The Secret Nexus of
Immigration and Terrorism
“From Nogales to Natchitoches on the Gulf coast, Terlingua to Tijuana on the Pacific, and from Baja to the currents of the Rio Grande, an adobe curtain will rise…” Charles “Lefty” Churchill, former congressional aide.
1)
Much has been made in screechingly shrill but entirely justifiable tones of the grave threat presented to our very way of life in America today from the hoards (this is not too strong a word) of aliens marching with impunity across our southern borders to undermine our way of life by seeking jobs for exceedingly low wages from extraordinarily wealthy American capitalists. This must be stopped.
As the Cold War was called the red peril after the commies’ favorite hue, this wave of illegals might be called the Brown or Bronze or even light Tan Peril after the color of the skin of people who still work out in the sun on a hot day.
Congress in its outrage and its calm and judicious and highly principled way, made a good faith start in attempting to quell this veritable tsunami of humanity seeking to work for low wages and no benefits in our country. They proposed a 700 mile wall along our border to stop and befuddle these migrants in their tracks. Of course, it was nearing recess time in an election year and so Congress didn’t really have the inclination to get into it all that deeply at the time and so were deeply shocked and embarrassed to find out later that the border is actually approximately 1,952 miles long.
Needless to say they were dismayed to find that they had been misled by our crack intelligence community as to the real length of our borders. Explanations were demanded, subpoenas were sent but ignored, as the White House, claiming national security, refused to comply with their civil requests.
A White House spokesperson replied, “We feel in these times of impending, inevitable terrorist threats that it is well not to publicize to our enemies the extent of our vulnerabilities in this area. Of course, we all know that if we actually had one, our southern border would be porous as a sponge. If we were to give this information to Congress, which has a woeful record of leaks to the press, why we may as well just publish a road map to our enemies as to where this border is and how anyone might easily gain illegal access to our country merely by sneakily coming across it. So we feel it best not to advertise this and keep all definitive information about our southern border, without even admitting that we have a southern border - mind you, we do not admit to this – classified.”
The government went on to argue that although this information would be very helpful to our enemies it was not, strictly speaking, vital to the general American public to know where our border was or even what nation it was held to be in conjunction with. So few Americans, they reasoned, had to deal with this border on a day to day basis that it was scarcely necessary to generally publicize it.
So even while seeming to acknowledge in unguarded moments that we had a southern border, the White House refused to acknowledge publicly that we did or that we may have shared this alleged border with any other known country. All references to that region of the world were heavily redacted and the name of the country with whom we would have shared this border if we had a border there was rudely blacked out. With such estimable caution on the part of our government (don’t we pay them to be frightened as nervous little girls so we needn’t be?) it is perfectly understandable in retrospect how Congress might have misjudged the length of our border.
It was our intrepid press who finally, under our mischievous freedom of information laws, sued that that info was already a part of the public domain and could not be classified, after the fact, post informationally speaking.
As a small window into the quandary this squabble placed individual Americans and American corporations, an amicus brief filed by Rand McNally stated, “we currently have been preparing maps which cut off in a loose jagged line our southern border from Los Angeles (San Diego being too close referentially to the actual border to risk referring to at all) toward (but not disclosing the location of) Phoenix, then veering up somewhere around Albuquerque. East of there ensues a very large blank space where Texas was (Our enemies, the government insisted, are not stupid and might easily deduce the name of said country which abuts the southern edge of Texas from old John Wayne movies). Rather than try to ban the movies it was thought better to excise any mention of Texas at all in any connection to the US. Finally,” they concluded, “the entire disembodied and disemboweled southern part of the map of the United States terminates in Rand McNally maps near where what is left of the former New Orleans was.
“We at Rand McNally,” the brief continued, “feel strongly that indeterminate vagueness, while perhaps mildly disorienting to our enemies, is primarily a hardship on American citizens who increasingly evidence a fear to even venture anywhere near the southwest US, for fear of falling into what looks on our maps as what can only be termed a vast, indiscriminant, sucking void. Travelers have called our operators in panic as they approached this region for fear of falling off the end of the world or passing beyond the farthest edge of humanities reach. Though we have comforted them that there was actually more land south of that shown on our maps we couldn’t tell them what it was or whether this region even had roads because of what we feel are overly restrictive government regulations prohibiting the disclosure of even the existence of a border to our south.
