Getting Less Than The Wall We all Want

PRESIDENT TRUMP, ever remindful of the spoiled, petulant teenager he seems to so very closely resemble, who on Christmas morning hopes to be presented a shiny new Corvette but is instead gifted a used Gremlin, is fixin' to pitch a tizzy, on camera, on twitter, and all destinations convenient to himself and the fake news media he so desperately despises. Said tizzy started last night, in El Paso Texas, a bare mile from the imaginary border wall so dear to his tortured heart. In desperate haste to avoid another politically damaging government shutdown, a bipartisan group of beleaguered legislators reached, at long last, a compromise on border security, a compromise which bears no discernable similarity to what Trump has been blow harding about for nearly three painful to our ears years. Trump, when informed of the agreement, dismissed it with a shrug, said he had places to be and people to see, and once again asserted his firm intention to have his Corvette style wall, one way or another. At this point, the only way might be a declaration of emergency, or of war with Latin America, and a mass conscription of slave labor, ancient Egyptian like, and thirty years of hard, sustained labor by tens of thousands of military personnel. Our memory is clear on this matter. Three years ago, we were told that "they" were bringing guns, drugs, rape, violence, and who knows what other nasty things into our country, by design, and that something serious had to be done about it. We were introduced to "the wall", a massive monolithic fortification to be constructed at Mexican expense, many feet thick and many feet tall, presumably of solid steel reinforced concrete, from sea to shining sea, a wall to end all walls. The cost would be in the neighborhood or forty billion or so, all of it Mexican money. We were skeptical from the outset, with only his most devout followers buying into the dream. No sooner had the ink dried on Trump's first post election twitter tweets, the backtracking began, amid an inundation of fact founded objections and reality checks. The president of Mexico made it plain: Mexico would no more consider paying for the trumped up wall than hell would freeze over. Trump, peddling backward, claimed that his new trade agreement with Mexico would, de facto, pay for the wall through its economic benefits to the United States, a claim which raised eye brows and rolled eyes. then, the wall started to shrink, brick by crumbling brick. It shrank in length, width, and height, in every dimension and direction, and the concrete turned into steel slats, while the funding proposals moved from Mexico to the American tax payers. the numbers kept going steadily down, and just yesterday evening, took the sharpest downturn yet, as congressional leadership signed off on one point three billion dollars worth of border security, way down from the president's long coveted five point seven billion. The wall gets smaller, the money keeps drying up. Now, we are looking at about fifty miles of new "fencing", presumably chain link several feet high, with maybe some barbed wire coiled menacingly at the top, prison style. The next moment of high drama will come in a day or two, when we will find out whether the president will sign the bill, one pen per letter, as is customary, and swallow still more pretend pride, or will have the sand to back up his pomposity with a veto, and declare a national emergency, along with another government shut down. Its dollars to donuts he'll sign on, and, in his usual cartoonish manner, claim victory. No matter what happens, this delusional narcissistic chief executive will claim, pathetically, to be the winner, no matter how bad his defeat. In the meantime, the wall, and its cost, continues to shrink, and if we millions who understand the futility of fixed fortifications continue to play the waiting game a bit longer, are likely to see a southern border festooned with a beaded curtain, through which caravans of impoverished asylum seekers can peer longingly into the land of plenty, dreading their imminent confrontation with Trump's legions of jackbooted goons.