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Deep Thinking and a Tall Wall

When we lived in Decorah, Iowa, I built a fence around our back yard to keep our Miniature Killer Peekapoo from pooping in our neighbors' yards.  Iowans do not generally like what they derisively call, "privacy fences", that inhibit what one might call just a little friendly curiosity.  So I inserted latticework panels, here and there, to ease the tension, and to make it easier to cruise down the alley without having to get out of the car, and still see what that two-story glass addition was all about.

Donald Trump wants to build a Great Trump Wall all across our southern border, just as the Chinese did in China and the Russians did in Berlin.  That man is a genius, isn't he?  

The Great Wall of China was supposed to shut out the Mongols, and it didn't.  The Berlin Wall was supposed to shut in Germans who would rather be on the other side, and that didn't work, either, but Donald Trump has a plan.  He plans to sell ladders and shovels in hardware stores on both sides of the Great Trump Wall.  And maybe, here and there, rowboats, and bus and airplane and casino tickets.

We should be careful, here, not to give Trump too much credit for having conceived of a Great Berlin Wall of China to protect us from Genghis Khan and Vladimir Lenin and Juan Valdez.  Many of our most simple-minded politicians have long-since advocated, and funded big sections of a wall that is already there.  Even the Chinese did not build their wall in a day!  It took centuries, and lots of people died doing it, of course.  But the Chinese made the wall a tourist attraction, with a walkway along the top.  Nobody wants to stroll the top of a steel picket fence!  I am sure Trump will fix that.

"A wall!", Trump said, and men smaller than Trump by far, repeat the cry:  "A wall!  Build a wall!"  

Oh, God, the glory of it!  The sheer unstoppable genius of it!  "A wall as tall," Trump said, "as the walls of this ballroom!"

What makes great men great is when they say, louder than the people at their feet, just exactly what other great men have said:  "A wall!"  The Mongol Kingdom stretched from China to Iran, and had their leader not died, would surely have included Europe, too.  "A wall!", the Russians and East Berliners said, and people picked it apart with hammers and courage.  "A wall!", Trump calls, and people with Budweisers and bravery return the call, "Remember the Wall, and the Alamo!"  (And Tippecanoe and Tyler, too, and the Maine, and charging up San Juan Hill.)

Who can gainsay that Budweiser is not better than actually thinking about things?  "A ballroom wall!"  

 We live in profound times.  

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