Concrete barricades are placed behind fencing outside of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House, following a night of protests near the White House in Washington, D.C., June 4, 2020. Will Trump send the bill to Mexico? (photo: Tom Brenner/Reuters)
05 June 20
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array of what might be described as the accessories and devices of
dictatorship have expanded with infectious ruthlessness in American
cities. The police swinging batons wildly, the paramilitary forces refusing to identify themselves, the hysterical president trying to incite war, the vigilantes in league with the police, military helicopters clattering overhead, the general marching in the streets in combat fatigues, the state TV network loosing its hysterical tales of sabotage and mayhem — it’s all there, loud and clear.
And Thursday, when 1.7 miles of cement barriers and wire fences
were transported to the heart of Washington, D.C. and latched together
to form an expanded perimeter around the White House, we even got our
own Green Zone.
The Green Zone was the diseased heart of the U.S.
occupation of Iraq. It was a jittery enclave in the center of Baghdad
where American officials worked in once-opulent buildings that were
encircled by a fearsome perimeter. The miles and miles of
cement barriers that serpentined around the Green Zone were brutalist
tombstones mutely announcing the fear and failure of the U.S. invasion. I
got to know those blast walls while reporting in Iraq.
Trump’s Green Zone is not nearly as large as the one
in Baghdad, and it is not threatened by suicide bombers or mortar
shells; it’s a miniature in all respects, as is our president. It is a
monument to Trump’s cowardice in the face of peaceful opposition, though
perhaps we should call it the White Zone, given his ideology of white
nationalism.
Trump’s administration — and police forces across the
country — have been hapless in everything except their viciousness
against protesters who demand little more than to live in a country in
which the judicial system does not destroy the lives of innocents,
especially African Americans.
Yet there it is, a government executive that has
surrounded itself with walls and troops, besieged by forces that in a
way are stronger than any insurrection might muster — the collapsing force
of its own malignance, incompetence, and cowardice.
This Green Zone or
White Zone or whatever we should call it is not a projection of
strength, not something to cower before. We might even want to celebrate
it. While there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty about what will
happen next, there is no greater sign of the failure of a political or
military enterprise than the fact that it has to seal itself off from
the general population in what it hopes and prays is an impenetrable
fashion.
A screenwriter could not have crafted a better arc,
the return of the Green Zone, and it’s not an entirely contrived plot
twist. Trump is an ill culmination of many deformities in American
politics and culture, including decades of militarism overseas and
deceptions at home that have impoverished the country literally and
morally. Empires tend to collapse as a result of such errors — it’s
worth remembering that the Soviet Union was to a great extent killed off
by Afghanistan and Chernobyl,
while America got Afghanistan, Iraq, and Covid-19.
“When the truth
offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even
there, but it is still there,” noted
a heroic Soviet scientist in “Chernobyl,” the HBO miniseries about the
1986 nuclear meltdown. “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth.
Sooner or later that debt is paid.”
So the debt of lies and racism and militarism must be
paid in America; Trump is probably hastening the reckoning, though we
might have been destined to have our own Green Zone at some point, or
some other startling representation of the bottom being reached. It’s
oddly fitting, after all, that the troops summoned to the Washington,
D.C. area included the 82nd Airborne Division, which participated in the invasion of Iraq and fought there throughout the years. (I even wrote about
an 82nd Airborne company as it tried to secure one of Baghdad’s oil
refineries from post-invasion looting.)
So this is a reminder of the
debt we are paying for sins committed by our leaders over the years and
decades: Soldiers from a famous unit that once trotted around Baghdad’s
Green Zone are called to Washington, D.C., where they are just as out of
place as they were in Iraq.
There is a final irony to the barricaded White House
that’s almost too obvious to mention. A president who came to office
promising to build a beautiful wall at
the southern border to protect the nation from foreigners has instead
erected a pathetic one to protect himself from his own people. Trump has
gotten some of what he deserves. His tiny Green Zone is not a prison,
but it’s a verdict on what he’s done.
Does Trump's White House Wall get him a little closer to his ultimate destination? Mexico would gladly pay for this conclusion.
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