how i hope this conversation goes from there is like:
"actually the concept album for this musical came out in 2010 and the original song was written in 2006"
"so she knew about the wall 10 years before Trump proposed it be built?"
"well, let's talk about that...
...but that wasn't when the wall was first built...
...this shift in the '90s marked the start of an enforcement philosophy called Prevention Through Deterrence, which basically says that if crossing is made more deadly, fewer people will cross (fact check: it just means that more people die on the journey). From the start, the purpose of the wall was not to physically to stop people from crossing -- it was to make it more deadly to do so.
...and we can also look at the song metaphorically and expansively, as a reference to the policing of migration, to company towns, to gated communities, and the physical and metaphorical walls that throughout history have kept people in and out and defined who does and don't belong.
"...how did you just say a hyperlink?"
"why worry about that when you can use this show as an entry-point into a deeper understanding of capitalism's investment in coercive control over human migration, and its long history in the United States?"
"so the song only seems prophetic because the long history of policing and militarizing the border has been ignored, and treated as an outsider position by Trump rather than the continuation of bi-partisan policy dating back decades? and it can be seen to reflect larger patterns of capital controlling people's movement in order to extract land, labor, wealth, and ultimately life from them?"
amandla
dailybridgerton
titsay
izzy806
origamiaround
theartofmadeline
stormborns
