stax up

"But if life were only moments,
Then you'd never know you had one."


I like that Sondheim couplet because it captures one of my great weaknesses.  When interesting things start happening, I expect the next moment to be even better than the last.


After the English and Mexican acts in our playlet, I would not have been surprised to see a topless Angela Merkel ride through the terminal on a unicycle while juggling a chain saw, a bowling ball, and Nicholas Sarkozy.  In fact, I was half expecting it.


And that is the problem with anticipation.  Life will never quite live up to what we expect.  Ever.


But it does not mean we cannot enjoy what does occur.


When Frau Merkel and her amazing unicycle failed to show up, I finished my meal.  I realized I had told told part of our group I would meet them.  And the time was fast approaching.


But before I could undergo the siege of airport security, I decided to take a quick rest room break.


Because I did not need a stall, I asked the attendant if I could place my backpack and a bag containing my flight snack (a tube of Stax -- a shameless Lay's rip-off of Pringles) on the counter.  No problem.  He even stood guard for the fifteen seconds I was gone.


I washed my hands, grabbed my backpack, and rushed out of the bathroom.  The attendant looked a bit surprised.  The fact that he expected (and deserved) a tip did not occur to me until I was headed to security.


About the same time I realized I had left my snack bag behind.


I pulled a couple of pesos out of my pocket and headed back to the rest room.  Just as I rounded the corner, I cartoonishly screeched to a halt.  The attendant was standing there, the Stax tube in one hand, and chips in the other -- just about to drop one into his mouth.


We looked like the Mark Brothers in the mirror scene from Duck Soup.


Both of us with our mouths open.  We simultaneously pointed at the other.  And started laughing.  The whole thing was absurd.


He had found a way to get a tip -- thinking I was long gone.  And I had a fitting finale to this playlet at the airport.


It makes me wonder what wealth of material I might find if I just flew more often.

snows of guadalajara

So, there I am.


Sitting in a Burger King at the Guadalajara airport with the not unreasonable expectation that I would enjoy a quiet meal. 


(Yeah.  Yeah.  I know.  Quiet Meal.  Airport.  Mexico.  Not a great expectation.)


Our Lady of the Malt Vinegar had fallen into a petulant (but silent) mood.  But, just like a well-directed version of Our Town, the next cast member entered just as the smiling employee left the stage.


With a polite "¿Con permiso?," he sat down across from me in my booth.  I thought it a bit odd.  There were plenty of empty booths and tables.  But I am never above meeting someone new.


He was one of those middle people.  Middle age.  Struggling middle class.  Medium height.   That was my five second appraisal.


I was fully prepared for the "I'm stranded in the airport" story.  That is what all of the elements looked like to me.  And it was starting to look like a very boring play.  I was really hoping for something original.


Sometimes our wishes come true in spades -- and hearts.


We went through the usual pleasantries .  Nice day.  Beautiful airport.  Mediocre Burger King food.  All in Spanish.  I was rather proud of myself.


While we were talking, at least three other people in the airport greeted him -- as if he were a fixture.


When he reached for a folder sitting next to him, I thought I knew why they knew him.  I anticipated the next item to appear on the table would be a copy of The Watchtower.


I was wrong.  It was a California title for a late model pickup.  He looked up at me expectantly.  I looked back -- confused.


He said he was trying to get the truck registered in Mexico, but he had no luck for the last six months.


I had no idea where his tale was headed, but I could see the peso notes stacking in his eyes as he readied the next round of Bluff the Gringo.  So, I cut the dance short by choosing not to be able to understand even the most rudimentary Spanish words.  A technique I find useful with Mexican policemen and military checkpoints.  Polite, but ignorant.


He must have decided I was too slow to pick up on the intricacies of whatever financial transaction he had in mind.  Away went the folder.


He then asked me a question (that I honestly did not understand) while repeatedly brushing his collar as if he were a third base coach.  He lost me on the entire exchange.


But I saw his hand move under the table.  In the upturned palm of his right hand was a small cellophane wad enclosing some form of white powder.


I looked up at him, started laughing loudly, and said: "You've got to be kidding."  Both the hand and Señor Middle disappeared as quickly as he had appeared.


I may be an advocate for the legalization of drugs, but I am not a user.  Never have been.  I do enough stupid things in life without getting involved with that silliness.