“Finally,” the amicus brief concluded, “at Rand McNally we feel the risk of terrorists learning we have a southern border with (name of country omitted in the original document) represents less a threat than the risk of Americans forgetting we have one. It is our belief that determined terrorists will be far more motivated and diligent in researching whether we have a southern border and with what nation that border may be shared, than Americans will be in researching the same information. In conclusion we believe that we as a nation risk losing an integral part of the heritage of our country for a generation unless Americans are taught that we have a southern part of our country. We believe that even though security risks may be real that this is decidedly the wrong way to protect ourselves from terrorists. Moreover, we fail to see how we can mount an effective defense to protect ourselves from terrorist incursions in this region unless we are first fully conscious that this region of the United States exists.”
For all this reasoned and persuasive eloquence, in an excess of courtly caution the freedom of information request for this controversial information about the rumored existence of a southern border of the US with an unnamed country of uncertain length, seemed destined to be denied. That was until a famous, fateful faux pas made by the forgetful Justice Department lead attorney, turned the entire proceeding on its ear. Thinking their case all but won, filing his briefs into his brief case, he was overheard unconsciously humming, perhaps in some vague and distant childhood reminiscence, the old tune that contains the tag line “south of the border down Mexico way.” With that the “gato” as it were, came screaming out of the bag.
Opposition attorneys immediately seized on this grievous guffaw. They claimed it as incontrovertible proof that the information of the United States sharing a border on the south with Mexico was too firmly ingrained in the back of the public’s consciousness to even be suppressed from the minds of the government’s own attorneys. How could this information then be effectively re-classified as secret in face of the evidence of such wide public dissemination? After the uproar which ensued as the plaintiffs eagerly pounced on the unconscionable error by the hapless government attorney the judge found himself compelled to rule ex parte and ipso facto, that the information was too far embedded in the dim recesses of the public domain to be subsequently eradicated.
As the winners celebrated this triumph of openness in government, the unfortunate attorney who slipped up with his impromptu recollection of the old melody was rumored to have been Vaya con Dios’d darling, to Cuba. There it is alleged we have a secret prison with secret prisoners subjected to highly classified techniques of alleged interrogations which are not, however, we must insist, ever to be thought of as torture, secretly waiting for secret trials at some secret time never to be announced later.
Only after the Government’s attempts to keep our border information under wraps collapsed, did word eventually filter back to our ever on the alert Congress not only that we apparently did indeed have a southern border but we had it with, the name can now be uttered aloud, Mexico. Even so they were understandably shocked to discover the extent that the government’s Wanton Map Destructions (WMDs) had already been allowed to warp their thinking. Though some members of Congress had been briefed as to the ongoing existence of such a southern border with Mexico, as they were prohibited from disclosing its existence to their colleagues, they professed they were as totally unprepared and shocked as the rest to learn of its great extent.
“Woowee,” one Congressman was said to have muttered outloud. “Golly gee willickers, Miss Moses,” said another. “Howdy do Doody,” said a third. And “who’d a thunk a thunk a thunk it,” marveled a fourth.
Nor was the court decision vacating the government’s argument for secrecy enough for some in this imperious administration to give up a spirited rearguard action to punish those responsible for compelling its disclosure. Several New York Times reporters were sent to prison just on general principle (which should as a general rule be done periodically anyway) and the Vice President to this day continues to insist that there is no compelling evidence or credible proof that such a country named Mexico ever existed at all, terming it, just like Egypt in his mind, a Hollywood invention. The Secretary of State actually went before Congress armed with satellite photos that seemed to show a Mexico sized vacancy just south of the United States that mysteriously did not begin again until Central America. The effectiveness of his presentation was diminished somewhat, however, when on closer inspection when held up to the light erasures could clearly be seen where the land mass of Mexico used to be.
Nonetheless to say that Congress was quite embarrassed that they had actually approved a 700 mile fence to protect a 2000 mile border would be an understatement. Though to say it would be a surprise for an organization that never manages to make their budgetary ends meet and always plays both ends off the middle politically to have made such an error would be an overstatement.
Jokes they were the butt of suggested they proved the axiom – close enough for government work. In that sense being less than half right was about just right for them to maintain their average level of competence. Other observers were quick to make the observation that it was well to the nation that they had not been in charge of building say, the Grand Coulee Dam, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the chunnel between Britain and France, or of setting troop levels in Iraq or been in charge of NASA’s first mission to the moon, or even in setting the hundred year flood levels of New Orleans’s levees. Otherwise we’d have astronauts stranded only half way to the moon, cars plunging into San Francisco Bay, New Orleans would be flooded, we’d have commuters driving into the open seas in the middle of the English Channel, Iraq would be an unwinnable morass and every river in America would be flooded and running wild as wolves.
