I OFFER this as a public service.
Alas, most folks who read The Unseen Moon, I imagine, are far from being adults with young children.
I read a news story not long ago, an interview with an Army drill sergeant. He said that most recruits today had clearly never had anyone tell them “no” and mean it.
Most of these kids are in universities now, not the Army.
ALL YOU need is love. This nutty notion was born in the 1960s with the hippies, and it’s traveled down the years branded into the hearts of the hippies’ children and grandchildren.
The concept’s basic error is that all cultures are of equal value, that people around the world think the same.
The basic error is why so many support open borders, both literally and figuratively.
Open borders in Europe has led to Amsterdam and Sweden and Paris where Mohammedans run amok.
Closer to home, it’s led to places like Dearborn, Michigan, where now live lots of people who want to murder you.
Blame the Beatles. And ignorance.
WE ESCAPED the Mardi Gras celebration in our hardscrabble neighborhood over the weekend by heading to the Gringo-invested burg of San Miguel de Allende.
I always find San Miguel unsettling to the soul. There is something just not right about it. It’s about as Mexican as I am, which is to say legally yes, spiritually no.
Perhaps Disneyland, but better: Mulatto* Ville.
It’s a combination of two very different worlds. Two mindsets, two races,** two cultures. And they do not stir well.
Oil and water.
Walking around downtown San Miguel, it’s all I can do to not burst out in howling laughter. The rayon shirts, the Bermuda shorts, the Birkenstocks, the berets, the feathers in the hat bands, the old white women*** wearing native blouses, the art paint smeared preciously on khaki pants.
So one might wonder, why do you go there? The main answer is restaurants. Mulatto Ville has great places to eat.
I enjoy eating.
And this recent trip was also to visit an old friend from high school who was wintering there, a retired university professor who included Marco Rubio among her students.
We took a drive north to Dolores Hidalgo where we had not gone directly downtown in a long time. We were pleasantly surprised, shocked even.
It’s a wonderful city that’s been undergoing renovation for a few years. Most of the plaza has been closed to vehicles. The church has been painted. Much of downtown too.
Some good restaurants and hotels can be found. And, unlike San Miguel, which has horrible streets and sidewalks, Dolores Hidalgo is flat, smooth and easily walkable.
It’s also one of Mexico’s main sources of talavara ceramics,**** the quantities of which are astounding and beautiful.
Next time we flee our area due to Carnival, we’ll be staying in Dolores Hidalgo, not south in Mulatto Ville.
In Dolores Hidalgo I spotted nary a Birkenstock*****.
* * * *
* I am playing loose with the word, of course. A true mulatto is the offspring of one white parent and one black one, à la Barry Hussein Obama who “identifies” as black.
** Oh, I know Mexican is not a race, but bear with me.
*** Why does everyone complain about Old White Men but never about Old White Women?
**** The other is Puebla. FYI.
***** My second ex-wife, now an Old White Woman, used to cringe at my own Birkenstocks, so perhaps I should avoid this point. Nowadays I sport Crocs but only at home.
WE MEXICANS are really incensed. We have been disrespected, as they say in the ‘hood. Oh, the effrontery!
The pinche (look it up) Gringo President Trump wants to build a wall along the border. What a slap in our faces.
And how undeserving!
We’re mad as hell, and we’re going to stop shopping at Sears, Costco and Walmart. Of course, that would only put the Mexican employees out of work, but it’s a price worth paying, shooting ourselves in the foot.
Those of you above the border cannot imagine how insulted we Mexicans are at this wall idea. Insulted, I tell you!
Here’s a post we might have titled Border Wall for Dummies. It is the entire nasty matter in a nutshell.
First, both nations are equally — well, almost — at fault. For decades now, both Democrat and Republican administrations have ignored or even tacitly encouraged the immigrant invasion over the southern border.
Second, millions of Mexicans have been sneaking into the United States, tunneling below ground, climbing over fences, flying in with tourist visas and overstaying, backpacking across the arid deserts, you name it.
Some have been my relatives.
And all are in the United States illegally, millions, building neighborhoods, packing “sanctuary cities,” creating Little Mexicos all over the place.
Finding enchiladas has never been so simple.
