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Someone (I think it may have been on the ANSAX-L list: source of so many inspirations for me), someone made the very funny comment that 'Heorot must have been a Geated community'
[Ha! Ha! Ha... Uh! ... Oh!]
Well I suppose that's only really funny if you know that Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar king of the Danes, was the place that the great Beowulf defended against Grendel and his monstrous Mum and, further, that Beowulf was of the people of the Geats ... and I suppose further, that the fact that 'Geat' while pronounced 'gate' is actually spelled 'G E A T' thus creating a disjunction when read rather than heard on the radio.... uh! ...so I suppose that means that it's really not too funny to you at all. Which, as it turns out, is quite appropriate, since gated communities are no laughing matter, representing as they do one of the more subtle though vile unsavourinesses of the human psyche.
Gated communities are the continuation by more or less other means of a process that's been going on for ... millennia of expropriation and propertisation of space, usually by those that have (power, money etc.) against those that haven't.
You see, way back at the beginning of people, when, as the mediæval snippet has it, "Adam dalf, and Eve span, / Who was thanne a gentilman? "--- well obviously not Eve who always liked to think of herself as rather a refained lady---but anyway, out in the woods so wild there were no enclosures; and fat cats and top dogs were just that---animals, and ungentle Man roamed freely until he was chomped to death by a sabertooth, or a dire wolf, or whatever.
And ever since those ancient times there has been a steady enclosureization of space in the more civilized parts of the world, or at least in the parts of the world that like to think of themselves as more civilized---those that have that procul-procul-o-este-profani attitude of keeping the rabble out (and preferably down too).
So it was that, almost as soon as there were cities, or if I'm any judge of human nature (or at least the nature of the sort of human who ends up on top), just before there were cities, privileged citizens arose and builded, or rather had built, stout walls to keep out what they had suddenly realised were the ... Yeuch! Others.
Outside were the dreaded Others, and inside the walls the guys who belonged (or rather, in those slave-encrusted days, the guys most of the populace belonged to) and they owned the space1.
And the barbarians were always at the gate (largely because those privileged leading citizens looked ---probably with disdain---at some rabbley group and said to their minions 'OK chaps, that's where we'll build the wall').
This was, of course, a world-wide phenomenon: from Beijing's Forbidden City to the even more forbidding Inclosure Acts of the dreaded English Gentry. There were, even of courser, a whole series of Inclosure Acts, reaching an evil peak in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries; the which really just enabled the gentry to steal land from the peasantry incidentally and unpleasantly creating and savagely prosecuting new crimes of poaching (and not just of eggs) and forcing the poor sods out of their villages (read Goldsmith's The Deserted Village if you want a relevant tear-jerker).
And now, today we have people, admittedly a bit further down the social scale from the perpetrators of the Inclosures, enclosing themselves for supposed exclusivity and safety for the better sort in Gated Communities .
I can't begin to tell you what I think of the inhabitants of these soi-disant 'communities'---at least not on the air---we'd have to go to that big and greasy Hell's Angels bar (the one full of big and greasy Hell's Angels) on the other side of town before I could use language appropriately inappropriate enough, and then I'd probably have to whisper for fear of offending the sensibilities of the other patrons (and let me assure you that there's nothing more fearful than a big and greasy Hell's Angel who's just had his sensibilities offended--I mean it happens so rarely) so let me just finish by pointing out that the gates work in both directions and out here we feel a lot safer, and better, with them locked in there
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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Notes:
1 And if they were Greek and classical they could even vote (and of course ostracize people---with real ὄστρακα too!)
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