Trump: A Disqualifying Event

The pathetic spectacle to which we are hostage right now as a country - having to endure a presidential candidate who is mentally unfit for office, is not a coincidence. It is the direct result of eight years of Republican Party policies. They courted the fringe, abandoned every pretense of service to the American people, made President Obama's job hell, did whatever it took to cater to corporate interests even in the face of unspeakable atrocities (NRA) and care about nothing except power. Their cravenness makes Frank and Claire Underwood look like Mother Theresa.
The Republicans made this lice-infested bed, and now we all have to lie on it. We are now the laughing stock (if not the waking nightmare) of the world. But here we are. That Hillary Clinton, whether you like her or not, has to campaign against this carnival barker  in her historic opportunity to become the first female president of the United States, is sad and unfair. This shameful humiliation is the sole responsibility of the Republican Party. The only consolation is to watch them self-destruct and slide deeper into indignity, absurdity, and shamelessness as they try to contain the demons they've unleashed: besides Trump's unbridled lunacy, the worse evils of xenophobia, racism, violence, divisiveness, and hatred.
My only consolation is knowing that anyone who is remotely associated with, and pandering to, Trump has soiled their reputations forever. The nefarious Rudolph Giuliani, Chris Christie; any Republican that has stood by and encouraged this to happen is a coward and will live in infamy for eternity.
But what kind of delusion are they under? It is barely understandable how any sentient being can support such a fake conman, regardless of how desperate they are to vote against their own self-interest, blinded by his simplistic bombast, his fake hair, fake tan and fake money. But career politicians who should know better? What in God's green earth is in it for them? Cabinet posts? Shady business deals? A lifetime supply of Trump steaks? Is their resentment at the legacy of a twice-elected Black president so pernicious as to aim to dismantle the entire nation? A legacy that is all the more admirable considering that they did everything in their power to thwart it.
Make no mistake: a lot of this particular descent into madness is the result of racism. Therefore, it must sting even more deeply to watch the Obamas sail into history with dignity and grace, having achieved some monumental changes like Obamacare and gay marriage. I think history will reciprocate. When Giuliani and Christie are relegated to the forgotten clown corner of the circus tent, the Obama presidency will be remembered as one of the greatest in history, his shortcomings notwithstanding.

On the one hand, Trump is a gift to the Democrats; they can't possibly lose this election as things stand right now (although one fears that they are entirely capable of doing so. Just look at Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her crew).
On the other hand, the presidential election should be between two feasible candidates. It took Trump to encourage Russia to spy on Clinton for pundits to scream that this is a disqualifying event, when everything he has done from day one should have disqualified him from the job long ago. It's like living in an alternate reality where reason, common sense, decency and integrity do not exist. The Republicans attribute everything to spin. "He was joking", "she didn't steal the speech". This deliberate denial of reality by the right is frightening.

I assume someone will write the definitive history of how this happened to us. It seems like we blinked and woke up in the middle of this nightmare. Let this be an eye-opener to politicians on both sides of the aisle. This is what happens by ignoring the reality of the vast majority of people in this country, who struggle and dream of a standard of living that doesn't exist anymore. This is what happens when, by inaction and cynicism they encourage the existence of an uneducated nation who gets their world view from reality shows and talk radio instead of a robust public education.

It's in the hands of the American people to save our own country, even the world, from disaster. This time, it means trouncing Trump so overwhelmingly that he becomes, in his parlance, a yuge loser, the biggest loser of all time.  If you need to hold your nose because you are a conservative, or a Bernie supporter, or you just hate Hillary's guts, then do it. But sitting this one out because you are apolitical, or too ideologically pure, is not an option. And voting for Trump or any third party is suicidal.
Trump must be destroyed, and the only safe way to do it is by voting for Hillary Clinton. So register to vote, whatever your persuasion, and let's make sure Trump gets nowhere near the White House.

Open Unhappiness

I haven't seen a more offensive advertising since Donald Trump last opened his mouth. Mistakenly thinking that its role in society is to do good, Coca-Cola Mexico came up with a campaign to "open your heart" and "break prejudice". Which is fine. We don't listen to someone like the Pope when he exhorts us to do the same, but if Coke says it, the entire Mexican nation is sure to follow through. After all, it is a known fact that Mexicans drink far more Coke than water.
In the commercial, a bunch of young white models, all behaving in slow motion, get into a hipstery looking truck, and, supremely enamored of their own munificence, arrive at an indigenous Mixe village in Oaxaca to spread their self-congratulatory, privileged joy. There, instead of bringing education, jobs, better housing, opportunities, water, curiosity, respect, understanding, equality, any sort of practical help, or simply begging humbly for forgiveness, they unload coolers filled with ice-cold Cokes and, armed with plywood, "build" a hideous Christmas tree made of Coca-Cola bottles that happens to look like a deformed Coke bottle and which says something like "let's keep the unity" in the Mixe language.
According to The Guardian, where you can still see the spot, there were calls to take this preposterous garbage off the internet, for the expected reasons: patronizing the Mixe people, and by extension all the indigenous cultures of Mexico, while encouraging their consumption of a drink that can only hasten their tooth decay, their diabetes, and their death.
To me, this, although true, is not the biggest problem. I love Coke and will love it until it causes my untimely demise. In my case, the demonization of its sugar content falls on deaf ears.