It finally reached a boiling point for U.S. citizens, and that’s what put Trump into the Oval Office.
Americans are divided almost equally into two camps. On the left are the people who croon Kumbaya, reject national borders entirely and sincerely believe that all peoples, with a tiny bit of effort, can live in eternal peace.
In spite of there being absolutely no historical evidence to support this conviction. Quite the contrary.
It is the addled Flower Power mindset of the 1960s that has filtered down through the generations, and still thrives among a healthy percentage of the population.
These Kumbaya crooners, ironically, are the ones rioting in the streets and punching Republicans in the name of love.
On the Great Divide’s other side are people who believe in borders, who know that a nation is a tribe with a common culture, language, religion, race, something that merits and requires protection.
Reams of historical evidence support this fact.
* * * *
TWO TO TANGO
Here in Mexico, we have a couple of notorious Gringo enclaves, particularly San Miguel de Allende and Ajijic, Jalisco.
Mexico’s government puts the number of Americans living in Mexico at around 700,000.*
It’s very probable the overwhelming majority are here with visas or — like me — have become citizens, although that’s not very common.
Most are spread out quietly all over the nation, and most mind their own business. Mexican law forbids them from political activity, and marching in the streets waving U.S. flags and demanding “rights” would be outrageous.
You know, like illegals do in the United States.
It would lead to deportation.
Mexicans mostly ignore San Miguel and think it’s a cute place to visit. However, if there were hundreds of San Miguels instead of one, it would be very different.
And it would require hundreds of San Miguels and Ajijics across Mexico to be comparable to what now exists in the United States, to create an equivalency.
If there were hundreds of San Miguels full of Gringos here illegally, refusing to learn Spanish, opening little businesses selling grits, ham and red-eye gravy, there would be a national outcry. We would be apoplectic!
We would go postal!
Then the shoe would be on the other foot, and Mexicans might understand President Trump’s historic trip to the White House with a tad more clarity.
No nation really wants to be multicultural. Just up to a point, it’s interesting. After that, it gets nasty.
(No nation on earth apart from the white populations of North America and Western Europe embraces multiculturalism. Just those lands where hippies reigned in the 1960s. The Soviets shielded Eastern Europe from Flower Power.)
Mexico, in cahoots with the Democrat and Republican political establishments, brought us Trump.
It takes two to tango.
* * * *
* You’ll often read that one million Americans live in Mexico. This is a myth that has existed since before I moved south 17 years ago. I find the official 700,000 number a little difficult to believe, but perhaps it includes part-timers. And perhaps I misread, and it includes all foreigners, not just Gringos.
(Note: I saw on Twitter this morning that our President Peña Nieto has announced a new program to support and facilitate continuing education for young Mexicans who return from the United States. More positive effects from Trump.
(Furthermore, about 60 percent of Mexico’s exports currently go to the United States. Mexico recently announced it will begin widening its trade with other nations. This diversification is a positive thing, bought to us by Trump. )
RIGHT-WING FRENCH politician Marine Le Pen opines: There is no more Left or Right. There are only Globalists or Nationalists.
I think she is right, no pun intended. But those labels are another, fresher way, of saying Left and Right.
The key issue is multiculturalism, the diversity thing. It you favor it, you’re on the Left, a Globalist. If you oppose it, as I do, you’re on the Right, a Nationalist.
Multiculturalism has been the rage in elitist, left-wing circles for decades, and its heavy hand inspired the backlash that has Donald Trump heading to the Oval Office. Perhaps he can knock a little sense into our heads.
Multiculturalism was seeded in the 1960s, a hippie thing. It’s Utopian, idealistic, lovely to imagine, dreamy-eyed, and totally unworkable. Like socialism-communism.
It birthed the curse of Political Correctness.
In the real world, people embrace their differences, their individuality, with a vengeance. We love what separates us, what makes us think we’re better than others.
Ego.
Obama’s a Globalist. Trump’s a Nationalist. The next eight years will be fun as Globalists collide with reality.
I like the new labels.
LET’S PRAY this will be the beginning of the end of the Flower Power nuttiness that erupted half a century ago.
R.I.P.: Kumbaya, globalism, organic food, unisex restrooms, safe spaces, ObamaCare, open borders, sanctuary cities …
… all that bunkum.
