News from Good Morning America about hundreds of migrants tunneling under a border wall in Arizona, adds weight to the following story. New World Design, a Chicago-based architecture firm, is mocking Trump's insistence on a 2,000-mile border wall by proposing a 30-foot-tall gilded picket fence to safeguard Trump's Florida home at Mira Lago. The gold pays homage to a favorite color of the president's as his Manhattan penthouse attests. As the Daily Mail reported in 2015, his Trump Tower pad is smothered in shiny 24k gold embellishments.

Wall of shame

Erich Stenzel, one of the architects in the design firm, said in a statement that because the president's border wall is an “absurdity,” his team's design for Mira Lago wall is also “quite outlandish.” And fellow architect Jeffrey Roberts told Hyperallergic that while his company's proposal is “tongue-in-cheek,” the effort is “very real.” He hopes the irrationality of a glittering gold fence will spur people to speak out against the senselessness of what Trump wants.

Fantasy fencing

OK. Stand back. If you're talking absurdity, a picket fence is not ridiculous enough, even one 30 feet tall and gilded. For something preposterous at Mira Lago, why stop at a picket fence? Why not go for a really off the wall roadblock to ward off intruders, like, say, a knock-off of the giant stone statues at Easter Island?

If ever there was a Keep-Out sign, it's Chili's lineup of monolithic heads facing inland from the Pacific Ocean. And while the statues loom over the desolate beach, likely the grimmest place on earth, erecting such stark faces on the lush land of Palm Beach, Florida could achieve that irrationality the design firm is after.

Defending the realm

Think about it, what good is a fence compared to a row of rough-hewn gargantuan heads carved from hardened volcano ash extracted from crater walls, as described by historian Jean Mathe's 1982 book Buildings and Monuments of the World? Another thing off-putting about the statues is their deep eye sockets and massive headdresses made of red volcanic rock.

Of course, for the Florida installation, the color of choice for the top of the heads should be champagne blond in honor of Trump's tresses. And because some of the heads were originally painted white, that would also be fitting for Mira Lago given Trump's well-known white nationalist sympathies. Some 870 heads have been counted on Easter Island. Can you imagine that number fronting Mira Lago?

But wait, since Mexico won't pay for the US border wall, how about we get something else from south of the border? I'm thinking of the Tula, those forbidding sculpted pillars of the Aztec empire portraying Toltec warriors. Their frightening features, so harsh and pitiless, which spoke for a militaristic civilization, would send any intruder running.
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