Monday and Tuesday were Mexican independence day. Two days, yes. They put the event of declaring independence right at midnight, as that way they can party two days in a row each year. But this year, the celebration was marred by grenades being lobbed into crowds in Morelia (which is the place in Mexico where I've spent the second-longest amount of time, after only my "#3 hometown," Mexico DF).
Mexico has always had a strong undercurrent of violence and anarchy, but lately I'm beginning to wonder if my time in Mexico in the mid-to-late 80's was maybe exceptional in being relatively tranquil, or whether in fact it was just as violent as now but I was simply being oblivious to it. I know that the murder rate in Mexico City was very high even in the 80's, but it's even higher now. Back then, murders were out of hand in the U.S. as well, so maybe it didn't seem so alarming. Nowadays, the rate in Mexico City is the among the highest in the world, while notorious death-dealing U.S. cities like L.A. or NYC have improved substantially.
My run-in yesterday with Korean private-sector bureaucracy had me thinking about Mexico, too. Obviously, any run-in with bureaucracy can cause me to wax nostalgic for those interminable hours standing in lines at banks or government offices in Mexico. Though the DMV in California isn't disimilar. Superficially, Korea has leapfrogged into the developed world. But the undercurrent of thirdworldism (as pat and offensive and cliche as that really sounds) is still there, to be found, lurking under the surface of things.
Now that I work for a large, much-more-faceless corporation, perhaps I'm seeing that more, too. Anyway, it's on my mind.
But back to Mexico. I'm worried. When I surf the news articles on the grenade incident, I detect a certain institutional despair over the increasingly out-of-control situation vis-a-vis the drug violence that seems to be sweeping the country. And, like any vaguely liberal American, I blame the American "drug war," at least partly, for the problem. But Mexico's ambivalence about genuinely enforcing rule of law is saddening. It's depressing to observe its tendency to allow money of all varieties (thus including narco-money) to seep into and quietly control all political processes, in ways that makes U.S. money-driven politics look profoundly transparent, humane, and fair. Calderón seems as weak and aimless as any old boy priísta in his day. The congress, supposedly more under the panista´s control than during the Fox term, stil seems to resist any efforts whatsoever at reform. The PAN, far from offering anything genuinely new, just seems to be a new PRI with a sexy neoliberal headdress but nothing really new, and the left (PRD etc.) remains as chaotic and self-absorbed as ever.
In other notes: "These are your father's parentheses." LISP programming language humor.