CARLTON FLETCHER: Floyd’s ‘Wall’ trumps Trump’s wall

All in all we are all just bricks in the wall.

— Pink Floyd

America should have seen Donald Trump coming long before his improbable ascension to the White House. At least the 23 million Americans who bought copies of Pink Floyd’s seminal album “The Wall” should have seen Trump coming.

Created around brilliant bassist Roger Waters’ vision of the growing isolation that was engulfing the band during its frantic touring, “The Wall” was released in 1979 to critical acclaim and almost unheard-of sales. Most came to the album through the No. 1 hit single “Another Brick in the Wall: Part II,” but “The Wall” is not a collection of hits. It’s a “rock opera,” the story of “Pink,” whose growing isolation leads him to build a metaphorical wall that keeps everyone out.

Trump, as everyone knows, came up with the cockamamie idea of building an almost 2,000-mile-long wall along the United States/Mexico border, purportedly to keep potentially dangerous illegal immigrants out of the country. But Trump shrewdly deduced — and proved to be correct — that the wall symbolized the underlying prejudices and hatred a growing number of frustrated Americans felt for the many societal and personal ills run rampant in this country.

So he pledged — preposterously — that not only would we wall up the border between the U.S. and Mexico, but that he would make the Mexicans pay for that wall. Enough of the populace, frustrated over the elitist politicians who had turned their government into a money-printing machine for environment- and soul-killing industrialists and merchants-of-death special interests, bought into Trump’s Aryan vision to elect him president.

Trump’s base no doubt had visions of their nemeses — immigrants, minorities, the great unwashed — with their backs figuratively and literally up against the president’s wall, just as Waters foresaw such “undesirables” trapped by the antagonists in his masterpiece.

“Are there any queers in the theater tonight? Get ‘em up against the wall,” Pink Floyd sang on “The Wall’s” “In the Flesh.” “There’s one in the spotlight. He don’t look right, get him up against the wall. And that one looks Jewish and that one’s a c—n. Who let this riff-raff into the room? There’s one smoking a joint and another with spots. If I had my way I’d have all of you shot.”

And while those parallel sentiments of Trump’s and Pink Floyd’s walls are undeniable, more lyrics from the album show an almost eerie prescience. In one of “The Wall’s” most moving tunes, Pink sings, “Mother should I run for president? Mother should I trust the government?”

There are references throughout the ‘79 double album that could be quotes in news stories today. It’s not hard to imagine the president saying, “How should I fill the final places? How shall I complete the wall?” (“Empty Spaces”) The right-wing media proclaiming, “The bleeding hearts and artists let him get away with murder.” (“The Trial”) The neo-Nazi alt-right declaring, “Waiting to clean up the city, to follow the worms, to put on a blackshirt, to weed out the weaklings … to turn on the showers and fire the ovens for the queers and the c—ns and the reds and the Jews.” (“Waiting for the Worms”)

Pink Floyd released an even more successful album a decade before the wall, the classic “Dark Side of the Moon.” As many have noted, playing that album over the soundless video of “The Wizard of Oz” offers the impression that the album could serve as the movie’s soundtrack. “The Wall” could serve as the soundtrack of modern-day America.

There are several more “Wall” lyrics to ponder as you consider how well the album from 40 years ago relates to today’s political madness: A disenchanted supporter singing, “Mother did it have to be so high?” The wished-for end game that a large part of the population, as well as Trump’s enemies, await: “I sentence you to be exposed before your peers: Tear down the wall.”

And maybe the most telling line for those of us who are just weary of hearing all this nonsense: “After all, it’s not easy banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall.”

Contact Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow on Twitter @ABH_Fletcher.