Trading Places

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.