It pretty much took my breath away, this New York Times article on the former guy’s infamous wall.
I know, I know, we’re living in an era of constant metaphors. Everything is a metaphor for something else. But this, this wall, how it happened, why it happened, the man who made it happen…This is a metaphor for the former guy and his four-year reign of damage. Hang on, while I pull actual language out of this article:
Lonely, connected to nothing at all
Pointless and senseless
A fragment, bizarre in appearance and of no apparent utility
One of the costliest megaprojects in US history
Mired in controversy from the start
Wreckage and damage
There are half-dynamited mountaintops where work crews put down their tools in January, leaving a heightened risk of rapid erosion and even dangerous landslides as the summer monsoon season approaches.
“…particularly destructive environmental damage and destruction of sacred sites.”
Waste and detritus, easy access points
…colossal piles of unused steel bollards linger at deserted work sites, next to idled bulldozers and water-hauling trucks. In Arizona, ranchers are complaining that rough roads carved by work crews into hillsides near uncompleted segments of wall now serve as easy access points for smugglers and others seeking to enter the once-remote areas along the border.
“Now there are so many access roads that it’s possible for someone to walk right up to places where the wall ends, and have someone just pick them up”…
Refusal to accept the election results; rage and destruction
In some places along the border, such as Guadalupe Canyon in southeast Arizona, dynamiting crews were blasting hillsides on Inauguration Day.
Scroll through the linked article for stunning photos of the Southwest and some ugly fragments of the former guy.