“Existence is illusory and it is eternal.”
– Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Don’t know what I want, But I know how to get it.”
– Sex Pistols, “Anarchy in the UK”
The bizarre nature of this illusionary resplendent wall that exists in the pantheon of incredibly stupid concepts rumbling around in the cracked frontal lobe of this game show president of ours has taken on at once a symbolic, political, racist, nationalist, and cultural slant on levels of geographical surrealism worthy of Salvador Dali. It has become artiste Americana — a kind of grotesquely abstract Dadaist performance craft meets paranormal emblem of strength and hate and protection and division. Yet, it exists only in lore, like Paul Bunyan or Davey Crockett. It is neither a thing nor it is not a thing. It is all things to all people: an edifice, an abomination, a salvation and a joke. It lives in imagination and litigation, as well as legislative combativeness, all of it devoid of recognizable definition. Moreover, there appears to be no sane rationale for its proposal or battle, despite its stated imperative. No one, not even its conjuror can quite pinpoint what the fuck it is or what it means or what portion of it is real or something else entirely. It’s existence or vision is malleable, as if a child’s dream or Lewis Carroll’s obsession. It is not the wall…it is The Wall.
With deep apologies to Pink Floyd’s intellectual property, at the time of this writing a partial government shutdown over The Wall’s congressional funding continues as part of its strange journey through our lexicon. Its supporters demand it. Its detractors defy it. It’s not unlike the first years of Christianity or the final sequence to 2001: A Space Odyssey; it is mystery and mysticism and myth; Egyptian nu and a Coptic mindfuck; it has begun, but yet it has not. It is partial but permanent and it is must beat the same time it always has been. Again, neither its origins nor those who espouse its elixir seemed to have a goddamn clue, and perhaps they never did, for in the unknowing, there will be knowledge.
Cue the sitar.
A nearly two-thousand-mile cement Wall, a real wall (we think) along the rocky, valleyed, mostly desert terrain the length and breadth of the American/Mexican border was first proposed by then celebrity candidate Donald Trump as a way to get cheers from rally participants in what was fast becoming a media sensation in the late months of 2015 into 2016. “We’re going to build what…?” Mr. Trump asked. The hooting throng would bellow, “…a wall!” And then after this line began to lose its swagger for El Douche, it became the now infamous, “And who is going to pay for it?” To which the crowd shouted gleefully, “Mexico!”
This piece of cheap carnival theater, which became the very foundation, some say raison d’etre of the Trump run to the presidency — a minstrel barker kind of tent revival meets the bearded lady to which the candidate bragged endlessly outdrew all the other normal tie-and-haircut political nonsense — tended to use hyperbole and National Inquirer bold type headline lunacy as pure showmanship. The Wall, its very nature and idea of conceiving it and building it, much less getting the very country it would be erected to flip off, was truly a work of punk rock genius. Those paid to say so, communicated this safety-pin-power-cord delusion as Trump merely riling up the base and kicking sand in liberal tree-hugging faces. None of it, they laughed, was meant to actuallybe real.
Somewhere along the line it did become real for Trump. It may have been the nifty scare tactics he used to try and stem the tide of the Blue Wave that would crash at his door last November, when the Caravan — another Grendel-like form created from the bowels of the Anglo-Saxon queer Puritan dysfunction of our national gene pool — was to bear down on us with disease and drugs and killer rapists and brown-skinned marauders. The commander-in-chief even deployed the U.S. Army in its wake, reminiscent of mad King George’s paranoia cum policy. This alerted his most loyal servants, who for reasons only known to them keep defending this car wreck presidency, to need The Wall. “Walls work” said a press release on the Homeland Security home page, framing what can best be described as a fourth-grade level explanation for why brick is heavier than a bag of leaves. But the question everyone within the Beltway was prompted then to ask laid it all on the line: Did Trump always believe this schtick or was he forced to eat it, like writing “I hope I die before I get old” and living way past 70? Because this summer a bipartisan piece of legislation made it to Trump’s desk that provided $25 billion in funding for this campaign rant and he refused to sign it, and only now does he demand $5 billion, five-times less, to build something he claims is already being built and/or he doesn’t seem to need congress to do so.
Trump’s latest shifts in truth — a master at work — has gone from a wall needed to one already partially built to a mysterious Christmas week signing of non-existent contracting bids for an out-of-thin-air 115 miles (no one knows where the number came from) and several curious tweets of a type of gothic, spiked fence taken from Getty images that no one involved can begin to surmise was ever part of the original hype. Suddenly the phrase “steel slats” was a thing, like emoji or hydroponic weed. And before the president traveled all the way to Iraq to call our military “suckers” and lie to them about pay raises they never received, there was a proposal of using them once again for a political prop and start laying brick. “I’ll just get the military to build it,” he tweeted.
Speaking of tweets, as I literally finish this up, the president has tweeted plans on unilaterally closing the entire southern border if he doesn’t get your tax dollars to realize this weird hallucination of his, throwing a grenade into U.S. commerce and halting aid to South American countries. Nothing, though, on Mexican funding.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth border security experts and high-ranking officials of Homeland Security, as well as cyber geeks in the U.S. military, not to mention actual contractors routinely scoff of the idea of building a midlevel barricade in an era of drones and electronic surveillance and other barely legal inspired forms of protecting the other three borders of the nation and aboard, not to mention the treacherous landscape it is meant to span, thinks any of this, anyof it, is such for a good idea.
But yet it exists; a collective agreement of understanding that this is what happened or what happens, like say, Columbus discoveringAmerica or that somehow human existence has not affected the earth in any way.
In a very effective way, The Wall is a microcosm of this presidency which on a daily basis seems to secure the idea that artifice is the actual and that this is and always be that. It is art; Diane Arbus in its reach — horribly beautiful and damaged, set to music by Nine Inch Nails and wonderfully American.
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James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, “Midnight For Cinderella” and “Y”. “Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”
And coming in June, 2018; “Accidentally Like a Martyr – The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon”
