According to an unnamed source inside the president-elect’s coalescing transition team, a bold new initiative regarding the wall along the United States-Mexico border is underway. This report reveals that high-level negotiations are currently taking place between Trump and China, the basis of which is The Art of the Deal, and that for certain trade advantages, a 1,000-mile stretch of the Great Wall of China will be sold to Trump.  It will subsequently be bulldozed, loaded onto ships, and sent to this continent, where at enormous expense it will be off-loaded and reconstructed. Great care will be taken to reassemble the top stonework and trails exactly as they were in China. Thousands of people will be put to work. Some of them, after protracted court battles, will even be paid.

Who will pay for all of the rest? Russia, of course, will pay some, for a percentage of future profits derived from the casinos built into the wall every 200 miles. Wealthy tourists from both China and Russia will bring their money here to witness firsthand this historical and planet-altering installation. Hundreds of miles of the original wall will still exist in China for tourist satisfaction there. Trump will come up with a large chunk of money himself, for which he will claim naming rights (Trump’s Great Wall of China is currently preferred) and a 50-year tax abatement on all family-owned properties, local, state, and federal.

Party insiders probably have additional details, though they haven’t been forthcoming. But Representative Chris Collins was overheard, by an unreliable eavesdropper, saying something about the “virtual” Great Wall of China, and the New York State co-chair for the Trump campaign, Carl Paladino, was spotted at a rally wearing a tee-shirt with the words “Make the Great Wall of China Great Again” on it.

These fictions aside, I insist that my idea for such a wall was much better. I documented mine in a book titled Niagara Digressions in 2012, proposing a 100-foot-high wall constructed entirely of all the billboards in America (which would have the bonus of removing the blight of gaudy billboards from our rural and urban landscapes). I saw it as putting thousands to work—welders, truckers, carpenters, electricians, cement workers, and so on—with solar panels on the wall, union wages being paid, etc., providing a wonderful opportunity many years from now for the president of Mexico to “intone, dramatically, imperiously, cunningly, self-righteously, petulantly, and demandingly, ‘Estoy hablando al Presidente de los Estados Unidos, ¡Tira esta pared!’”

What made mine better is that it was satire; I’d also said (after mentioning the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, and the one in Israel), “We deserve to have our own wall, our own national monument of embarrassment and shame.  When we fail to solve human problems of national, cultural, and economic complexity, then we should build a wall, an actual world representation of the invincible walls in our minds, and a damn big one, too.”

Trump’s wall was, and still is, presented as real, actual. When he first mentioned it and he wasn’t dragged off-stage in a straight jacket, that only encouraged him, and so others, previously thought of as sane, on other occasions began chanting, “Build that wall!” and so on. It was very sad, actually.

For those collecting wall memorabilia, I should tell you that fewer than a half dozen pages out of the nearly 300 in Niagara Digressions deal with the wall proposal. But I make you this offer: Go to my website (erbaxteriii.com) and order a copy via my email contact there, and if you mention The Public, I will sell it to you at half price, free shipping, and throw in a collector’s item bookmark, as well. 

Or drop a line or two, anyway, just to say hello.

 E. R Baxter III is professor emeritus of English at Niagara County Community College Professor Emeritus of English, the author of several books of fiction, poetry, and essays, and a founding member of Niagara Heritage Partnership.