The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Farrington
If you’re of a mind to ponder things, ponder the phenomenon of walls — real ones and metaphorical ones. Are the various walls being built by Donald Trump (and not just the physical border walls) designed to keep people and things “in” or “out?” Or both?
Ponder Trump’s return to Arizona to construct a “red wall,” part of a political wall to keep him in power. Ponder that on April 12 the Star reported that Trump was planning yet another wall on Arizona's southern border to deter the movement of people and animals both ways. Like water, the natural movement of people, animals, and things will find the path of least resistance.
The fact of an acceleration of “movement” of ideas, information, people, and things around the globe (due to previously unimaginable technological change) will likely circumvent all unnatural “walls,” especially the artificial human ones, physical and otherwise. Humans and human constructed artifices are fungible and temporary, and usually they don’t last long enough to permanently stifle natural “movement.”
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The movement of Americans and American residents (including the four-legged ones) and their things moving freely and seamlessly across deserts, mountains, forests, streams—and borders—has been natural throughout the entirety of American history.
The very idea of America is a people on the move. Walls are as restrictive and antithetical to movement as they are to openness, creativity, and innovation. Movement and change have defined us. Immigration to America is likewise a natural part of the very idea of America. Americans, and those who would become Americans, have always been “a people on the move.”
Culturally, after 400 years of immigration, we should pay attention to our senses and the rhythm of our very existence. Our sensory experience defines us. We come in many colors, flavors, tastes, sounds, and feels. Activity and mobility across borders and boundaries, internal and external, is the rhythm and rhyme of a people on the move. Immigration is fluidity and movement. Isolation is stagnation and stasis. Our history is the ebb and flow of people coming and going. Just as water purifies itself with movement, there is a freshness and newness to movement and relocation. Our history is not the stagnant pond of a conjured white Christian nationalist past.
Donald, we can’t be made all white (or all-white nationalist), all Christian, or all-anything. Here’s a new slogan for a new Orwell novel: “Impurity is Purity,” at least in a land of immigrants.
“Fortress America”. Say these words aloud and see how they sound, how they resonate. Saying “America First” aloud sounds somehow more benign, but the phrases amount to the same thing. Isolation.
But, let’s stay with “Fortress America”—literally, figuratively, rhetorically, metaphorically, and culturally. To seek to erect and maintain walls, physical and conjured, amounts to an attempted denial and destruction of culture. And walls don’t work — they protect nothing and they defend nothing.
Ask the Chinese, ask Hadrian. Ask the feudal lords about their fortresses, their moats and their drawbridges. Ask the Cathars who built fortresses of stone on remote stone outcroppings, accessible from only one direction.
Qin Shi Huang, called the first emperor of China, consolidated a series of walls into one, and the Great Wall of China became human kind’s most profound metaphor for an engineering marvel that didn’t work. Perhaps the emperor’s paranoia got the best of him when he constructed his own tomb, contaminated it with mercury, and surrounded it with thousands of terra cotta warriors. The Great Wall itself a massive tomb for the laborers whose remains underneath speak the truth about the human costs of fortresses that don’t work.
Donald Trump’s “Fortress America” is an attempt to wall us in by shutting out those who are culturally, racially, ethnically, and religiously unacceptable to his fascist idea of purity. Trump’s border wall, his Space Force, his golden dome defensive shield, his tariffs, his dismantling of stable alliances and treaties, his lawless and unconstitutional indiscriminate deportations as a kind of ethnic cleansing, the cleansing of certain civil rights words from all texts and documents reachable by federal power, and the attempted cleansing of all the dark corners of American history — all are walls.
Tribal factions; a racial, ethnic, religious, and economic caste system; suburban walled compounds; urban melting pots of unaddressed grievances; rural and countryside wastelands with declining infrastructure and investment; homes as armed fortresses with almost a half a billion guns polished with grievances — all are walls. All are barriers to movement — upward, inward, and outward.
Can legions of ICE agents and Trump officials bleach the cultural colors and flavors out of white grievance, and so cripple the movement of people, including immigrants, that the immigrant features of the American identity will perish beneath artificial walls? Immigrants built America. Thousands who built the Great Wall of China are buried beneath the walls.
Say it aloud. “Fortress America.” How does that sound to you, the descendants of immigrants whose forbears were defined by fluidity, movement and improvement, in a word — progress?
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Gerald Farrington is a retired community college professor of history, political science, and law and retired from the practice of law. He is a member of the Arizona Daily Star’s editorial advisory board.
