Building a wall to preserve what?

That proposed wall to separate the USA from its southern neighbors looms large as a priority of the soon to be Trump administration.

Le mur

2018

Oil on two linen canvasses

46 x 76 cm

Proposed to preserve possibly the following:

1.  America's culture from invasion of taco stands from the south

2.  American jobs from invading armies of illegal aliens from the south

3.  America's splendid isolation from the corrupting influence of all other non-white cultures 

4.  America's racial purity, her whiteness, from all those other darker-skinned alien invaders

The list could go on, and the chimera that is American "whiteness" and its "white culture" (no doubt a mixture of pumpkin pie, Mickey Mouse, and Rambo) upends any rational discourse with its adherents.  All four points mentioned above are obviously ridiculous notions which do not stand up to any logical scrutiny based on fact.  But fact and science are moot in such gestalts.

Walls have been built time and again, for multiple reasons, and their failures to keep out the enemy are recurrent themes in history -- China's Great Wall, Constantinople's great fortress walls . . . that wall-fence combo that is supposed to preserve and make "America great again" will probably not be an exception to the rule.  The thing though is that in China's case, there were actual invaders from the North, and in Constantinople's case, there were actual invaders from the East.  What exactly is that Great Wall of Trump protecting the USA from?

The "threat" of multi-culturalism and globalization in a country that is feeling a loss of its "original" identity seems to be the answer one hears about a lot in response to this outright xenophobia.  Here in France, the far right Front National has been agitating for decades in its push to preserve "French Identity" and French culture against foreigners -- a veiled direct reference of course to people of North African heritage, often Muslims, and isn't it ironic that the US State Department does indeed classify these peoples as "white?"

I once painted a wall back in 2013 after a trip to Tunisia.  I was struck back then by the walls of graffiti, often of utilitarian use.  For example, the boxes painted on the walls, each with a number, were in fact allocated spaces for the republic's first true parliamentary elections since the Arab Spring toppled the Ben Ali dictatorship in 2011. They were allotted for each candidate's election poster.  The countryside that we visited, about three hours east of Tunis, was often lined by long walls, separating mud road from farmlands, private from public spaces perhaps, and a marker of shared space, with its handwritten and painted signs marking road names, bus stations and directions.

With the recent election in the US, the walls I painted seems to have taken on a whole other meaning, where one space seems to be inevitably excluded from the other, where one group is confined and another, unseen, attempts to preserve historic and modern vestiges, where the transparency and fragility of modern democracy risks inevitably to fall and break into a broken heap of glass shards.