Skip to main content

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.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more