News we will immediately forget

My friend, M., was so busy watching the results on November 4th that she didn’t notice her whole building shaking. Then her niece called up, crying. The lights were out in the condo she lives in, close to Los Pinos. Was the building on fire?

It turned out that the fire was burning down the street. M. reports that the parade of firetrucks speeding through Polanco was astonishing. But all the President’s horses and all the president’s men couldn’t put the interior secretary back again. In the U.S., few noticed what had happened, and all took the Government’s line: Calderon’s right hand man in the drug war and his best friend, Juan Camilo Mouriño, along with the chief manager of the war on organized crime, José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, had been killed in a tragic accident. The pilot lost control of the plane, that is the official story. And who believes it in Mexico, where the police chiefs of major cities, like Acapulco, have been beheaded by the narcos men, and where Calderon, prodded by the Americans, has staked the legitimacy of the government on a military confrontation with Mexico’s most successful private businessmen, who just happen to deal in the transit of cocaine and narcotics to the world’s hungriest market for such goodies, the United States. Success, of course, is relative: on the one hand, the ostrich boots and the hacienda and the week long parties, on the other hand, the feuds, the children shot down, the flights and territorial wars, the whole meat machinery in which he who does not butcher will be butchered, and none shall be the last butcher standing - there is no power on earth to cover your back long enough. M. reports, in a nice touch that Garcia Marquez would appreciate, that Camilo Mourino’s last sight might have been the monument to Pemex, the bastion of legitimate enterprise in Mexico, state owned, that he and Calderon have been working for years to privatize.

Read Alma Guillermoprieto’s essay on the current misrule and massacre in Mexico. Ask yourself what it means that 4,000 people have died in Mexico this year, due to the narco war. Ask yourself what the fuck, what the fuck the U.S. was doing during the Bush years, concentrated on Iraq. Ask yourself if we have a nation so cocooned in trivia that we think Mexico going into the abyss means nothing to us. Ask who made up those narcotic laws. Ask where the market is. Ask yourself if anything can stop the now 40 years of drug madness, the entrenchment on all sides of a money/punishment engine that serves every low, vile, peculiar political and economic interest. Ask yourself how anybody in Sinaloa with brains and a peasant mom and dad is going to get ahead, except through licking those ostrich boots and trying to shatter a few mere human lives himself – lives that are discounted, every day, in the mad, mad media, in the Moloch of the worldfuck, where an hour or two of nod, or enough of a dose to get through the shift at the third job before you get home and shake the newborn when it cries and take another dose, is what you can expect tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.