Here we are back to the stupid wall. Mexico’s never gonna pay for it.

Hey! I just looked in my wallet and there’s $4.27 gone! Look in yours. I bet it’s missing the same amount, in fact, it’s missing from the pockets of every man, woman, baby and immigrant in America. Those four bucks are your down-payment on the wall because our president promised it. He promised it to show how ferocious and unkind he intended to be in preserving cabbage-picking careers for capable, white American hands. And he does this while his towers and resorts are staffed with immigrants.

Instead of giggling their fool heads off, Congress approved a $1,600,000,000 payment that will not be in pesos. Let me write that out: sixteen-thousand-million dollars. That hurts. How far would that go toward opioid and fentanyl education and recovery? How many lives could that money save? Instead, our president is determined in squandering it on a medieval bulwark laughably defeated by tunnels and drones. And the sad thing is – he knows it. It’s all show.

I’ve written about it before. History is replete with failed walls. Back in 21 BCE, ancient Sumerian’s built a hundred-mile wall between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that worked perfectly to keep out the unwanted – for three years before they were overrun by the Amorites.

One of the longest walls of antiquity was the “Red Snake”, a 120-mile barricade hat extended from the Caspian Sea to the Elburz Mountains in Iran. It was built by the Sasanian Persians sometime around 500 BCE. The wall was built to guard against enemies to the north and completed shortly before the Persians were overrun by enemies from the north.

In 461 BCE, the Greeks built walls to protect Athens. And they worked too. Well, for a few years until the Spartans sank the Greek navy, cutting off their supply lines and starving them out.

This one’s my favorite: sometime around 122 CE the Emperor Hadrian built a 73-mile wall separating the Romans from the barbarians of northern England and Scotland. 10 feet wide and 15 feet tall with troops spaced one mile apart, this wall was infiltrated by the Scots for 300 years until everybody forgot what it was for and tore it down to build homes.  

Did you know the Great Wall was stuck together with slaked lime and sticky rice? True. It’s the Big Kahuna in the Hall of failed walls and for a while it was the largest manmade object in the world, only to be surpassed by the American highway system. Despite its formidable size it was easily breached by Mongol hoards and later by the Manchus, leading to the fall of the Ming dynasty.

Constantinople citizens felt pretty safe in their walled city with a moat, a 27-foot outer wall and a 40 feet tall inner wall. Troops stationed on ramparts would rain flaming arrows dipped in “Greek fire” on intruders. They even successfully drove off Attila the Hun, but then troops from the Ottoman Empire rolled up a curious device and blew their walls apart with cannons, toppling the entire Byzantine Empire.

The most infamous wall in recent memory was built in 1961 when the East German government built concrete partitions across Berlin to keep East Germans from defecting to the West. More than 100 people were killed trying to escape but thousands more succeeded by scaling the wall, tunneling underneath, hot air balloons and ultra-lights. It lasted almost three decades before Berliners tore it down when the two Germanys reunited.

Call our senator Cory Gardner (202) 224-5941 and tell him walls don’t work. It may come as a total surprise to him. But while you got him on the phone, ask him for your four bucks back.