An interesting read. History in a way we rarely see.
""To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing," the Canadian poet Anne Carson once said. With Trump, America finds itself at the end of its myth.
To talk about the frontier is also to talk about capitalism, about its power and possibility and its promise of boundlessness. Donald Trump figured out that to talk about the border -and to promise a wall- was a way to acknowledge capitalism's limits, its pain, without having to challenge capitalism's terms.
Trump ran promising to end the wars and to reverse the extreme anti-regulatory and free-market program of his party.
Once in office, though, he accelerated deregulation, increased military spending, and expanded the wars. But he kept talking about his wall.
That wall might or might not be built. But even if it remains only in its phantasmagorical, budgetary stage, a perpetual negotiating chip between Congress and the White House, the promise of a two-thousand-mile-long, thirty-foot-high ribbon of concrete and steel running along the United States' southern border serves its purpose. It's America's new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier. It is a symbol of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, or at least strode atop history, bur now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to think they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past." Introduction p8-9
'The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America' by Greg Grandin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...nd-of-the-myth
"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." Dwight D. Eisenhower