Wednesday New Yorker writer Francisco Cantu has alerted me to an important book on the role that the frontier plays in the American imagination. Greg Gandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, traces Donald Trump’s wall back to America’s frontier days. I describe the […]
Tag Archives: Trump's wall
From Frontier Racism to Wall Racism
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Long Hair", America-Mexico border, American frontier, Blood Meridian, border wall, Cormac McCarthy, Donald Trump, End of Myth, Francisco Cantu, Greg Gandin, Hernan Diaz, In the Distance, Ofelia Rivas, Ofelia Zepeda, Tohono O'odham, Trump's wall Comments closed
When Is a Wall Not a Wall?
Wednesday A few weeks ago I wrote about how Donald Trump’s wall slides between the literal and the symbolic depending on which day it is. On some days the president goes into great detail about its physical features and claims that it will stop armored cars filled with drugs and duct-taped women that otherwise will […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Donald Trump, Immigration, Mistress Masham's Repose, T. H. White, Trump's wall Comments closed
Lindsey Graham as a Dickens Toady
Friday High school teacher Carl Rosin, whose Great Expectations class interviewed me by telephone yesterday, suggested that Donald Trump’s national shutdown is giving us our own versions of Dickens’s “toadies and humbugs.” For a while I’ve seen Vice President Michael Pence as candidate #1, but I must say that South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Charles Dickens, Donald Trump, Great Expectations, Lindsey Graham, National shutdown, Trump's wall Comments closed
Whitman Would Embrace Trump’s Victims
Thursday I wrote yesterday’s Walt Whitman post before hearing Donald Trump’s Oval Office address, which is why I find myself returning to the poet again so soon. Like the Statue of Liberty mentioned by Sen. Chuck Schumer in his response to Trump, Whitman’s Song of Myself serves as an antidote to the president’s racism and xenophobia. Trump, as […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Song of Myself", Government shutdown, Immigration, Trump's wall, Walt Whitman Comments closed
Trump’s Wall, Symbolic or Literal?
Monday Literature majors will find their training useful in understanding why Donald Trump has chosen to shut down the government. It has to do with the difference between the symbolic and the literal. A literal wall makes very little sense, with the $5.5 billion dollars that Trump is demanding from American taxpayers (not from Mexico) […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Beloved, Donald Trump, magical realism, Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie, symbolic vs literal thinking, Toni Morrison, Trump's wall Comments closed