Still some supporters of the administration in Congress, anxious as always to expiate any culpability for their behavior, bowed their backs and insisted that despite its shortfall the short wall was still a mighty deterrent to illegal economic migration. Along the same lines of those proponents of the Star Wars missile program who argued that even if it didn’t work it would still be a viable deterrent to missile attack because our enemies wouldn’t know for sure it didn’t (as long as no one told them) work. No nation, they argued, would want to risk the interception of a few of its nukes raining in upon us, in the embarrassment of the uncertainty. Besides, they may as well have argued, even if it didn’t work and didn’t deter our enemies from attacking us what would it matter to us really, because of course by the time we found out about it we’d all be dead anyway.
So it was that some apologists in Congress, in its passion never to revisit or admit its own mistakes, argued that it might be years before the illegals actually figured out that the wall was way too short to fill the requisite space along our border. Until then, an illegal unfortunate enough to have crossed the border at say, the middle of the wall, was sure to be mighty discomforted when they realized how long a walk it would be to walk all the way around. They might actually be so tuckered out from the walking that when they finally crossed the border and were immediately hired by an American company they might prove to be less effective workers. This, the adherents of the wall insisted, would be a black eye to the whole illegal immigrant, cheap worker community. Therefore, quick mouths in Congress, which generally work in inverse ratio to the speed of their minds, reasoned that though woefully short in length, the Adobe Curtain (as it was now beginning to be called) would nonetheless be a totally effective deterrent to illegal immigration well worth the money (projected at a cool $50 billion) as long as no one told the aliens that it was really too short by half to actually do any good.
Therefore a special act of Congress was proposed and passed unanimously that all talk of this wall should from that time on be carried out only in English (which, as that was the case anyway, was actually a measure of some redundancy) so that the uneducated illegals who, it was well known to well traveled members of Congress, often were mainly foreigners, would never be able to discover the full extent of the shortfall of this final solution wall’s shortcomings.
Then someone finally thought to question whether, since the building of the wall hadn’t even begun and further that Congress hadn’t provided any actual money for its construction, it might still be possible to look into whether it might not be too late to be redesigned. It was determined to commission a commission to consider whether the wall could be redesigned better within the parameters of the projected spending limits provided, provided the projected spending was ever forthcoming. Concerned that a new study might raise the intellectual basis of the debate to a level which would overshadow the administration’s own thinking on the topic, they decided to go with a group whose wisdom could be safely trusted to never outshine anyone’s. A t this time the so-called Adobe Study Session was organized by either the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute (one of them or both of them incestuously, their positions being so interchangeable that everyone gets the two confused) to recommend the best method to complete the wall.
It is safe to say that the A.S.S.’s findings surpassed all their critics’ limited expectations. They brilliantly satisfied all the problems connected with the wall as to its length merely by altering its height. The beauty of the ingenious “stretch” plan the proposed, in the best traditions of American governmental compromise, was that it would satisfy all the requirements of being profoundly xenophobic, allow Congress and the White House to continue to pontificate on their great moral superiority to the rest of the world, pretend to cure the walls shortcomings without really doing so and still be done with just enough gratuitous expense to make it sound formidable while at the same time being done cheaply enough to still remain largely ineffective. This, you’ll agree, was in itself quite a balancing act to engineer.
2 a)
I apologize if some of the highly technical jargon and many intricate details of advanced wall technology with its amazingly detailed specificity may pass over the average layman’s head, and suggest some may want to skip these technical discussions and proceed to a later part of the dialogue. Yet to relay the full texture and tenor of the debate in order to refute the claim some make that these decisions are made lightly or in haste in some paroxysm of shoot from the hip, gunslinger-like, gangster type policy making, I think it is important to relay their paper’s findings in some detail.
In an impressive display of scholarship and erudition the Study Sessions paper began profoundly enough.
“There is a long distinguished history of walls, it began. There was Hadrian’s Wall in Britain. That was a wall. The ancient Chinese built the Great Wall to keep the Mongol hoards out. Now that was really a wall. And Communists built the Berlin Wall to keep the East Germans in. Our conclusion is that walls have been a very effective deterrent throughout history and some, like the Chinese Wall, may even turn into good tourist attractions later. There is an axiom we believe applies, ‘good walls make good neighbors.’ Walls, in short, are our friends.”