Forget about the tone-deaf impropriety of a foreign company that peddles what many people consider syrupy poison telling Mexicans how to deal with their "prejudice".
Forget about the absurd appropriation of a Christmas tree by discarded product.
Forget the wholesale contempt for the original religious and cultural traditions of the indigenous Mexican peoples.
Forget about the imposition of Christmas, consumerism, cavities and Coca-Cola by a bunch of insufferable rich twats pretending to "give back" while they look down on the "indians".
Forget, if you can, the plywood.
What makes one retch is the abject cluelessness of an ad that preaches against prejudice while completely avoiding the vast majority of Mexicans, who are neither resplendent white specimens nor indigenous people.
Where are the people who represent most Mexicans, not just the ones at the very top and the very bottom of society? Where's the working class? Where's that mythically expanding Mexican middle class everyone talks about? In short, where are all the other brown people?
As is traditional in Mexican advertising, they don't exist. They are rarely, if ever to be found in a commercial.
This ad is no different from the great majority of ads in Mexico, which, unless they are public service announcements, almost exclusively cast people who seem to have arrived recently from Scandinavia or the tonier confines of Buenos Aires. But in this case, for maximum absurdity and bitter unintended irony, it also stars, probably for the first time in the history of Mexican corporate marketing, a number of forsaken natives, and not even this fact could make the advertising agency, the casting agency, the director and the client consider representing all the rest of the actual people who drink their beverage, and who are hounded every second of their lives by the racism the ad purports to fight.
People who deny that Mexican society is predicated on the most enduring, insidious racism need to be subjected to an endless loop of this ad, like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.
So do the people who made it. Ad infinitum.

Nationalism, Politics and Frivolity

The Oscars just blew into town, leaving nothing but despair and destruction in their wake. Apparently, Mexico and Kenya almost went to war over the nationality of Oscar winner and classiest new star since Audrey Hepburn, Lupita Nyong'o, a daughter of Kenyan diplomats who was born in Mexico and left at the age of one. Lupita gamely averted an international crisis by saying that she is Mexican-Kenyan or Kenyan-Mexican and she loves carne asada tacos and both countries equally.

Poor Alfonso Cuarón is first lambasted for not making films in Mexico, then treated like a national hero for winning a bunch of Oscars. National pride surges to an all time high, since his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, is also Mexican. Some Mexicans consider the Poncho-Chivo-Lupita a Mexican axis of world domination. The last time this happened was when the Three Amigos (Del Toro, Cuarón and Iñárritu) all had nominated films.

Venezuelans bent on overthrowing their abject, incompetent, irrational, yet democratically elected government, organized a campaign asking Hollywood people to mention Venezuela's plight in their Oscar speeches. Apparently, Best Supporting Actor Jared Leto got the memo and mentioned, among other things, Venezuela, Ukraine, his mom, AIDS, etc. A lot of people liked his speech. I was not that impressed.
People who win Oscars are suddenly foisted upon a soapbox in front of a billion people, but they are still in a circus called Hollywood, not in the circus called the United Nations. Increasingly, I think they should stick to thanking their agents and costars and directors and moms. If they want to do something for world peace, they should do as Angelina Jolie and actually work it.
I know many Venezuelan friends will disagree with me on this one, but asking people who have nothing to do with that country to give it a political shout out at an entertainment ceremony is absurd. Why Venezuela and not Syria, where things are far more dire? Why not some war torn country in Africa? What makes Venezuela so special? The request is both disproportionate and inappropriate, as was the Venezuelan government's response delusional in the way that only ideologically perverse regimes can muster: they banned the Oscars. Reductio ad absurdum on both sides of the divide.
People have been trying to call the world's attention to sundry plights at the Oscars since Vanessa Redgrave lashed out against Zionism and Marlon Brando sent a Native American to retrieve his award. Except in very few instances when the issues are relevant to the films, broadcasting them from the winners' perch is misguided and frequently embarrassing.
And even when relevant, as in the case of 12 Years A Slave, it was rather jarring for Steve McQueen to mention that almost 30 million people are still slaves today, then jump around the stage like an overgrown schoolboy with his coveted Oscar. There is a tonal conflict at work. The possibility for gravitas is almost nil.
Bringing serious issues to the most frivolous event in the universe belittles and cheapens those issues. Unless the winners happen to be intelligent, articulate and self-possessed enough for impromptu eloquence, they all look like pompous asses trying to be something they're not when using their thirty seconds for some cause or another. Lupita Nyong'o did more against racism and for women with her poise and her refreshing lack of ego than any bombastic speechifying ever has.

