Columns

Abraham Lincoln’s birth date, February 12, by government decree has been folded in with George Washington’s birth date, February 18, to constitute something called President’s Day.   Living in the 1960s in a society that some said had too many national holidays, prompted the view that the United States could trivialize (and commercialize) anything.  Anthropologists had suggested this concept much earlier.

In solemn and (presumed) circumstance, before an enthralled public and the politicians proud of the spectacle they were offering the citizenry, “the bones of the heroes who gave (Mexico) its fatherland,” passed through the streets of the city of Mexico September 30, 2010, in ostentatious parades commemorating the bicentennial of Independence, wrote a journalist from the Mexico City daily La Jornada.  Crowds applauded Morelos and Hidalgo, the most popular founders of an independent Mexico.

Rich Mexican immigrants are changing Texas, Time magazine reported Monday.  Thirty-eight killed in three days, reported the BBC Tuesday.  Sixteen of the 38 were killed in Toluca, capital of the State of Mexico, where the nation’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was born, a state his extended family and close family friends have dominated for years.  (Peña Nieta was its governor 2005-2011.)   Twenty-two bodies were found in Mexico City, where he now lives, in Los Pinos (Mexico’s White House), and rules the nation from the National Palace.  Many Mexicans – whose avid taste for speculation has been proven correct disturbingly often – suggest that the killings in Mexico City and in Toluca are a signal from drug traffickers to the president that any hope for a lessening in violence and slaughter is misinformed.

A number of professional international and political analysts have examined Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) President Enrique Peña Nieto’s proposed new policies and found some illuminating but others unpromising.  Their assessments are not couched in the sharp rhetoric that many (both Mexicans and those abroad) believe the new administration’s campaign-tainted maneuvering merits.

During the holidays, many folks looked back, examining what last year meant. Being perched on a rural foothill of a mountain facing the rain and the winds of December and early January, the new year prompted a look back on warmer times.  And to experiences further back chronologically.

“Caray, that’s a good one.”  Paco Ruiz Gonzales grinned as he squinted into the slip of early morning light.  It was a couple of days before a mountain Christmas cold enough to show your breath.  We turned to face a slice of the red disc growing above the distant southeastern horizon.  It was a chill morning, but as soon as the sun crested the far Michoacan peaks, it began to change.