After this short but very provocative and persuasive introduction the study’s authors proceeded quickly to a more substantive tone.
“Early Congressional plans had the Great Wall of America, the so-called Adobe Curtain, projected to be 10 to 15 feet high. Yet your average Mexican or even Honduran is generally shorter than that and may only be on average 5’10” or even 5’8”. So that even if they were to jump really, really, high or were standing on each others’ shoulders, unless they are specially trained or on steroids, especially if they are women, particularly women with babies, some of whom haven’t eaten well recently and may not even be able to jump as high as normal, the wall could safely be shorter and still be effective. Even East Germany was able to keep their highly trained and steroid ridden competitive athletes behind the Berlin wall without many getting through, though of course they had the luxury of the added deterrent of shooting anyone who’d try. While we don’t believe such an expedient is necessary in the United States yet, it should not be completely ruled out for the future.
“Our experts have concluded then, particularly before these illegal workers have been paid and wined and dined on fast foods by the prospective generosity of their rich American employers and were still weak from their journey, that a shorter fence would suffice and a higher fence not worth the additional cost.” The Adobe Study Session then boldly reached its signature, landmark conclusion.
“Therefore the A.S.S’s computed that even if the wall were lengthened to cover the entire southern border it would still be possible to stay within the projected costs projected to be allocated at a latter date by Congress merely by lowering the height of the wall.”
As breathtaking in its sweep as this conclusion was there were still problems which had to be addressed. One problem they found, for instance, was that the footing of the wall is its most expensive part. In part this was due to difficulties inherent in the acquisition, preparation and excavation of land approximately one foot wide for a distance of nearly 2000 miles. Because of this it would cost more to make the wall shorter and extend the wall in length than it would be to make it taller for a shorter distance. Or, in other words, for every two hundred miles the wall was “stretched” in length it would be necessary to shorten its height by approximately 1½ feet.
Therefore their study concluded that it would indeed be possible to stay within the proscribed, alleged and proposed budget while extending the wall the full 2000 miles necessary to completely seal the border. The only problem is by that time the wall would only be 2 ½ feet tall. While it takes some mental adjustment to consider such a significant change in the structure of the wall, upon reflection the Study Session decided that this change would not appreciably limit the efficacy of said wall. “If you consider that this wall will be as much a psychological barrier as a physical one,” they reasoned persuasively in their proposal, “then the deterrent effect of a shorter (in height), longer (in length) wall would be largely undiminished from a shorter (in length), taller (in height) one.”
Upon deep reflection, even for those who disagree with the wall’s entire premise, given the two possibilities, this revolutionary conclusion is a hard conclusion to dispute. While one version of the wall would be less easy to go over, the other version would be less easy to go around, which makes either equally easy or hard to evade, depending on your point of view. Therefore the choice of either wall option will offer precisely the same degree of potential effectiveness at keeping foreigners out. This deceptively simple reasoning keys the remainder of their treatise in support of the “stretched” wall concept.
“…despite the fact that people will pay “coyotes” (what the human traffickers are called) their life savings, ford rivers, cross deserts and risk untold other dangers running a veritable gauntlet merely to seek to undermine the spirit of America with all their hard work, their willingness to sacrifice for their betterment may not be limitless. We believe that when faced with this last hurdle (though technically shorter than an actual hurdle at a track meet) of such a magnificent engineering accomplishment as the Great Adobe Wall of America would represent, it would surely give even a brave soul pause and maybe even make them gulp to step over that wall and soil our soil with their foreign soles. This is, you watch,” the panel guessed, “the last straw on the wall that will break the coyotes’ backs.”
The report continued, “to make certain that our new wall is not mistaken by some illiterate foreigner as just an old foundation or something to trip over on their way north and to make sure that this wall is clearly identified as our sovereign border we plan on erecting signs. We will use angry capital letters, maybe even in red ink, though that may be too provocative, like a cape to a bull, and provoke a backlash. But anyway, we were going to mount these signs on the wall itself but at only two and a half feet tall we were afraid they’d be too small for all but the shortest immigrants to see. So we decided free standing signs would be best painted in even bigger and angrier letters more than just a few inches high which would say, though the exact wording is not yet agreed upon, something like: PLEASE !! (we are undecided too, as to the number of exclamation marks we should use following each word) PLEASE!! PLEASE!!! don’t cross our borders and tred on us! We feel the repetition of the word “please” will indicate just how truly serious we are.”
