The Texas Car Border
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has sent a fleet of state-owned vehicles to line up for miles as a barricade along the border with Mexico, insisting the state was taking “unprecedented steps,” as thousands of migrants still seek to cross into the United States. The “steel wall” of cars, as Abbott called it, is only the latest of stark images coming from the crisis unfolding in Del Rio, Texas, where nearly 15,000 border-crossers, many Haitians living in Chile and other South American nations, have arrived. “What we did, we put hundreds of Texas Department of Public Safety cars and created a steel wall — a steel wall of DPS vehicles — that prevented anybody from crossing that dam that you’ve seen people walk across,” Abbott told Fox News in an interview on Tuesday. “We effectively … regained control of the border.” (Seattle Times)
Photos by Julio Cortez / APYou start wondering the moment you see the photos, what the purpose was of the vehicles being side by side, apparently even to the point of making it hard to open the doors. Not natural, clearly there is something beside this. Not even arguably coming from genuine desire to be most efficacious at policing unauthorized access to territory. Has to be something else, right?
Show of force, capability? Maybe. Governor's desire to be seen as serious, efficacious? Arguably, but self-defeating, no? Maybe they got more cars than needed, with accommodation of the overreaction producing the tight arrangement.
This is kind of what they mean that politics today are for show. Officials wish to be seen as heroes rising to the occasion, but in actuality only trying to get visibility at the expense of the situation, with the situation's outcome sidelined, subdued to the Officials' necessity of attention, attention they need to stay in office, need created by the way the office works. People need attention to make their actions feel efficacious, make them feel like they happened.
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Key / A Fragile Democracy