In 2001 I visited Vietnam.  While walking through the market in Da Nang, what looked like Marshal Ky's emaciated doppelganger hobbled up to me -- and hissed: "Want some marijuana?"  The last word pronounced as if it had between eight and ten syllables.


Some things have the distinct odor of police involvement.  And I had no desire to be part of either of those two events.


But the curtain was not yet ready to come down on this Thornton Wilderish layover.


There was still one act to unfold.

polling the wit

Yesterday’s post caused most of you who commented to chuckle.  But not everyone.


A reader was a bit put out at me for -- .  Well, rather than paraphrasing (and running the danger of skewing the point), let her speak for herself.


”Why would you think it's funny for one person to call another person a fat cow? Yes, the woman behaved badly - but being unkind in response does nothing but create more ugliness. Seriously.....we have quite enough of that.”


It is a point not easily dismissed.  A fellow blogger and I spent part of an afternoon recently discussing the tendency on blogs (especially in comments) for people to indulge in some rather nasty name-calling.


Not the witty banter one would find at an Algonquin Round Table.  You never hear things like: “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”


Instead, the verbal equivalent of a medieval mace clutters the internet.  “Stupid.”  “Dolt.”  “Racist.”  “Fascist.”  All of them designed to merely terminate civil intercourse.


So, I stand in the dock accused of being – “unfunny,” “unkind,” “ugly”?  I am not quite certain.  But it is my blog so I will appeal to the dear readers to render a verdict.


There are two questions.  You will find them posted rather inconspicuously to the right.


The first is: what should I have done about the waitress?  Turned her in to see her get fired -- or sat there enjoying the performance (which is what I did)?


The second question involves my next two posts.  My stay at the airport offered up a wealth of stories.  I have chosen two more to share.  But I will warn you.  They have witty twists.  And I do not want to offend any sensitive souls out there.  The majority will prevail.


Your second vote will be on whether to spike the next two stories or to allow liberty to ring throughout the land.  (I didn’t spend my life as a lawyer for nuttin’.)


The poll will have a brief (but fulfilling) life.  So, get your vote in fast.

cow lips

Someone once said life is about the journey, not the destination.


That is not only good theology, it is also good travel advice.


My two prior tours to Guanjuato and Morelia were bus tours.  Not so the trip to Mexico City.  As pleasant as the bus was, it would have been a brutal ride all the way to the capital.


Instead, we took a bus to Guadalajara and flew from there.


With the exception of the Manzanillo airport (which is the equivalent of a regional airport), I have not been in a Mexican airport since the turn of the millennium.


And I was pleasantly surprised.  The Guadalajara airport is sleek and efficient.  Almost germanically sparkling.  With nearly every food offering you could find at the Dallas airport -- and some of the same.


I must have been in a retro mode because I decided to refuel at Burger King.  Who knows why?  Maybe it was the memory of the only time I would stop at Burger King in Salem -- when I took Jiggs to the veterinarian.


Now and then, it is as if life decides to amuse us with a play.  In Guadalajara, it decided on a three-act playlet.


I barely sat down when it began.  A smiling young Burger King employee came on stage delivering an order to a woman of a certain age sitting two tables away from me.


In an English accent (somewhere near Sussex, I would surmise), the customer abruptly said:  "Vinegar."


The Burger King employee answered politely in Spanish:  "No, señora."


English Woman:  "I didn't ask a question.  I want vinegar."


BK:  "No, señora."


EW:  "You don't have vinegar?"


BK:  "No, señora."


EW:  "Certainly you have malt vinegar."  [Perhaps thinking that if an entire category is not available that a subcategory might be.]


BK: "No, señora."


EW: "Intolerable. The Burger King at home has malt vinegar. Are you certain?" [With rising exasperation.]


BK: "Si, señora, vaca gorda."  [Delivered quickly, but with the same smile she had worn throughout the encounter.]


It was like watching Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude appear in human form.  The Mexican smile covering resentment of the irrational demands of the powerful -- but with a well-aimed dart at the center. 


I suspect the Burger King employee had no idea by using "fat cow" she had chosen the very term that will deflate or madden any English woman ahoof.


I felt like jumping to my feet and giving her an ovation.  A first rate performance.


People sometimes wonder how places such as Egypt and Tunisia can erupt so quickly and overthrow their rulers.


The answer is easy.  Many people throughout the world are forced to wear similar masks.  And, sometimes, the masks crack.


