The idea of the frontier in US history has been one of endless promise, but the reality has involved violence, even genocide. As this powerful study argues, its latest incarnation is Trump’s wall
It is hard, as an American, to take much pleasure in the irony that the past appears to be catching up with the United States. We’ve been running from history for a long while now, watering the continent with blood and imagining all along the way that we were racing forward: not fleeing in fear but charging into a bolder, freer future. Now we’re caught in the knots our ancestors tied. We seem doomed to fight the same battles, replay the same massacres, weep again beneath the same old lynching tree. What else but ghosts could make children shoot each other in such extraordinary numbers each year?
And somehow, despite the country’s increasingly florid pathologies – the school shootings, endless war, massive homeless encampments in some of the richest cities on the planet, the largest prison system the world has ever known – the president is obsessively focused on an imaginary line, the one separating the US from Mexico. He wants to make it real, to turn a political boundary into an actual, physical barrier. In December, Donald Trump shut down the federal government because Congress would not fund his wall. His “beautiful wall” means more to him – and to the third of the populace that adores him regardless of all outrages – than all other functions of the state.
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