The Wall

4 IX 2019: Ozymandias gotta get his wall on time!

The Secretary of Defense, with no regard for his duty to the American people and their military, has authorized the diverting of $3.6 billion in military construction funds for 11 wall projects on the Southern border. His explanation is a masterpiece of BS. He told Congress that he determined, on the basis I suppose, of his long experience as Secretary, that “eleven military construction projects along the international border with Mexico, with an estimated cost of $3.8 billion, are necessary to support the use of the armed forces in connection with the national emergency.”

The military construction projects are not barracks, missile silos, air fields, or PXs, but chunks of Trump’s Folly, the Wall.

The national emergency is the prospect of Trump’s not being re-elected and having to go to prison. Preventing this requires an abundance of deceit hitherto unseen in American politics and fulfillment of the promises of BUILD THE WALL and MAKE MEXICO PAY FOR IT.

So this unexampled waste of money is required by Trump’s personal needs, not “to support the [wasteful] use of armed forces in connection with the [phony] national emergency.” I am again and again amazed at Trump’s ability to appoint administrators who are a) all quite incompetent and b) shameless liars.

Trump & Co. have made the U.S. Government into a “privately held” company in which the CEO can do as his fears and whims incline him. They are taking money appropriated by Congress for FEMA and for the real defense of the U.S. and using it to advance his personal interests.

Misuse of huge sums of government money for personal purposes and operating a deceitful p.r. campaign in support of this are behaviors I associate with Third World dictatorships.

14 I 2018: “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair”

Walls never serve their original purpose for long, but are repurposed as tourist attractions. The Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall (what is left of it), the Roman Empire’s limes(fortified border) have all become tourist attractions. This is also the case with those two virtuoso works of poured concrete, the Maginot Line and Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The Berlin Wall has come and gone, as has the Iron Curtain. Now the “Iron Curtain” was a figurative wall in Mr. Churchill’s famous speech, but it had its concrete manifestations in guard houses, machine gun emplacements, and forests of fence and barbed wire across the map of Europe. President Trump is now calling for a Wall of Steel along the U.S.-Mexico border and I imagine that this wall, if actually built, will one day be a rust stain across North America and a monument to folly.