WallCare

I’m starting to think this building a wall thing is a big tease. Sure, it’s only 100 days or so into the Trump presidency, and I suppose no one could have expected it to be done in such a short amount of time, but eventually, they’re either going to start building it or they’re not. And if not, then what?

I kind of liken this wall to the prophecy of a cult preacher who said the world was going to end on, say, July 17, 2014. If you bought into that bullshit sometime during 2010, you’re probably OK with waiting around and throwing money or adulation at this snake oil salesman for a few years, but by around July 16, you’re probably going to expect results. You’ve probably quit your job and completed the process of purifying yourself for the Great Rapture. But then what happens when you open your eyes on July 18 and then you realize you’re broke, your entire wardrobe consists of white robes and you’re unemployed? How do you go about begging for your job back when you told your boss you’re quitting because the entire human population was about to be cleansed with holy fire, so he/she can take this job and shove it up his/her ass? I’d imagine it would be pretty difficult.

This might be a stretch of a comparison, but it’s also a stretch to think that building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border would actually accomplish anything.

They do have a proven track record of working, I guess, if their goal is to piss people off and force them to devise means of circumvention. How about the world’s most famous wall, The Great Wall of China? Scholars (if you’re prone to put your faith in smart people) say that the Great Wall began construction in the seventh century B.C.E. as a series of separate walls that were eventually made stronger and linked together to form one bad ass wall that you can’t really see from outer space, but it’s much cooler to say that you can totally see it from outer space, bro.

The Great Wall was built to keep out raiding invaders. Maybe it worked. Who knows? It was a really long time ago. A lot of things have changed over the past 2,700 years or so. Raiding hordes of barbarians have fallen out of vogue, despite the raging popularity of Game of Thrones. Boats are also much more accessible. There are even tiny motorized sea crafts that don’t require a whole team of slaves manning oars to operate. The Gulf of Mexico is also very real, but this should come as no surprise to anyone at this point. As far as I know, that’s been a thing for a very, very long time.

But you really can’t say over and over that you’re going to build a beautiful wall and then, when push comes to shove and your base is looking at you to actually deliver on that promise, not deliver. So, OK, it’s going to cost a lot of money, and, shockingly, Mexico isn’t going to foot the bill for it, or at least they won’t just now but (wink, wink) they totally will at some point, but you’ve still got to push ahead and build that darn thing or else you’re going to look like a liar … insert joke here.

Congress has until midnight on April 28, 2017, to pass a spending bill to keep the government open until September. Trump and his cronies have taken a hard line saying that the spending bill must include money for the wall. Democrats are like, nuh uh, so the president got all tweety on them saying, “The Democrats don’t want money from budget going to border wall despite the fact that it will stop drugs and very bad MS 13 gang members,” followed by, “Eventually, but at a later date so we can get started early, Mexico will be paying, in some form, for the badly needed border wall.” The former, of course, sounding like something a grade schooler scrawled down in crayon, while the latter being complete gibberish perfectly suited for citation in a column such as this one.

But this wall thing is so important that the administration is pulling out all the stops. The White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney even said that they’re willing to throw in funding for Affordable Care Act subsidies to Democrats if they support funding for the wall, according to the Washington Post, a dick move of epic proportions. Like, hey, unless we get to build this useless piece of infrastructure, granny’s gonna have a harder time paying for that diabetes medication. Them’s the breaks, old lady.

Both sides have to come to some sort of compromise or else the government will shut down, which seems to be in constant threat of happening every six months or so. It’s starting to sound like shuttering the doors won’t be a bad thing.