Yesterday, January 3, 2019, Donald Trump made his
first visit ever to the briefing room at the White House with an escort of
border patrol officials to press his case for funding for a border wall, and
China landed an unmanned probe on the dark side of the moon.
The United
States and China are two countries proceeding rapidly in very different
directions. China, having tried a wall and gotten colonized, is projecting
outward—around the world with its far-flung Belt and Road Initiative, and into
space. The United States is withdrawing into itself. In the name of restoring
our supposedly lost greatness, Donald Trump would have us retreat behind a
physical barrier of a sort better suited to the Middle Ages or before and
seldom if ever entirely successful even then.
Walls
are generally better at keeping people in than out. The Great Wall did not keep
the Mongols out of China in the 13th century. The Maginot Line didn’t keep the
Germans out of France in 1940. Hitler’s Fortress Europe seawall of
fortifications did not stop the Allies in 1944. The Berlin Wall, on the other
hand, like prison walls in general, was largely effective. But it was also
odious, and whatever you may have thought of Ronald Reagan, his words urging
Mikhail Gorbachev to tear it down rang with a simple eloquence born of an
instinctive human aversion to confinement.
That is primarily what
Trump’s wall, if he ever gets it built, will give us—confinement. That and the
scorn of the rest of the world as we hunker down inside our multibillion-dollar
cocoon and tell ourselves how great we are and China takes our place on the
world stage. Perhaps if we could at least build a genuinely beautiful wall,
like China’s, or at least something graceful like a Christo running fence, we
could generate some tourist revenue from it. Maybe over about a thousand years
it could attract enough Mexicans to pay to see it to have them pay for its
construction after all. But if you believe Trump’s wall is going to be
beautiful, maybe you haven’t seen the mockups competing in a sort of
preselection barrier beauty pageant in San Diego, or what the winner will look
like after a few decades of exposure to the elements and spray paint.
If we wall ourselves off
and readjust our sights from world leadership to graffiti removal, as
drastically as we will have circumscribed our horizons, we’ll still be able to
look up. We’ll still be able to gaze at the moon through our Chinese
telescopes, or maybe German ones, and if they’re powerful enough maybe we’ll be
able to see Chinese colonies on it, and we can swell with pride at the thought
that we got there first.