American Shakedown

Attention, Mexicans! Our pride in being undisputed champions of the shakedown is now under mortal threat from our neighbor to the north. You heard right: not from a ravaged country in Africa, not from the Russians, the Chinese, or from our very competitive neighbors to the south (all of them). The latest challenge comes from the good old US of A. You would think that the police stealing cars, money, jewelry and kids (yes) from people only happens in benighted third world countries, but think again.
According to this excellent article by Sarah Stillman in The New Yorker, now you can find the third world shakedown right in America The Beautiful! And as everything that is rotten and corrupt in this magnificent land (corporations are people, the NSA can read your emails, lobbying, you name it), it is perfectly legal. It is called civil forfeiture. It was originally designed to fight drug cartels and organized crime, but ever enterprising, some police departments in some states have decided to expand it to regular, innocent, hardworking people. Because isn't that the way of all progress?
In a nutshell:

In general, you needn’t be found guilty to have your assets claimed by law enforcement; in some states, suspicion on a par with “probable cause” is sufficient. Nor must you be charged with a crime, or even be accused of one. Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture amounts to a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner’s guilt or innocence.
One result is the rise of improbable case names such as United States v. One Pearl Necklace and United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins. (Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson’s forfeiture was slugged State of Texas v. $6,037.) “The protections our Constitution usually affords are out the window,” Louis Rulli, a clinical law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading forfeiture expert, observes. A piece of property does not share the rights of a person. There’s no right to an attorney and, in most states, no presumption of innocence.

Lately, with all these newfangled laws designed to protect us from sundry terrorist evildoers, the US is starting to adopt not only the surreal magical realism that is endemic to developing countries (Texas vs. One Pearl Necklace?), but a frightening Orwellian and Kafkaesque degree of absurdity. We should all be very concerned.
At least in Mexico we have equal opportunity: everybody can be a victim of the shakedown. The rich, because they're rich, and the poor because they're poor. Everybody pays. Not in the US, no siree Bob. As befits the cradle of unbridled capitalism, the rich here are left untouched, no matter their wrongdoings. It's the poor, black and brown who get shaken down the most.
Do you want to take a guess at what states are vying for the world championship in the art of the police shakedown? I'll give you a hint, it's not Vermont. Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Florida, Arizona, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C. (you know, where the Capitol is) and the underfunded police department in Detroit. By law, the loot goes directly to fund law enforcement, which is a great incentive for police departments to cast a wider net and relieve innocent people of their possessions. As for the kids I mentioned above, the notorious police ring of Tenaha, Texas, has a cash for freedom deal in which they threaten to remove your children from your care unless you give all your stuff up. A termagant called Lynda K. Russell, the racist, corrupt attorney general of Shelby County, Tx, is the one allowing the shakedowns of people to happen.

One difference between Mexico and here, is that at least here people can still find some legal recourse, even if an expert calls U.S. civil forfeiture cases, "the Guantanamo of the legal system". The article introduces several admirable lawyers that have taken up cases to help people fight this outrageous injustice.
I moved from Mexico 21 years ago thinking that I was moving from the developing world into the apex of progress and civilization. I never expected that I would feel like I was back in a third world country, or worse, but I see evidence of the US slipping into moral, economic and political decay every single day.

Stand Your Ground

In which an unarmed minor dies of a gunshot wound wielded by a suburban vigilante, who decided to take the law in his hands even though Trayvon Martin was not breaking any law and the 911 dispatcher told him to stay inside his car.
No one saw the altercation. No one was on the street. In places like Sanford, Florida people live in gated communities in houses where they can go weeks without seeing a neighbor. Then they get in their cars by themselves. They live in fortresses, and because of this isolation, they are paranoid that someone is going to harm them. This is why they feel they need to have guns to defend their property. They act as if there is no one around them, and they are all alone in the world. No society, no community. This is why they have absurd laws like Stand Your Ground. Although we can surmise that had this entailed the shooting death of a white 17 year-old with skittles in his pocket, murdered by the same man, Zimmerman would have fried, his white last name notwithstanding. Because it is about race, but race gets worse in the suburbs.
In a city teeming with people we share the space with all kinds of other people. We feel safer because we don't feel so alone. And we know better than to assume that because someone is black and wearing a hoodie, our lives are in imminent danger. We may think racist thoughts, but we learn to recognize signs. We simply are more in contact with all kinds of people and this creates a certain social cohesion that seems to be missing from less crowded places.
Racism of course, plays a big part. But the more you live in proximity to different kinds of people, from different ethnic backgrounds, socio-economic levels, beliefs and gender orientations, the more you share the space, the broader criteria you have to wield your prejudices. The city provides a saner reality check than the lurid fantasies that come from living in isolation. We laugh about the people we hate in the subway, but we live in peace with them, in very tight quarters.
Living in the suburbs may give you lots of space, but it is isolating and can lead to delusions of blacks coming to rob you, immigrants coming to steal your job and use your hospitals, and you, some sort of lonely Daniel Boone, armed in your own cocoon, fearsome of everything that is out there.
Zimmerman is already rotting in a hell of his own making.