I’ve been thinking about “Melinda Mae,” a Shel Silverstein poem about a little girl who vows to eat a whale. Everyone says she can’t, but she starts right in at the tail. The last page of the poem shows a picture of her as a wizened old lady in front of a gargantuan whale skeleton, with the lines,
Like a lot of great literature, the poem lends itself to multiple interpretations. It’s silly and fun, of course. Deeper than that, however, is the lesson for kids that if you set your mind to it, you can do anything.
But it’s a third interpretation that’s relevant here. Keeping that promise ruined her fucking life. By the third day or so of this project, she was eating rotting whale flesh. Her digestion was surely wrecked. Surely the stench meant her friends deserted her. The promise loomed so large over her life that she had no time to pursue other dreams.
Now, this thread may be useful. It’s not proof positive, but it’s a decent indication that the best and most elegant way for Trump to fulfill his promise is to bring back widespread slavery and flagrant violations of human rights on a scale not seen in a democracy in over a century, and very likely initiating a second civil war. That’s the best-case outcome if the promise is kept, according to the OP.
LHoD, I’m sorry to do this to you, but this is the Straight Dope, and… [deep breath]
…actually, a whale carcass about the size of that depicted in the illustration would probably be under 3000 pounds total. If we assume conservatively that as much as 2500 pounds of the carcass was edible, and estimate that Melinda Mae was consuming a very manageable one-quarter pound or four ounces of whale meat per day (presupposing some magical children’s-poem mechanism that preserves the edible parts indefinitely, etc.), then we easily determine that even allowing for occasional holidays and sick days the carcase will have been consumed in well under thirty years.
If she took a full eighty years or so to finish the job, she was probably just having a small stick or so of whale jerky every other day. Really nowhere near such an all-absorbing or life-ruining commitment as you suggest.
Hell, the notorious late Monsieur Mangetout, beloved of these boards, took only two years to eat a freaking Cessna 150 airplane.
Just sayin’. Okay, I’m going away now.
The problem is that as quick as you pile them up, they either eviscerate or are blown up by right-wing terrorists, so it is not just a matter finding enough whale volunteers to make a wall, but to then constantly have to find replacements.
Yup. That is why Canada has put in tighter speed limits for freighters in our Gulf of St. Lawrence.
The single greatest harm that the proposed wall would cause would be to permanently bisect ecosystems.
Tragically, Trump, his cronies and his supporters only think of themselves. They don’t recognize human caused climate change, they actively remove flood limiting land use regulations (e.g. Houston), and they don’t give a second’s thought to how their decisions will harm life on earth, including ourselves either directly or indirectly.
And not only that, as they die from the heat during their labor, we can feed their dead carcasses to the remaining workers, thereby saving on food AND funeral costs at the same time. Brilliant idea, no?
The wall is an incredibly stupid idea, but assuming that stupid people want to build it, it won’t be built with a whole lot of manual labor - it will be built with heavy construction equipment - backhoes, cranes, bulldozers, skid steers, dump trucks, cement mixers, etc. Having a bunch of un- and semi-skilled Mexicans pressed into service isn’t going to get you very far.
Yep, one billion would be a drop in the bucket. WTF is the ‘down payment’? They, once again are just trying to fool Trump supporters into thinking it’s easy/not a lot of money.
The only thing that is easy, is fooling Trump supporters.