In brief: Yipeee!
I CAME OF age in the 1960s, heyday of the hippies, but I never was a hippie. Didn’t suit my personality.
So it feels strange now that I am harvesting organic pears, tons of them, more pears than we can easily dispose of.
We don’t do anything to make them organic. We don’t fertilize with donkey poop. We don’t light incense. We don’t smudge. We don’t howl at the moon on summer nights.
It’s what we don’t do that makes them organic.
We do nothing.
We have a pear tree that is perhaps 25 feet high in the yard. It was already planted when we purchased the property. We also have a sour orange, a peach and a loquat. But it’s the pear that provides most Hacienda fruit.
Some years the peach gives the pear a run for its money, but the peach is unpredictable. Some years, nada.
The pear is steady, reliable.
We pick up and haul away incredible quantities of pears. We give them to relatives, amigos and acquaintances.
You will notice two things about our pear:
One, it’s not shaped like a pear. Two, it’s butt-ugly. Of course, being butt-ugly adds to its modish allure. It would likely warrant a high price at Whole Foods.
You’d want to buy brie and skinny crackers.
In spite of its shape and a face like Danny Trejo, it’s quite tasty. I ate the one in the photo after snapping the picture.
Felipe Zapata: organic pear farmer and accidental hippie.
* * * *
(Note: Photo is the first here with my Fujifilm Finepix F850exr, a sweetheart of a pocket camera with a 20X zoom.)
NO, I’M NOT going back to Puerto Rico. I think about it a lot though. I also think about buying another motorcycle, which I’m not going to do either.
I lived on a roof there. Technically, it was a penthouse, but pinning the penthouse label on the place, which I’ve often done, is making it sound far fancier than it was.
The view was spectacular and, if memory serves, the rent was about $100 a month, but this was in the mid-1970s when $100 meant something. Now it’s coffee at Starbucks.
An element of this time that I haven’t mentioned in the past was my neighbors. Directly next door, and four stories down, was a police outpost that included a holding cell.
But just past that was another “high-rise” of about five floors. My building was five floors, but it sat a bit higher on an incline, so I had a view down to the roof of that other building.
That was where the hippie family lived.
We never spoke, and we rarely even waved. They were not Puerto Ricans from the look of them. The family consisted of Mama Hippie and Papa Hippie and a brood of about four or five mini-hippies, ages 8, 9, 10 and so on.
But I’m sure they enjoyed their life in the Caribbean air, there with the green sea and blue sky and almost endless ocean breezes. Off to the left was the El Morro fortress. To the right sat the hulk of San Cristóbal.
Those five stories were navigable only on foot. There was no elevator. This discouraged casual jaunts outside. And the step risers were not uniform, making the ascent more arduous. I usually went out once at midday to shop and again in the afternoon, going to the newspaper.
Five stories high does not provide a true picture because the street ran along the edge of a high cliff above the sea. Actually, I was probably about 10 stories above the surf.
Ascending the steps was up a dank, gray, concrete stairwell. On reaching my door, the topmost, you opened it and were instantly flung into another world. There was the sea, the forts, the heavens, ahead, up, and to the right.
To the left was the living-room door. The living room was tiny, and sparsely furnished. At its far end, to the right, was the kitchen, so tight that the fridge lived in the living room.
Straight ahead was a door where you entered a vestibule that provided two options. Ahead to the bathroom or right to the bedroom. Funny, I don’t remember the bathroom.
The bedroom had a double bed and two windows. One was above the low headboard with a view of San Juan Bay and the mountains.
The other window was on the opposite end, just to the right as you entered the bedroom, and it opened onto the large, uncovered patio.
The entire apartment, not counting the open-air patio, would have fit into the Hacienda’s living room easily.
It was a fascinating, booze-fueled, time, often warm because there was no air-conditioning, and there was a hammock out on the patio. But the nights were cool enough.
I never encountered the hippie family, head-on. You’d think we would have passed on the street downstairs on occasion, but we never did in the 10 months I lived there atop the world.
I have quite a bit of history in the Caribbean, having visited also Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the U.S. Virgins.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading along. I write this sort of stuff more for myself than anything. Don’t want to forget.
Always a danger in one’s dotage.
