I am driven to wonder how much of this whole issue of The Wall is even real. As far as Trump is concerned, it was just a rhetorical device, red meat for the crowds… and Mexico is gonna pay for it! It was, in short, a con job from the start – only a fraction as real as repealing and replacing Obamacare on day one – with the special appeal of actually being something Trump might know something about; as opposed, you know, to everything else.

Meanwhile, on the other side, for whom The Wall is the very Alpha and Omega of bigotry, racism made manifest, a Confederate flag writ large, there is never the slightest mention or recognition of the fact that a wall was already being built under the Obama administration.

It’s just a fact… but one that shatters a particular ideological fantasyland.

I’m not an expert on the once and future Wall, but it stands to reason that barriers along the southern border of the United States have been in the works for many years. I doubt, in short, that it was Obama’s idea, either. The crusade against borders is, we might say, historically challenged.

There it is: one of the polarizing issues of our times, in large part a phantasm. And here we are, caught in a world composed of Donald Trump’s bullshit promises and an opposition unable to see itself for what it is, and so doomed to oscillate between self-righteous denial and open self-hate. Vampires or Zombies, take your pick.

So, when people demand that it’s time for everyone to take a side in the coming Civil War, I am going to keep saying

NO

and

GET REAL