Walls and Fences

The Gadfly Research & Revelry Gang (GRR) has heard that the White House is composing a Tweet to announce a new position: a Retroactive Poet Laureate and will name Robert Frost to the post. It seems President Trump read the last line of Frost’s poem, Mending Wall, [“Good fences make good neighbors”] and decided that Frost would be the first Ex Post Facto Poet Laureate.

Never mind that Mending Wall starts with “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and a little further asks “What am I walling in or walling out?” Frost answers the question with, “My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines.”

But, President Trump is better known for creating his alternative facts than in reading a poem from beginning to end.

Neither is The Donald known to be a student of history. But someone ought to remind him that the Mexican-American war was about as shameful as the Vietnam or Iraq Wars. We literally stole one-third of the territory of Mexico. President James Polk invoked the principle of Manifest Destiny, as if taking anyone else's land could ever be a principle of anything but robbery. Then, to show that it was just a real estate deal, he signed peace treaty with a Mexican name, Guadalupe Hidalgo, and paid Mexico $15 million. $15 million even then was a fire (arms) sale for the entire US SouthWest — most of Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. Texas was another whole story. It was a deal to make Trump proud.

The only ones to benefit from walls and fences seem to be the satirists and the poets. 

A recent Letter to the Editor expands the topic a little:

Asylum or Sanctuary?

The first a legal status derived

from working judges.  The second,

history and hallowed ground to set rules.

Let The Donald fire me.