The study group stated that they were certain that the wall and signs would be a very, very persuasive deterrent what with the exclamation points and all. They also emphasized especially their belief that the great, even exorbitant cost of the wall would itself prove a deterrent. They believed that the cost was bound to impress poor immigrant aliens into a particular awe and unwillingness to treat disrespectfully such a massively expensive edifice. When asked if they weren’t confusing the actual cost of the wall with its actual worth, they rightly dismissed the charge out of hand.
One final controversial note about language arose, however. Since we are an English First country the A.S.S. recommended that we proudly post these signs in English only. Though some argue that since many of these scofflaws, so we understand, speak some kind of foreign language, and will not understand them if they are in English, this would be counterproductive to our dignity and honor to deign to notice such diversity. To counter the argument, however, the Adobe Session thought of mounting loudspeakers on the signs which would say something like, “por favor, por favor, por favor,” in a lingo the aliens would understand, Parenthetically, this would have the added benefit of alerting even blind aliens to not cross our border.
On further reflection, however, they decided the loudspeakers might be too costly and too hard to maintain and so ultimately decided to stick with the signs with the one inclusion that they would repeat the message in Braille (though the Braille would be English as well), just in case any blind alien should stumble into one of them and wonder what it was. While this Braille gambit showed the Adobe groups reasonableness in seeming to satisfy the call for equal protection and in sounding quite humane, lest you think for a second that the panel was going soft, when wheel chair ramps were proposed they were rejected out of hand.
2 b)
Clearly the stretching of wall length and lowering of wall height, while leading to some extra expenses also may provide additional economies. When the wall was just 700 miles long it would have been relatively easy, just a matter of time, for our border security merely to circle around one end or the other of the wall when they wished to relieve each other. With a 1500 mile wall it will be nearly impossible. Either we would have to buy a whole pile of helicopters merely to ferry our officers over the wall or permanently station half of our personnel on one side of the wall and half on the other. This would not be always an efficient division of resources.
Of course, shifts relieving each other is different than one’s relieving oneself. Relieving oneself should always when possible be done alone not in tandem. Pragmatically, if one actually wished to relieve oneself (called watering the cacti in local parlance), since we are a civilized nation, we would also need to either purchase or construct some facilities for this specific function spaced strategically along both sides of the wall. While the Study Session agreed that it was true that FEMA has thousands of these porta-potties still stockpiled in the New Orleans area, however, since both border security and FEMA are different part of Homeland Security needless to say all cooperation between these two agencies is impossible.
One obvious savings the Study Session identified in the initial projected budget would be guard towers. Guard towers of at least fifteen or twenty feet in height were originally envisioned as a necessity with the taller wall, but with a shorter wall much less so. We envision that with a thirty inch wall our personnel could see and communicate with each other more easily than with the previous really tall 700 mile wall. Be that as it may, it is still necessary to construct them because it is a legal requirement stipulated in the legislation, but with a shorter wall we feel they could now still be successful if only built to a height of only five feet tall.
The original plan also called for peepholes or gates. Peepholes would obviously be cheaper and it was initially decided to go that way. However, with a wall only 2 ½ feel tall that would obviously obviate the need of peepholes for one would have to literally lie on one’s stomach to see through one. But doubling the length of the wall brings us back to the necessity of creating a series of gates within the wall to allow passage back and forth of our border personnel.
Anticipating one of the principle arguments opponents of the stretched wall concept would make – if the wall is only two feet tall why not just step over it? – the A.S.S.’s proposed a two fold reply. We quote from the A.S.S. document’s own words:
“Number one, we feel it would not be wise to show disregard for the efficacy of our own deterrent by merely stepping over the wall. This would give unspeakable aid and comfort to the enemy aliens. And we think we speak for all us then when we say we are sure none of us wants that. If our enemies on the other side of the border became accustomed to see our own personnel stepping back and forth over the great wall it would alert those illegals who it may have not previously occurred to that this was possible to do.
“So how bad would we feel if through some careless and short sighted corner cutting and top shorting we were to inadvertently teach the aliens how to defeat our own deterrent? In that case we believe it would not be too much to say that the terrorists, I mean the insurgents, I mean the immigrants, will have won. Rest assured if we do not defeat them on their own side of the wall these terrorists will follow us home to our side of the wall and we will have to fight them in our own bedrooms when many of us who weren’t up late watching television would be asleep and have better things to do at night than fight enemy terrorists in our own homes.
