I remember that date for a reason.
The town (which I will not name here) was one of those Sonoran municipalities that had been laid out in a grid by Mormon city planners back in the late 1800's.
One of the streets was named Avenida de los Niños Héroes, as in most Mexican towns. I asked someone who they were, and received my first of many object lessons about history's many possible inversions.
Do you remember 1848? The grandchildren of the last Caudillo do. I've met them. I taught them English. They told me so.
There was this guy I knew there who had been in Army special forces (like a few other people I know) and had done some odd things. One night over tequila after carne asada he told me about how he'd been involved in loading planes with cocaine during a stint in Central America back in the 80's. Could have been b'sing me, but in that context (where I was in a place where half the city was - without exaggeration - living in shacks with farm animals, and most of my students where from families with houses like the ones JR lived in on Dallas - big sprawling modern, trashy neo-classical places with at armed guards at the gates..) it made sense..
When the drug money and violence is in your face, and apparently half your students' families are running chop shop and coyote operations, that sort of admission isn't that weird.
After all, Amado Carrillo Fuentes had died on the plastic surgeon's table in the latter part of that year, and his surgeon's body reportedly was then found chopped into chunks in a trash bag.. One of my student's uncles had been kidnapped and killed a few years before (from very rich agribusiness family with reputedly 100's of millions) and had been killed by the kidnappers. Those fellows reputedly all met very public and grotesque deaths.. This is what happens to anyone who kidnaps a Diaz-Brown..
Merely a foretaste of the violence that was to come.
At the time, I was really still an American evangelist. I was pretty arrogant, and had the gall to lecture my students on how their corruption was doing them in, and how we Americans were in contrast incorruptible, which explained our power.
I actually delivered that message to them in a lecture, after I caught a bunch of them red-handed cheating. I knew that they were all cheating, almost all the time, but they were good, and I didn't have the wit or energy to catch them most of the time.
(I never told them about Pik and Hartley passing the answers back and forth brazenly in Health Class, or any of that other counter indicative stuff.. One of the many slight hypocrisies I've committed in my time..)
Very Calvinistic attitude, anyhow. We are rich and powerful because we are good.
The prosperity gospel in a nut shell.
I've long since lost that faith.. The last post was merely my shooting the pooch for the last time, and saying it out loud.
How did it happen?
Some point along the way.. Or was it in increments?
Maybe it was when Grover Norquist said that he wants "strangle the government in the bathtub"? Then his boys get elected, they cut taxes for the wealthy and keep on spending, and then squeal how the government is inefficient when the deficit explodes.. This, while massive amounts of public money goes to pork and private business?
Or, when a bunch of Saudis lead by an Egyptian putatively (I love that word, putative) attack us, and our response is to launch an attack on Iraq, the arch- enemy of Salafi and Shiite Muslim extremists.. And also incidentally perhaps the most important oil power left, and the second biggest threat to the Saudis after Iran?
Or, when they overturn usury laws, repeal Glass-Steagall, and then we immediately get screwed in a series of bubbles and fraudulent insurance scams, in which institutions are destroyed, but individual speculators walk away free and filthy rich?
All this, while our oil and banking scion president walks hand in hand with the Saudi "king" across the White House lawn, and then kisses him for the cameras.
When I was in Florida people kept on saying things like "I won't be surprised if they get Obama.. Someone's gonna shoot that bastard.." This, with the implicit understanding that someone shooting the president would be a good thing.
That may have been the last straw.
Is it that cynicism is like never having to say you're sorry..
Or is it that paranoia's just having too many of the facts?
I've lost my testimony. I no longer can tell..
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