Everyone loves a parade
Dear editor:
George Bernard Shaw is credited with this bit of wisdom: "If you want to tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh or they'll kill you." John Naisbitt, American author and speaker, was perhaps following that sage advice when he wrote "leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it."
If you're looking for a parade to get out in front of, there's a ridiculous one right under your noses. Day after day, and week after week, circus clowns prance and parade their blissful ignorance and brazen bigotry across these very pages. Some rise, like the mythological phoenix, from the ashes of their self-imposed "burnout" exile to ponder the preposterous. Others feel compelled to call down damnation on heathens and heretics alike. And Democrats ...
Our petulant president's next barrage of mangled tweets will soon have us chasing new shiny objects, but the latest outrage du jour is remarkable Rashida Tlaib, newly representing in the hallowed halls of Congress. Oldest of 14 children growing up in rough-and-tumble Detroit, she had the unmitigated audacity to use a common vulgarity to describe our purest President. Republicans everywhere are clutching their pearls and swooning over her disrespect of Donald Trump.
No matter that our tangerine POTUS is on record using the same language and worse. "You lie!" screamed a Congressman at Obama's first State of the Union speech. Remember? Were your petticoats ruffled then?
Of course not. You were too busy breathlessly following Trump's intrepid quest for The Lost Birth Certificate.
To his beguiled Dear Leader personality cult, he can do no wrong. He has never done wrong and yea, verily, will maketh America great again. He will build a big, beautiful wall to protect us from caravans of impoverished invaders in flip-flops. Mexico will pay for it.
To dream The Impossible Wall. If you can't smell its stupidity and sheer vanity, your olfactory sensibilities have utterly abandoned you. How is a wall going to stop suicidal terrorists in airplanes? Or homegrown vigilantes with assault rifles?
They must not teach history in medical school. A recently thrown gauntlet insists walls always work. Walls alone never work. Hadrian's Wall had garrisons stationed every Roman mile. The Great Wall of China was built to rush defenders to wherever the enemy appeared. The "wall" between East and West Germany was rigorously patrolled by shoot-to-kill soldiers. Even the much-lauded wall holding Palestine's refugees at bay and out of sight has phallic observation towers and remote-controlled machine guns.
Not all walls work. The walls of Jericho came a-tumbling down. A trick pony got past Troy's walls. Jerusalem's walls certainly didn't prevent annihilation.
Walls are all about us and them. About exceptionalism. Walls are an immoral, ugly desecration of this beautiful planet. Must we continue this selfish madness until her beauty is a long forgotten fable told only in the dust of whirlwinds?
Fortress America. Is that what you want? Tell me, patriots, are walls Christian?
John Ragland
Hot Springs
Editorial on 01/21/2019