“Therefore for the same reason, we also think it is vital that we resist the natural tendency to sit or rest anything upon the wall. We understand this may be a natural desire of some as the ground is dirty and some of these areas are quite remote might have spiders and bugs and even snakes and stuff, but the war on terror, I mean illegal immigrants, is tough work and this is just another hardship, danger and inconvenience we must learn to live with if we are to succeed at the world wide war on immigration, we mean terror.
“To deter this particular activity of sitting on the wall from occurring it has occurred to us that it would be better achieved if the wall was surmounted by something really sharp, like razor wire. Our careful study of walls throughout history have shown that nobility in Europe used to build walls or fences of wrought iron with pointy little spikes atop them to keep poor peasants from sitting on them. Walls were even sometimes fitted with ragged shards of glass embedded in the concrete to prevent the indigents from loitering. This would be a particularly cost effective method of deterrence on your shorter wall.
“We originally thought of testing glass from broken pop or soda bottles, but unfortunately most of your bottles nowadays are made of plastic. In trying shards of plastic embedded in the concrete atop the wall and hiring test subjects to sit upon it we learned that the flexible plastic only caused a slight, vague discomfort after about twenty minutes, which was effectively minimized by a mere shifting of the buttocks occasionally. We did not consider this a sufficient deterrent and so we are considering other methods to make our wall top unsittable upon, as it were.
2 c)
“Meanwhile, this brings us directly back to the whole issue of gates. We propose gates not only for our personnel but for our many, many humvees. We think these gates will pay for themselves by saving wear and tear on the tires and undercarriages of the hummers by not requiring them to frequently just drive over the wall, but to calmly and urbanely drive through the gates. Here again, in yet another problem area, we find the whole “stretched” wall project benefits from a wall less tall. Previously, with a tall wall we were uncertain of which side of the gates to put the padlocks on. Logic and patriotism would suggest we put the locks on our, the good, the American, the winning side of the wall. But what if one or more personnel were trapped on the wrong side of the wall? Obviously they would be SOL, which is a country acronym we often use in the field which we will sanitize here in this document and translate as – soap out of luck.
“Here again your shorter (speaking here in terms of height) wall will vitiate one of our potential problems because we do feel it would be appropriate in some instances for a member of our border patrol to actually reach their hand over the wall to unlock the gate as long as they do not extend the bulk of their torso itself too far over the wall and appear as if they on the verge of actually crossing the wall. We would still for the same reasons given above insist that no personnel be allowed to actually extend his or her leg or legs across the wall to plant a foot or two on the other extremity from which they started on over our two foot wall.
We will render it absolutely verboten for any of our personnel to breach the imaginary verticality of the wall. We especially will prohibit the breaking of the circuit of the wall which we define as a ground to ground contact. This includes any activity from actually standing astride the wall, one foot on either side, or in resting any part of the anatomy, like an elbow or the sole of a shoe, upon it.
In other words even if, say, a border patrol officer should accidentally drop his or her gun on the opposite side of the wall from which they are standing, unless they can easily reach the weapon with their hand quickly while keeping both feet still on the ground on their own side of the wall we will require that they must call another officer to retrieve it for them or use one of our gates to go retrieve it themselves. Under no circumstances will it be acceptable for a border agent to merely ask an illegal alien standing nearby or on the opposite side of the wall to either pick up their weapon and hand it to them or to step over the wall to retrieve it on their behalf. Any fraternization of this type with the enemy is strictly forbidden. We will enforce this strictly.
“If this seems too harsh or overly complex a requirement we think the real solution is for our border patrol officers to not be so careless with their weapons as to drop them on the far side of the wall from where they are standing. If they must drop their weapon it would be better to drop it on the side of the wall most consistent with the side of the wall on which they already are. We don’t believe this is too much to ask. We don’t believe we can beat committed, godless terrorists through a relaxation of our basic principles of discipline and good procedure.
“In any case, having once decided on inserting gates into the wall it still remains to be determined with what frequency these gates should be situated for maximum cost versus efficiency. First, we envision each gate to be a two door double swing gate measuring from 14’ to 16’ wide between them, meeting in the middle where they may be padlocked on the northernmost side. Specifications dictate that they must be this wide in order to admit two humvees simultaneously heading in different directions rather than just in one and the same direction single file, though with the double gates both vehicles could actually be heading in the same direction side by side, though that would be odd.
