ArcaMax

I remember being impressed when the Jehovah's Witnesses in the city where I lived needed a new Kingdom Hall, which is what they call their churches.

That thing got built fast, I mean in just a few days. Religiously motivated volunteer labor doesn't dog it on the job. You go to hell for that.

Down in Florida, where hurricanes are the will of God, and you better not say otherwise to your sixth-grade science teacher, the new federal immigrant detention facility was knocked up from the swamp in a little more than a week.

To be fair, it's mostly just tents and house trailers and temporary buildings, which is what you'd expect from a president whose three-book presidential library will probably be designed to look like a big Walmart.

Of course, the place was built on the cheap, and some of the contractors probably used illegals to keep their costs down, but we are not a generation that builds cathedrals or pyramids.

We build schlock, is what we build. We build schlock, and we think schlock, and we say schlock, and we have hats with "Make America Schlock Again" printed on the front.

But they built it fast, which is what counts.

As a reporter, I've had the opportunity to watch towns and cities spend years deciding whether to build a new homeless shelter or some affordable housing.

The city council debates. The mayor weighs in, and there's a traffic study to see if 15 people with big plastic bags of deposit cans will snarl traffic for miles. The zoning board gets involved. There's a non-binding referendum on the ballot. The neighbors organize a group called "Save Our Community." It gets done or it doesn't, but five years isn't that long for the process to last, and that's before construction starts.

But if you build cheap, you can build quick. That's even more true if you don't need anyone's permission to start building.

And that lack of permission is key to Donald Trump's presidency. He got elected, and to him, that means no permission is needed ever to do anything. The razor-thin election win makes all permission useless and unnecessary.

Nothing is more boring than watching the local zoning board of appeals try to figure out if they should permit a new convenience store.

But, if you go to that meeting, the members of the board will talk about the effect it will have on traffic, and will it have enough parking spaces, and will the all-night lights bother the neighbors.

Of course, if you're building out in a swamp, and you don't care if the first hurricane blows it flat, you can put up your alligator theme park/concentration camp fast.

The popular name for the place is "Alligator Alcatraz," because Alcatraz is a prison old people have heard of and because alligators will eat those illegal immigrants who flee into the surrounding swamps.

That nickname is an absolute, pitch-perfect hit tune you can sing to the dumbest half of the American population, and they'll dance to it all night.

They're already selling "Alligator Alcatraz" merch. Hats. T-shirts. The tacky never stops when you have endless permission, no class and are surrounded by a crew of advisers that includes brain-damaged junkies, active alcoholics, Confederate apologists, snake-handling religious fanatics, men who don't like gay people but don't seem to like women much, either, and the dregs of an entertainment/news network.

Don't build to last. Build for the next election cycle. Don't speak for the centuries. Speak in sentences short enough to be printed on a T-shirt. Nuance isn't manly. Regulations just get in the way. Compassion is weak.

The future is in the mouth of a 'gator.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.