Last night, our president, TV’s Donald Trump, was asked if his proposal of a “Solar wall” on the Mexican border was a joke. Here’s his answer, as reported by Jonathan Karl and The Hill.
No, not joking, no. There is a chance that we can do a solar wall. We have major companies looking at that. Look, there’s no better place for solar than the Mexico border– the southern border. And there is a very good chance we could do a solar wall, which would actually look good. But there is a very good chance we could do a solar wall.
A solar… wall? I think he means a wall made of solar panels. That’s a pretty cool idea, in theory, except that every solar panel I’ve ever seen was facing straight up or diagonal to catch the sun’s rays, and the whole point of a wall is that it’s vertical. But I suppose you could build a wall and then hang solar panels on it at a slant, or line one side of the wall with solar power plants. That could be really neat. It’s a little disturbing to hear the president, who has decried the idea of solar power as too expensive, pitching a 2000-mile solar power plant all of a sudden, but I’m all for solar energy. Though I am slightly concerned because it sounds as though he’s going to build this “solar wall” on the Southern border of Mexico. You can be sure that, if he did such a thing, his disciples would laud it to the skies.
One of the things with the wall is you need transparency. You have to be able to see through it.
Bless him, he knows what “transparency” means.
In other words, if you can’t see through the wall– so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings so you can see what’s on the other side of the wall.
I specifically remember video footage during the campaign of Trump saying the wall would be made of ‘hardened concrete, rebar and steel,” which he was presumed to have knowledge about since he’s overseen the building of so many hotels. Rebar is a kind of steel. Apparently he’s abandoned the idea of concrete entirely and we’re going to build a pure steel wall now. Solar panels are made out of silicon, which is not a kind of steel, but at this point he’s forgotten all about his solar wall idea as well. Also, the idea of a border wall to keep trespassers out was impractical in the first place; now he wants openings, and so many openings as to make a steel wall “see-through.” A rebar mesh. I think I’ve heard of such a wall before. It wasn’t called a a wall; it had a specific name, let me think… I’ve got it. A steel structure with openings everywhere so you can see through it is called a chain-link fence, and we’ve already got a border fence.
And I’ll give you an example. As horrible as it sounds, when they throw large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them– they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff? It’s over. As cray as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall. But we have some incredible designs.
Sixty-pound sacks of drugs hitting bystanders on the head? Now that’s what I call heavy sedation.
I’m googling around to find the rate of Americans being killed by falling drugs on the Mexican border, but so far I’ve found nothing. I’m a bit concerned about what kind of drug dealer is hurling a sixty-pound sack of “stuff” over a fence that high. Are Mexican drug dealers into Crossfit? Do they take steroids? Are they using some kind of hydraulic canon? Maybe the best way to protect the border would be to have them come to this side and pay them to hurl sixty-pound projectiles at Mexico, and just forget about a steel or concrete see-through solar wall.
Or, as long as the president is promising his gullible followers a transparent wall, perhaps we should just hire mimes to stand on the Mexican border and pretend there’s a wall. No one would attempt to throw a sixty-pound sack of heroin in the presence of a mime. Mimes put the fear of God into people, even freakishly strong Mexican drug dealers. Mimes are terrifying.
And it’s not as though we’d have to put mimes on every inch of the border, as the president was quick to point out.
But we are seriously looking at a solar wall. And remember this, it’s a 2000-mile border, but you don’t need 2000 miles of wall because you have a lot of natural barriers. You have mountains. You have some rivers that are violent and vicious. You have some areas that are so far away that you don’t really have people crossing. So you don’t need that. but you’ll need anywhere from 700 to 900 miles.
Rivers? Well, yes. Something like half of the Mexican border follows the course of the Rio Grande, which means about half of the Mexican border is underwater. I could have told you that in 2015 when this nightmare started. Many people were saying that in 2015. People were broadcasting it on television. We’ve been saying it all along. There’s no way to build a wall across the whole Southern border of the United States. But Trump’s disciples were excited at the prospect of a wall that was going to cover the whole Southern border anyway.
Oh, and that border fence I mentioned? The see-through fence? It covers about 700 miles. But I suppose the staunchest Trump supporters will claim he went back in time and built that fence in 2006. Mission accomplished.
Plus we have some wall that’s already up and we’re already fixing[…] We’re taking wall that was good but it’s in very bad shape, and we’re making it new. We’re fixing it. It’s already started.
I rest my case. He’s going to take credit for the extant fence and call it a see-through solar wall. You can see the sun through it, can’t you?
And the worst part is, I don’t think the staunch Trumpists, the ones who wanted this wall and believed it could be built in the first place, are feeling betrayed right now. I think they still haven’t caught on.
(image via Pixabay).
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