“Three basic gate options were entertained. First, one gate every ¼ mile. Second, one gate every 5 miles. And third, one gate every 200 miles. The first would necessitate 6000 gates. The second option would eventuate in 300 gates. And the third would require only 7 ½ gates. Presumably in this last option the ½ size gate would of necessity only allow one humvee at a time to pass through safely. According to our calculations this could be a safety problem and conceivably result in a head on humvee collision every four or five years resulting in a broken leg or collar bone now and then and again. According to common actuarial tables a death or near death - such as full or partial paralyzation - would occur on average every 12.7 years. As the safety of our personnel is paramount, this risk seems to us to be unacceptable. For this and other reasons the third option was deemed inappropriate. Similarly the first option, due to a suspected shortage of hinges and locks in the region, was thought to be too gate intensive. The second option, however, was just right.
“As to the matter of hinges another problem arose. With the shortened in height but lengthened in distance wall, two normal hinges to support such a short (in height) span was thought to be too brassy. But one hinge was found to be too small to support the weight of the gate (in width). Unfortunately if two smaller, commercially available hinges were used to support the weight of the gate they would appear too scrawny and unprepossessing for something as weighty as the entire border security of the nation to hinge upon and so thin that they may be pried from their places with a mere screwdriver. Fortunately, we do not believe that these aliens customarily carry screwdrivers with them when they are illegally trespassing our borders (apparently believing that they can acquire any tools they might need once they arrive) and have a reasonable expectation that for the foreseeable future they would not think to bring their own tools with them. So though we have not fully solved the hinge dilemma we are working on it and have enough of an expectation that we will solve this engineering conundrum that we feel confident in proceeding with the general project assuming it will be solved at a later time. We have in fact already begun to redesign these hinges which we think we can get at the bargain or at least quite reasonable rate of only 200 times normal retail cost per piece.
3)
“This brings us to the final crucial and most sensitive part of the equation as to who will actually build the wall. Of course, as to normal recent procurement and contracting methods we would let these contracts on a no bid or no competition basis to secure maximum ease and benefit to the contractor with very little to no oversight which makes it easier on the politicians. Naturally this does ensure a large degree of fraud and wastage, incompetence, lack of accountability, cost overruns and out and out profiteering by the companies that meet the political approval of the administration and “win” these contracts. But as these costs and overruns are expected and already accounted for in the inflated budget they can occur without breaking the proposed money allocation if these monies are ever at some later date actually allocated.
“The problem with the availability of labor is another issue, however, and has grown quite acute. Some of these areas where the wall will be built are quite remote and forbidding and hot, with snakes, little air conditioning, swimming pools or cable television hooks-ups available. And since Homeland Security up until recently as you well know, was still fully invested in the period of Wanton Map Destruction (WMD’s) maps of the area are highly unreliable and many Americans get easily confused and lost in the region. To this day some Americans doubt that, so effective was the agency propaganda and disinformation efforts, such an area even exists in the United States at all.
“Labor problems have been exacerbated by the severe greed of the companies involved. To keep their profit margins much, much higher than would normally be the case for comparable private sector work (justified by them as necessary to cover the exorbitantly high cost of the campaign contributions they made to politicians to ensure they received the no-bid contracts in the first place) they have kept their pay and benefit packages near rock bottom. To hurry the project along the administration has exempted these companies form normal wage, safety and benefit structures and nearly all other applicable rules and regulations, oversight and humanity.
“These things in combination have made it very difficult to find any real Americans willing to sacrifice to build this wall to protect America. So, uh, to be blunt as a club, it seems the only workers the companies have been able to find to hire on to build the Adobe Curtain have been uh, well, the illegal aliens themselves. Acknowledging these problems the administration has granted a waiver to these companies to go outside of normal labor practices and American law to hire illegals legally.
“Although at first blush this might seem to contradict the whole purpose of building the Great Wall of America, we of the A.S.S.’s project think that despite the, uh, irony inherent in the situation we actually, if you think about it hard enough for a long enough time, think this is not necessarily anything but a plus. It’s dirty work, after all, and some nationality has to do it. Our voluminous study of the history of walls referred to earlier shows many instances of slave labor being used in similar projects or of prisoners being compelled to engage in construction of the very walls destined to imprison them.
“So once you move past the irony of bringing illegals into our country to build a 2 ½ foot high, 1500 mile long wall to keep themselves out of our country you have to admit that it is rather a delicious concept after all and actually quite apropos. Who better after all to build this wall?”
4)
Who indeed? The hearings concluded here, leaving this poignant question hanging in the air unanswered. As of this time it still remains to be seen whether this amazing example of American legislative and engineering ingenuity will be built or not. Yet we have explored the debate at length for the fascinating insight it gives into the breathtaking diligence and care that goes into legislating in this day and age.
