… so far from God, so close to the United States, went the comment attributed to one of their presidents. Mexico was very close to us, when I was growing up in suburban Los Angeles in the 1960s and early 70s. My elementary school had us study Mexican history in the 6th grade if I remember correctly, that was part of the unified school district curriculum. We did a field trip to Olvera St., in the old part of downtown, at least three of the old Spanish missions were within a short drive from our various homes, and we weren’t allowed to forget that Los Angeles itself had Spanish origins and Mexican governance for decades before American statehood. For Southern California, Mexico was just a hop, skip, and a jump away just as it is for South Texas.
Americas
Will You Take One Hump, or Two?
The pride of the US Army Camel Corps (21st Century Reenactor Division) At the New Braunfels Folkfest, this last weekend, on the grounds of the Heritage Village.
Yon Tanpèt Pafè
In the wall mural of global incompetence that is our Crisis Era, Haiti has become the most lurid corner, a hallucinatory labyrinth worthy of Hieronymus Bosch; not so much the canary in the mine as a collapsed side tunnel whose maimed and trapped victims are within earshot and line-of-sight of First World institutional leaders already fumbling with a dozen groundwater leaks and toxic gas buildups in the main shafts.
Another Visit to the Quadrangle
My daughter and I with Wee Jamie had cause to visit Fort Sam Houston this week, to pick up some prescription refills and make a run through the commissary but before we did, we went by the historic old Quadrangle, so that my grandson could pester the deer and the peacocks and admire the enormous koi goldfish in the little landscaped fishpond. Yes, the historic limestone Quadrangle, the original structure and oldest building at Fort Sam houses a kind of petting zoo in the courtyard in the middle of three block-long ranges of buildings. That is, it would be a petting zoo if the current herd of nine deer were slightly more tame.
Floating in the Trope-Sphere
Towards the end of the Vietnam war, and for at least another decade after it ended, there was a trope/cliché which always could be depended on in movies and television; the whacked out, dysfunctional and traumatized veteran; sometimes a victim, often the guilty party, but always and reliably whacked-out. Even news media got into the act, now and again, interviewing theatrically dysfunctional, traumatized veterans, who on cue related how they had supped full on the horrors of the war in southeast Asia. This was so pervasive that for-real veterans for years were advised to leave periods of military service off resumes when job-hunting, and to never, never, ever advertise any connection to military service, be it with a ring, a gimme ballcap, a tee shirt, or an OD green field jacket … unless, of course, they were in the war protest movement.