Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin

The Trump presidency increasingly induces the feeling that one is living in an Ionesco play. The frequency with which we are all reduced to talking about the Emperor's new clothes as if they existed, even as he tells us himself that he is stark naked, would have been impossible to believe two years ago. The wall is only the latest such absurdity, but it is perhaps the most surreal. The endless ink spilled over whether "the wall" is practical, moral, effective or economical is truly amazing given that the concept itself is basically a frat boy joke. Debating whether we should spend 5 billion dollars to "build the wall" is like debating whether a major league baseball team should invest in a granite quarry to insure that "We Will Rock You."

The cruelest joke of all is the skill that Trump invariably displays in transmuting the petty and absurd into a crisis with genuine stakes. Wasting five billion dollars on a pointless vanity project would certainly not be either an unprecedented folly or the end of the world, but the context in which the current mud-wrestling match transpires lends added consequence to its outcome. Trump rode into office 2.7 million votes shy of his opponent. Despite that fact, and though his party controlled both the executive and legislature, he gave no urgency or priority to the building of "the wall" in his first two years in office. Now that voters have once again come out as a majority to vote against this plan, and handed the House to Democrats, Trump is shutting down the government and threatening to declare a state of emergency to force his unpopular policy through. Thus, even though "the wall" itself is a ludicrous fantasy, the manner in which Trump's pursuit of "the wall" subverts the norms and principles of democracy itself is not.

Above and beyond these systemic issues, the ethical stakes in the contest over the wall are even higher. Nancy Pelosi has been ridiculed for calling "the wall" immoral, but viewed in a particular (but nonetheless rather obvious) light her remark makes pellucid sense. Since "the wall" has never really been a practical policy, its chief significance has been as a symbol. This of course raises the question: "a symbol of what?" The answer is again obvious: a symbol of racism. "The wall" derives its importance entirely from the facts about the people on the other side of it: their language, religion, color, and ancestry. Donald Trump himself declared this when he told us that anyone of Mexican heritage could not be trusted to judge him fairly, because Trump "is building a wall."

So this is the condition to which we have been reduced. We have shut the government down over an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem. The damage to our way of life, present and forthcoming, however, is real.