The tragedy for those of us who unequivocally support this magnificent project, is that soon the nit pickers and quibble doctors were at work trying to undercut it at every turn. Public opinion had turned so negatively against the wall that finally it forced the President himself to take time from his busy schedule to address these concerns with the public directly.
“Yes we are winning, absolutely,” he argued forcefully. The unruly immigrants are being controlled. What’s a mere $50 billion (the projected price of the wall) for something that, some day, who knows, might just work, you know? In fact I’ll tell you right now that the only way the stretched wall plan will fail is if it doesn’t work and the only way we will lose is if we don’t win.”
Yet even on the newscasts when the President was speaking in such reassuring sound bites to the nation, it was possible to hear increasingly insistent calls of “stop the wall, stop the wall now,” rising in the background to drown him out. Clearly his message was getting twisted by the media and not getting through to the public. As public support continued to deteriorate in a mid term election his party was handed a severe rebuke at the polls.
Therefore he decided to enact a new, or at least enunciate anew, the old policy wrapped in different terminology. Defiant of his enemies which by now included much of the country, not only did the President refuse to stop the building of the wall but he reaffirmed his determination against all odds, logic and evidence to escalate its construction schedule and commit the nation further to all the complications of its implications.
At the same time, as a fop to his critics, to provide political cover for himself and to pretend his stay the course policy was really something new and different, he proposed to add a portable 2000 foot extension (or two hundred ten foot extensions) to the wall. Where one of these impermanent extensions was attached to the existing wall it would increase the height of the wall 1½ feet to approximately four feet high. Some argued that this would still do little to stop the flood of immigrants. But the key to it, its supporters insisted, was not only the increased commitment such an escalation would represent to our enemies but the mobility of the plan.
For as to its mobility, if alien immigrants were found to be breaching the wall in one place we could merely move one of these portable extensions to the trouble spot. Once the traffic flow of illegals subsided somewhat you could move it onto another place until the entire wall had cleared piecemeal, section by section. The President termed this new plan, “slow, stop and move.” He insisted it was completely different from the previous failed plans of “stop, move and slow” or “slow, move and stop.”
When it was suggested that the illegals might simply wait to see where we put these extensions and cross the wall elsewhere where our focus was not so intense, the President said he doubted the illegals had a high enough level of intelligence, commitment or sophistication to make such self-evident adjustments.
The President also for the first time added in his most forceful and eloquent statement yet, “We must be absolutely clear about this. It is not too strong a statement to say that in a very real sense it is these illegal aliens who really caused 9-11, probably at the instigation of Saddam Hussein. It is very well known that Osama bin Laden himself is an illegal immigrant to Pakistan and Afghanistan and that some Iraqis have been known to travel to Acapulco.”
And in an additional, highly controversial, claim which some maintain represents a severe misreading of history and unfortunately opened the President up to old charges that he never really seemed to know what he was talking about, he added: “Immigration has always been prohibited in our country, never allowed. It is we native Americans and native Americans alone who have built our country from the ground up. It would be a betrayal of our entire history to fail our ancestors at this critical juncture of our history and allow foreigners into our midst.”
Even in the face of such a stirring, clarion call to arms, believe it or not, his critics still refused to be swayed and step up and stand behind the President for the defense of the nation. “Too little, too costly, too late,” they whined.
Here you have it. It is plain to see for all but whiners and losers to see with what admirable attention to detail and care in planning have gone into what has been termed by some a “perfect and complete solution” to the problem of illegal immigration. Others have already termed the Adobe Wall if it were to built, “the thirteenth wonder of the world!” Despite all the naysayers, and A.S.S. knockers, I believe when people of such high principle and infinite wisdom as those we have leading our country today put their minds to it they can write perfectly good speeches which may pretend to solve anything. And when they do it is our duty not only to listen but to be quiet and do what we are told.
But some have apparently forgotten what it is to be American. And when such dedicated and capable people as these, sweating over all this gloriously mind numbing minutia, lavish such extraordinarily thorough care and attention to detail of the sort as is displayed in this article, how can anyone but be proud? When you consider that very much this same level of probity and capability, understanding, planning and care must have been devoted to other things every bit as crucial to our national interest as say, for instance, the war in Iraq, what American wouldn’t be willing to risk their lives or the lives of their children in the service of such estimable and charismatic public servants as these?
