory in Japan (August 15, 1945) day.

 As for my generation, we have a cloudy, mixed-emotions memory of Peace with Honor in Vietnam. Sadly, the most vivid image in my mind from the final stages of that struggle was a picture of evacuees being helicoptered from the American embassy in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.

 In our present situation, I'm wondering just how the VI and the VA days will play out.

Be that as it may, I'd like to point out that we do we have, you know, a collective psyche about these cataclysmic events.

 You can probably tell me where you were when 911 hit. I was doing some remodeling work for a friend. He rolled his wheelchair out of the basement door of his house and said that a plane had hit the world trade center.  My first mental image was a kind of comic book picture of a Cessna hitting the skyscraper.  But of course that first image proved to be quite an understatement. In the ensuing hours, I found out, as most of America did, differently. As the old Buffalo Springfield song says: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear..."

Here it is eight years later and it's still not clear exactly what happened, or why. As for the why and how of what is happening now goes, that's not clear either.

 But even before that, I remember  the stock market crash of '87. I recall the mountaintop development where I was working with a carpentry crew to construct a home. At the end of a typical day, I was driving down that mountain when I heard on the radio that the Dow had dropped more than 500 points. The stark financial news that happened to fall on that sunlit afternoon is still  vivid. . . and yet, I didn't even have any investments.  Just a few days or weeks before that, the owner of the home (being built) had said: "Greenspan will be good for business."

He was right about that. Alan served up a pretty lavish punchbowl. But it seems the long party fizzled out last fall when Hank Paulson pulled a fire alarm, and all the guests went scampering for the exits. 

That memory is quite clear too, and it's something like this:  7:55 am, just before undertaking a new day in the nine-to-five routine, sitting in the car in a school parking lot, and Kai Rysdall's voice  on the radio.  In this case, the memory isn't fixed to a single day, but a series of days in the same place, at the same time, hearing the incredible story of  our financial demise as events unfolded over several weeks.

Here it is a year later and it's still not clear exactly what happened, or why. As for the why and how of what is happening now goes, that's not clear either.

One remainder is obvious though:  Times are hard; now it's like pulling teeth to try to make a living.

The exponential curves of change that  recently commandeered our course have confounded even the most prosperous  among us.  Even the Wall Street Journal people, for cryin' out loud,  are trying to figure out  how to squeeze a few profits out of people's new info-gathering habits.

Punchbowls are a lot of fun while they last. The one we're drinking from now--this internet thing--is quite a stimulant for the ole neurons. We've all become accustomed to this free online punchbowl, and we're wondering just how the freebie will inevitably evolve into something that actually costs us.  Because. . . yes Virginia, it's too good to be true.

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant online. But what can you believe? As they said back in the last depression, there's no free lunch; most likely, when it comes to reliable content, there's no free punchbowl either. We'll learn that soberizing lesson one of these days soon when we wake up and realize that unbiased, objective reporting of factual events in the world doesn't just happen. 

 There are real journalists out there somewhere who deliver verifiably accurate reports of what is going on in the world--not  just opinionated, bloggated jabber like what your're reading here.  This challenge of keeping those reporters functional and reliable is one we'll have to work out collectively, and everybody will have to pull their share of the load.  It's a little like public radio with their pledge drives, or maybe like the WSJ with its paywall between free content and premium content, or some combination thereof.  We shall see.

If you're ever in Honolulu, ask the local folks about the "Punchbowl." They may direct you to a  volcanic site where you'll understand just what dear price our freedoms require of us.  In this life, there's really no free punch, except the one that hurts.

 

Carey Rowland, author Glass half-Full