Greg Abbott’s borderline insanity
Texas is a state with serious infrastructure problems. Its deregulated, just-in-time energy marketplace leans precariously on a system of production versus storage — a risk when natural gas lines freeze up.
Even worse, as part of a decades-old bid to avoid interstate regulation, the Lone Star State is on a separate power grid from the western and eastern U.S. grids. So when Texas suffers a power outage and its people begin to freeze to death, victims can warm themselves with the knowledge that they remained independent of help from other states. Don’t mess with Texas, indeed.
None of which is going to stop Texas Governor Greg Abbott from galavanting down to the Tex-Mex border with Donald Trump on Wednesday to review progress on his new and improved — you guessed it — border wall. Donald Trump’s stillborn 2015 campaign pledge has taken on a new twist: build that wall and make Texas freeze for it. In the annals of useless distractions, fiddling while Rome burns as it were, surely this one deserves a special prize.
But Wednesday’s stunt will grab headlines and make for wonderful theatre. Abbott will be viewed by many stupid people as a hero. When confronted with a choice between parading around with the thrice married twice impeached one-term failure and quietly remaining in Austin and fixing the power grid, Abbott figures he can do with the exercise. So down he goes, figuratively and literally, with a man who walks in the shadow of almost certain criminal indictment.
Much of this nonsense is motivated by Abbott’s competition with Ron DeSantis for anti-Biden credentials, love from their surrogate daddy Donald Trump and a possible 2024 Republican nomination for president. So Abbott must make A-mends. After all, what’s the point of having a border if you can’t exploit it for political gain? The new Texas wall’s $250 million price tag is a portent of the wastage to come.
Abbott’s cynical use of the border wall as a symbol of racist hatred and mistrust of foreigners will play well with the Texas ignoranti. Few seem to notice that Trump’s wall was a colossal failure. All such border walls are failures.
In the grand tradition of folly in all of history, it remains a lesson that Abbott and his ilk continue to fail to learn from. Or as general George Patton once put it, “Fixed fortifications are a monument to human stupidity.” Donald Trump and his eager lapdog Greg Abbott are living monuments to the very same. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.