The Tragedy of Mexico

Like millions of Americans I was born in what used to be Mexico. In my case, it's Texas, but California, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico were Mexican territory at one time, before the Texas revolt, the Mexican War and the Gadsen Purchase of the nineteenth century. Today all we hear about is the continuing migration of Mexicans north and the unending drug war. For a great country blessed with rich, ancient cultures and a glorious physical setting, Mexico has endured more than its share of history's miseries.
Mexico has suffered from economic and political disasters since before Cortez came ashore. The Aztecs were the dominant group at Contact, and they had effectively enslaved much of Central Mexico. Cortez and his Conquistadors brought huge and often devastating changes, militarily dominating the Aztecs, destroying much of the social infrastructure of the indigenous people, oppressing them socially and economically. Even after the Mexican people successfully revolted against Spanish rule in 1810, and in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, the country was never able to shake its colonial past or to overturn the ruling oligarchies that to this day dominate the nation politically and economically.
The North American Free Trade Agreement was supposed to put Mexico on the fast track to modernization and economic stability. What NAFTA actually accomplished was negligible, and in the long run, ruinous. Farmers and campesinos rushed to the factory jobs in the north of the country, only to find employment in shoddily run factories, jobs devoid of benefits, and woefully low wages. Meanwhile, agriculture, long the mainstay of the Mexican economy, suffered because of competition from other nations. As the reality of the economic situation began to set in, the Great Migration to the United States intensified.
With the disappearance of traditional farm products markets, and the increasing demands for drugs in the U.S., many farmers turned to poppy and marijuana cultivation to make ends meet. Meanwhile, powerful cartels arose that took control of the cultivation, processing, delivery and sales of illegal drugs. These cartels became major players in the politics of the country, their narcodollars buying cops, judges, military officers and politicians. The central government, which for generations was run by one political party, was corrupt already. The narcodollars, which are estimated to be at least forty billion dollars a year, bought cover for the cartels. In 2006, a new president was elected, and his first act was to declare war on the drug trade. Since then, over thirty thousand people have died, with nearly half having been killed in 2010.
Two of the great economic engines in Mexico are remittances sent from Mexicans working in this country to their families back home, and the drug trade, both of which have an enormous impact on the United States. Desperate people in Mexico continue to stream north, risking their lives and savings, looking to cross illegally into the United States in order to work the fields or clean toilets or do day labor - jobs Americans themselves shun.
The Great Migration will not stop, not as long as Mexico remains economically crippled and its government feckless and corrupt. The central government has lost control of much of several states in the north of the country. The city of Juarez, across from El Paso, is deadly and dying, the cartels and their hired gangs having reduced the city of over a million to a war zone that neither the Mexican army nor the federal police have been able nor perhaps willing to stop. The nation appears to be teetering on the edge of failure.

Strange but true admission

My wife and I own a cabin on a lake about 20 miles from where Sarah Palin lives. It's a beautiful spot, year-round, and we love to watch the seasons change - although winter is the predominant season and it lasts a very long time. I like most of my neighbors. They live a fairly rural lifestyle that harkens back to the Alaska of old. All of them, I suspect, own guns - as do I. Guns are a tool here, but they can also be a fetish. Palin's world view was shaped in this valley. She grew up, went to school and started her political career in the Valley. Politically it is an insular and relatively paranoid environment, where the myth of rugged individualism and self-sufficiency can still be actualized to some extent. Thus the politics here are anything but communal, and there is a strong dislike of outsiders, a fear of those who do not think along the same lines. It features an unsophisticated and deeply rooted credo of frontier anti-federal government sentiments and a strong and enduring embrace of the Second Amendment. Guns in Alaska are not just a metaphor, and although that separates Alaska from the rest of the country, it also adds to the suspicion that other Americans are wussies and to the general atmosphere of disdain many up here feel for the less than manly. My thought is that this is probably not the most fertile of intellectual grounds for someone who is interested in the presidency. The worldview shaped here is necessarily skewed and far too narrow, too anti-intellectual and ahistorical to produce a genuine national leader. Palin's fetishes and anxieties  are nearly pathological.

Now is the winter

This winter of discontent, not yet made summer by this son of York, has brought us violence in Arizona. Given the level of political rhetorical heat the past few years, and the ready availability of handguns in our culture, how can anyone claim that this event was somehow unanticipated. Only when we divorce ourselves from the reality of our words can we assume the position of irresponsibility that has been the hallmark of much of the so-called political discourse of late. People like Palin plaster gunsights on top of congressional district maps, speak freely of reloading, dog whistle their enmity to their followers, and when someone steps over the boundary and actually follows through on the threats, the ones like her who have helped poison the atmosphere back off and issue faint disclaimers. These people will ultimately be repudiated at the ballot box, because the Jeffersonian idea of free discussion of ideas will prevail, as the good ideas rise to the top, and the bad sink like a stone.