El Norte

Call it, friendo

In the movie No Country for Old Men, the film’s sociopathic antagonist Anton Chigurh asks someone who he is obviously about to kill: If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

I suppose that is a good enough analogy as any for what is happening politically, economically, and socially in the United States. The U.S. has been marching toward this inevitable conclusion for decades, and doing so with a draw-dropping lack of self-awareness. The U.S. has ceased to be a serious place, with serious people doing serious work. The greatest recent achievement the U.S. can point to is hooking the world on a steady junk food diet of algorithmically-tuned self-pandering words and images that serve no other purpose than to make already rich corporations and those who run them richer, and our brains softer, more malleable. A shared weakness of mind and spirt. One nation under God, show me your reel.

It would be easy to point to the results of the 2024 U.S. elections as the downward deflection point that has set that country on such an idiotic spiral. It is not. The U.S. has been punching itself in the head for so long now, that no one administration or ideology can claim credit for the self-abuse. For decades now, the Democrats have pandered to the elites and snubbed their noses at the uneducated prols who work for a living. Meanwhile, the Republicans have supplicated themselves to a pouty man-child and drooled over grainy black-and-white videos of goose-stepping Nazis. In the end, regular people who don’t own two yachts can go pound sand, regardless of their party “affiliation”.

And yet, the 2024 election is a deflection point of sorts: it was an election that managed to firmly repudiate the rationale of a “democratic” system when the electorate is being hand-fed toxic pond water by billionaire sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and whatever clown-show Gang of Four is currently running things at Google.

Further repudiated is the entire two-party system that the U.S. can’t shake itself from (3 choices is probably too much for our Facebook-addled brains). U.S. voters this year were left with the comically absurd choice between an über-rich trust fund brat rapist and an octogenarian who couldn’t follow a train of thought or complete a sensical sentence (never minding the too-little too-late advent of Kamala Harris, darling of the Olds but anathema to the woke hoards who couldn’t countenance the fact that she once prosecuted minorities for a living).

This would all be a lot more tolerable if - like Las Vegas - what happens in the U.S. stays in the U.S. Alas - unlike Las Vegas - the U.S. lacks the decorum to keep its boozy philandering behind closed doors. It touches everyone, everywhere. In Mexico, we are left pondering what should be stupid questions but unfortunately aren’t, such as:

• Will the U.S. military invade Mexico?

• Will Mexico’s economy take a beating from U.S. tariffs?

• Will the U.S. economy take a beating from those same tariffs?

• How will Mexico handle the deportation/repatriation of potentially millions of people? And how will the U.S. implement and pay for such a thing?

• How will all this anti-Mexico vitriol affect Mexico’s tourist industry?

• Etc.

Sigh. Immediately after the elections, Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum was put in the unenviable position of having to answer questions like: how will you navigate a Trump presidency? The question is absurd: one cannot plan for responding to chaos.

In the end, those of us who don’t have the wonderful gift of completely forgetting what happened just 2 days ago understand that the Trump administration’s promises about Mexico - and everything else - will take a back seat to the real agenda: making Trump himself and his billionaire cronies richer. It’s all a con, and we are the suckers. But the game was rigged long ago, long before a narcissistic pussy-grabber pulled a nation into his circle of depravity. It’s not Trump’s fault - this tab belongs firmly in the hands of the U.S. electorate - even those who didn’t vote for Trump. So yeah, now we get to watch Fox News hosts and RFK Jr. (🙄) run the most powerful country on earth while the rest of the world scrambles to try to defend itself against the onslaught of dumbness. Maybe it will be entertaining.

Still, more and more I find myself - when asked where I come from - answering: Here. I’m Mexican. I’m from Mexico.

Postscript

Sorry! This post has been sitting in various degrees of un-doneness for quite a while. It’s not really the kind of thing I like to focus on, but I needed to get it out of my text editor to make room for better things.

Also, yeah - the long break. It wasn’t planned - my work and family life had spun out of control for months. I couldn’t justify time spent writing when I was working 15 hour days, so I didn’t even attempt to justify it. I’m trying to get my life back under my control, and unburdening myself with this article is a first step 🙂.

Or, it might be my way of saying: What a blessing my absence has been; I mean, do you really want to read crap like this?