Tag Archives: Trump's wall

From Frontier Racism to Wall Racism

By Robin Bates | Published: March 12, 2019

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 […]

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When Is a Wall Not a Wall?

By Robin Bates | Published: February 5, 2019

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 […]

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Lindsey Graham as a Dickens Toady

By Robin Bates | Published: January 11, 2019

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 […]

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Whitman Would Embrace Trump’s Victims

By Robin Bates | Published: January 10, 2019

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 […]

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Trump’s Wall, Symbolic or Literal?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 7, 2019

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) […]

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