Old Gringo

     Mexico City didn't welcome Donald Trump when he accepted President Nieto's invitation to meet.  Trump's four percent popularity rating in Mexico added to Nieto's twenty-three percent makes twenty-seven percent, which, if doubled, tops Hillary Clinton's U.S. popularity rating.  It is a time of polls and worthless leaders.
     I can never forget the association of William S. Burroughs with Mexico City.  In 1951 he shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a small gathering, performing a "William Tell act" consisting of Burroughs aiming a gun he planned to sell.  The would-be gun buyer was late, Burroughs was drunk, the sight on the gun's barrel was, according to Burroughs, misaligned, the bullet hit Joan's forehead instead of the shot glass on top of her head.
     Burroughs' rationalization about the gun's "misaligned sight" wasn't his way of seeking expiation for doing something terrible and unforgivable.  He just had a dry, factual way of regarding reality.  The gun had a bad sight, he and his wife were both fucked up, both addicts.  They lived as expatriates in a sprawling Latin American city that had the world's highest murder rate.
     When Donald Trump speaks about Latinos it's usually in the way of a cannibal chef describing meat chunks in a stew.  His contempt for "illegals" has only one plausible explanation: he's a racist.  For an old American privileged white man to have racist attitudes shouldn't surprise anyone.  His journey to Mexico two days ago, so offensive to residents of that country, was supposedly a preliminary step to get Mexican officialdom used to the idea of "paying for the wall," another way of saying, "You're gonna be my bitch, Bitch."
     What nation would accept such subservience without protest, without revolt?  Accepting, for argument's sake, that the wall gets built, do we also assume a subservient, humiliated Mexico doesn't have an army equipped with lots of explosives to crumble Trump's "beautiful" wall?  It may as well be constructed of Graham crackers.
     Chris Hayes on MSNBC asked a pertinent question to a Republican Texas congressman and Trump supporter: "Which side of the Rio Grande will the wall be on?  Will Americans not have access to that river, which runs the length of the Mexican border with Texas?  Will the wall be on the Mexican side?  Will it be in the river?"
     The congressman had no answer to that, citing his mental location out of the loop, but his overall demeanor seemed childlike when he tried to explain the world according to Trump.
     Trump, standing at a podium near the Mexican president, looked like a grumpy old piece of shit trying to seem statesmanlike, listening to the translator as Nieto talked to a group of reporters.  Trump, when he spoke, seemed "low energy" to me; quiet-voiced, reserved.  Answering a reporter, he said the wall was discussed, but the payment issue "didn't come up."  Later, Nieto tweeted that the first thing he said to Trump in their private meeting was, "Mexico will not pay for the wall."
     In Phoenix that night, Trump addressed a rally of his supporters, all of whom expressed enthusiasm when their hero jokingly suggested "maybe we'll deport her [Hillary Clinton]]."
     His tone sounded distinctly Brownshirt, circa 1932.  Shouting most of the time, his voice sounded like all of civilization's best features collapsing.  His vocal barrage, a relentless assault, amounted to a toughening of his anti-immigrant stance; his rejection of the American value of accepting outsiders into the fold, a value his own ancestors, and his wife, benefited from.
     Trump insisted the wall would be built and paid for by Mexico, contradicting President Nieto.  We're supposed to believe Trump when he said that payment for the wall didn't come up during their meeting.  Having spent fourteen months spewing shit about this goddamn fantasy wall, riling up millions of his stupid supporters with wall rhetoric, he didn't talk about payment for the thing when he had the Mexican president in a chair in the same room with him?  Believe that the subject of payment didn't come up, as Trump said, or that Nieto right away said his country won't pay for it.  I believe Nieto, in spite of his twenty-three percent approval rating.  At least that's nineteen percentage points higher than Trump's.
     If William Burroughs knew the gun he wanted to sell had a misaligned sight, why didn't he adjust his aim accordingly?  Not being a gun user, I don't know how difficult that is to do, but apparently it's not always easy to know what you're getting into when you chance the squeezing of a trigger.  Trump's wall notion aims to get him elected president--it's the first thing he talked about when he announced his candidacy.  The policy's (and calling the wall a "policy" is more a stretch than the wall's proposed length) misalignment, while it seeks to establish a firm, unmoving, "impenetrable" barrier, really just manages to insult and aggravate an entire people in multiple countries.
     Trump, like the shot glass on top of Joan Vollmer's head, will survive intact, while the body bleeds.  His rhetoric never hurts him--his ambitions maybe--but it does abuse Latinos.

                                                                               Vic Neptune