The principle here is that we don’t need to be enemies with most of the people we are enemies with, but if we didn’t have enemies we wouldn’t know who we were or what to do in the morning. Or how to get funding for the Five-Sided War Box.
The following is a somewhat amplified letter to a friend. I know I’ve said some of this before. Jim, Permit me respectfully to disagree about the potency of American intelligence agencies. It seems to me that they are clowns, incompetent at their assigned work but adept at causing grave problems for the United States....
“England is a pathetic and usually wet has-been islet with delusions of significance, brandishing a bath-tub navy like a moldering codpiece of shriveled content; its soldiers, sepoys of America; its government a puppet licking the boots of Washington like a decaying harem eunuch.â€Â
Pondering Whither America, I reflected on a story, probably apocryphal but which I am going to believe because I like it, about catching monkeys. Tribesmen somewhere craft a heavy pot with a hole in it large enough that a monkey could insert an open hand, but not withdraw a closed fist. They then put...
December 28, 2010 Cusco, Peruâ€â€High in the Andes, spreading from the central plaza seen everywhere in Spanish lands, run narrow streets intended for earlier times and now choked with traffic, chilly but not cold, always threatening rain that doesn’t come. Not Kansas, Dorothy. As almost everywhere south of the Rio Bravo, the church dominates...
The country is now the Homeland, reminiscent of the Nazi Fatherland and the Soviet Motherland. We hear of American Exceptionalism, the ritual self-idolizaton beloved of pathological nationalism. Blood and Soil. The American Dream. Ubermenschen. All we need is a short Austrian.
Last week, having written that the governor of Texas wanted to invade Mexico militarily, I was multiply told that I was crazy. I am, but what has that got to do with it? The Washington Post wants to invade Mexico. I didn’t believe Bob, I’ll call him, a crazy friend from other times. He...
Let's take poison! Let's ride a motorcycle blind-folded, and other bright ideas.
Mexico, as seen from the north shore of Lake Chapala.. This ain’t literature, but may be interesting.. I get a fair amount of mail asking what Mexico is really like, some of it worried about the drug wars. The wars exist, though so far with little effect on the expats here. I don’t downplay...
So I was sitting with Tom the Robot and Jonesy in La Fuente, an old and cavernous beer bar hard by the cathedral in Guadalajara, and swapping  lies. Except they weren’t lies, because some people can’t lie to equal the truth. Otherwise I guess they would. Thing is, lying is a limited form. Life...
It may have been the summer of ’85, or may not have been, when I hitchhiked out of Washington, DC, which is the left ventricle of the heart of darkness, toward the coal fields of West Virginia. I was then on the low end of respectability, as I hope I still am. As a...
If Mexico were not next to the world’s most ravening drug market, it would be a corrupt, but functioning and reasonably successful upper Third-World country. But the country cannot withstand a drug business that, by a common figure, brings the traffickers forty billion dollars a year.
“Child Still Expelled for Toy Gun - a Year Later Parents want their child back in school. School board says no wayâ€Â
Splendid, this. We are telling 1.3 billion Moslems that America is not fighting Al Qaeda, or the Taliban, or Terror. No. It is Islam itself we hate. How very wise.
When I was a kid long, long ago, before time began, or anyone had thought of why time ought to begin, or what it might be good for, I lived in rural King George County, Virginia. The county bordered on the Potomac River and was mostly woods. Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground, on which my...
Two ways exist of looking at Wikileaks, the site that publicizes secret military documents and videos. The first is held self-interestedly by the Pentagon and by Fox News, the voice of an angry lower-middle class without too much education. These believe that Wikileakers are traitors, haters of America, who give aid and comfort to...
Looking back on a disordered life that I occasionally package as journalism, but that actually has more in common with the path of a large ball-bearing through a pinball machine, I don’t really think I will slit my wrists. Though it has its appeal. I mean, it’s unnerving to sail through the vastness of...
When I was a young studâ€â€well, young anywayâ€â€in high school, girls were still oppressed, which meant that a guy knew he probably wasn’t going to get laid, so he might as well find a girl he really enjoyed being with. The idea slowly leaked into his hormonally disabled psyche that girls were kind of...
I have walked by night on the wild empty beaches of Michoacan when the moon, at its full, aimed a silver path at me over the restless waters, when the wind blew chill and strong from the sea, and the waves, come from China perhaps, rose and roared and crashed and ran up the...
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