But tourists will continue to make stupid comments.  The Mexican smiles will go on.  And the tourists will go home telling tales of how the Mexican people are so happy with their lot.  (Well, maybe not the English Impatient.)


And, as long as all that keeps happening, this blog will live forever.

sounding the cannons

I have spent the day trying to put together my thoughts on the Mexico City trip.  But to no avail.


On our second to last day in the city, I came down with a nasty case of what doctors euphemistically call "intestinal disorder."  Without going into detail (because Beth Smith and Nancy Miller will have a fit if I even hint at the D word), let's just say that it sounded as if I were auditioning as the specialty percussionist to perform the Overture of 1812 -- from both ends.


I have been able to keep food down the last two days, but it disappears just as fast.  That makes trying to concentrate on writing more than difficult.


More than once I have dreamed of having some mild illness that would keep me house-ridden.  I could then do as much writing and reading as my heart desired.


It has not turned out that way.  I am dehydrated enough at most times that focusing to read is even an issue.  My doctor has me on a series of pills.


To let you know just how bored I am getting, I put Star Wars: The Phantom Menace  (the 1999 release that heralded the decline of the Star Wars epic) on the DVD.  I needed to get some sleep, and I knew it would work.  Its script (written for fourth graders) put me to sleep in the theater -- and it worked again.  But this time I slept for 14 hours.


As soon as I am not losing all of liquids through the incorrect exit, I will be back.  And I hope that is soon.

mural, mural on the wall

Now and then I see a piece of art that connects with me.


The first time I saw a plate of my favorite art piece -- Donatello's Mary Magdalene -- I knew I had to see it in person. And I can still remember how awed I was when I saw it in Florence.


Juan O'Gorman's work is definitely not in that category. But there was something that connected with me when I saw his mural of the history of Michoacán in the Gertrudis Bocanega Library.


Mexican muralism is world famous. Mostly through the work of Diego Rivera, a man who may have had talent but failed to prove it as a lackey to political power.


O'Gorman's mural covers the full north wall of the former church that serves as Pátzcuaro's public library. The space needed to be monumental because the subject is the full history Michoacán's history from creation to 1917 -- with two anachronistic touches from the 1940s.


It is easy to guess the artist's politics. The piece is set up in an Hegelian dialectic -- with thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And it is painted in blatant Socialist Realism -- admittedly with a Mexican touch. If that leads you to the conclusion he was a red, you would be correct.


O'Gorman is an interesting guy. Trained as an architect, he tried his hand at several monumental murals.


His Marxism screams out in his work -- like most of the Mexican muralists.   Well, maybe not as bad as Diego Rivera with his idolization of Marx and Trotsky. 


But he was also a humanist. And, I suspect, a bit of a libertarian at heart.


The mural is divided into three distinct horizontal bands reflecting the historical determinism of chaos to revolution.


The top band is merely an introduction reflecting the chaos of creation.

You won't find Michelangelo's God composing an orderly earth. O'Gorman's state of nature is far more Hobbesian -- all blustering volcanoes and destructive lava.

The first historical band (the thesis) shows the arrival of the P'urhépecha.


As a communist, O'Gorman is not a sentimentalist. Unlike many of my expatriate friends, who believe the Americas were a place of utopian harmony before the Europeans arrived and ruined everything.


O'Gorman does slip into a bit of Rousseuian "noble savage" imagery. We see family groups cavorting with imps. Women dancing naked before their god. And other women lolling beside a pool -- with an obvious tip of the beret to Gaugin.


He even shows the barbarity of tribal life by depicting in graphic detail the mass execution of Aztec warriors taken in battle. The P'urhépecha were determined to survive. And to do that, they needed to be as cruel as their neighbors.


 And, because this is a tale of political power, he depicts the first P'urhépecha emperor, Taríacuri, as a proto-Marxist hero, uniting the various villages into what would be one of Mesoamerica's great empires.

But historical determinism cannot stop with such a flawed character. Thus arrives the antithesis (in band two) -- the invasion of the Spanish. Because this is the history of Michoacán, the invasion means the arrival of Nuño de Guzmán.


And here O'Gorman slips into comic book reductionism. (Of course, no story is good without the arrival of pure evil.)


We have already met the Spanish commander who is still loathed by locals. Thus, O'Gorman could feel free to portray him as a beast with fangs -- because that is exactly how Nuño de Guzmán saw the Indians.


There is no glory of humanity in this land. Only torture and murder.


And we can see a little bit of O'Gorman's political view of his own time.

 

At the far right in the antithesis band appears a familiar face from the 1930s and 1940s. Small moustache. Swooped hair. Roman salute. Brown shirt. It is the unmistakable visage of a creature equally as evil as Nuño de Guzmán -- Adolf Hitler.


Of course, this was after Hitler had betrayed Stalin in their anti-aggression treaty when they divvied up Poland between them. Only one party to that dirty deal appears on the wall.


Being a Hegelian, O'Gorman must resolve the conflict between the thesis and antithesis with a synthesis. And that he does in the third historical band.
 

At the far left, the Franciscans arrive with Christianity and charity. But that does not improve the material lot of the Indians.


The next panel is of the local savior, our old friend Don Vasco. With Thomas More whispering in his ear, he brings crafts and trades to the P'urhépecha.

But O'Gorman could not let a Jesuit lawyer stand as the ultimate hero. After all, Don Vasco stood for Spanish colonialism as much as Nuño de Guzmán.

 

O'Gorman's coda is symbolised by Jose Maria Morelos, leading the Independence movement, and Emilio Zapata, bringing land reform to Mexico through the Revolution.


The drawing in the mural can be pedestrian. But the mural, as a whole, has a humane quality missing in much Mexican muralism.


There is one additional piece I cannot pass up. Most red art reduces the artist to a mere tool -- the method to convey the "truth" of the class struggle. Not so this piece.

 O'Gorman's personality is everywhere. And not just in his choice of sinners and saints.

If you look at the lower left side of the mural, you will find a modern-dressed couple -- O'Gorman and his wife (who looks jarringly like Eva Peron).


That type of individuality would have got him shot in most communist countries. Not to mention his failure to show the ultimate historical inevitability of the Revolution and its creation of the workers' utopia.


Is it a perfect piece of art? Of course, not. In places it can be as two-dimensional as a DC Comic. But it caught my interest and made me think.


What artist could wish any more for his work? To get a libertarian to at least listen to a rather eccentric communist.

street faith

Yesterday I mentioned I visited the Basilica of Nuestra Señora de la Salud, the church Don Vasco built for his flock in Pátzcuaro.

The man was not just a social planner.  He had big plans for the political and religious life of Pátzcuaro.  Including a big cathedral.  After all, he was the bishop.

It didn't happen.  After he died, the bishopric was snatched away to Morelia, and Don Vasco's massive five nave cathedral never got past the stage of being a one-nave parish church.

But its architecture did not interest me as much as two other reasons.

The first was Don Vasco himself. 

The bishop's remains are buried there in a plain tomb -- and worshipers still bring flowers in his memory.  The man is bigger than Juarez or Zapata in these parts.  Considering what we know of him, that devotion is understandable.

The second reason is more personal.  I try to attend church services during my travels.  After all, that is why the buildings were constructed.  Not just for half-naked tourists to traipse through.

In Protestant countries that is a bit problematic.  They usually have services only one day a week, and, in Europe, those services are attended by a demoralizing small number of congregants -- to the point where services are often held in corners of massive churches.

Not so in Mexico.  Mass is celebrated each day -- often several times a day.  It is the Burger King of churches.

I stopped at the basilica on my morning walk.  Mass had just begun.  So, I sat and participated to the best of my ability. 


Meaning, I just sat.  I am not Catholic and I do not speak Spanish well enough to fully participate in the service.  Nor am I convinced that Benedict XVI would have approved of me taking an active role.  That left me feeling a bit like George Spelvin in The Actor's Nightmare.

When mass was completed, I looked around the church, and left in front of a middle-aged woman.  As she came out of the church, into the Pátzcuaro morning, she began singing.

Not loud.  More like a conversational tone.  I know enough Spanish to recognize she was singing about God and love.

In The States, people would most likely have stared and wondered what was wrong with the woman.  The eccentric tends to attract reactions like that.

Not in Pátzcuaro.  People greeted her.  She greeted them and kept on walking down the hill as she sang of God's love.

I don't know about her mental state.  Maybe she was a bit slow.

What I do know is that she had the sincerity of someone who lived with the comforting knowledge of what she sang.

And I thought that was a darn good way for anyone to start the day.