Mexican Madness

The current economic crisis has demonstrated – among many other things – that it is still the case that, in many areas, when America sneezes the rest of the world catches cold. We haven't been as negatively impacted by the economic crisis as many other places simply because we're so big, and diversified. It's not that we knew better than to put all our eggs in one basket – it simply wasn't possible, whereas smaller countries were perfectly free to, let's say, “invest” in just one of the financial “instruments” that have turned out to have feet of clay – or to be a total will-o-the-wisp. So our troubles, which are at least spread across a wide spectrum of markets, get amplified when, for some of these unfortunates, the worst of those markets turns out to be the only one they have an interest in. And yeah, “I pity the fool” who trusted in things like “complex derivatives” -- but really, were they any more foolish than the people who put every cent they had into the hands of Bernie Madoff? It's the oldest con game in the world – convince people you have a better way, a short cut to riches, and you pull in all the suckers and the people who want to be seen as “winners”. No boring, conventional investments for these folks, oh no! They'd much rather go into high-risk, but allegedly risk-free (and shouldn't that, right there, have aroused some suspicion?) speculation, trusting in the genius at the top of the heap to protect them from their own ignorance.

But I digress – because I'm not talking about the catastrophe-amplifying effect of picking the (in retrospect) worst of what America has to offer investment-wise. I'm talking about the folly of signing on to the obsessive, Puritanical “War on Drugs” that our government has been pursuing at least since “Reefer Madness” came out in 1936. Going by various titles over the years, this at once futile and hideously inhumane crusade has been one of the defining features of our society for about as long as anyone can remember. Like the Hundred Years' War, the amount of time and money devoted to it has ebbed and flowed, but it has never halted, even for a moment. And it has – besides being a gross violation of the liberties of American citizens – served as a medium for any number of social and political movements over the years, not to mention being a preferred instrument of tyranny and totalitarianism. It is always there, either right up front or lurking in the background, corrupting and contaminating our political life and contributing greatly to social and moral chaos (not to mention the enormous economic costs).

But even at that, the overall impact of the War on Drugs, and its predecessors, has been, by and large, spread thin across the land, in the sense that relatively few get caught up in the machinery, or wind up crushed under the wheel. In other words, it is possible to live a drug-free existence, in that the issue of illegal drugs simply does not come up in one's life from one week to the next... nor do the consequences of the ongoing war between those for whom illegal drugs are important and the government.

But the same cannot be said of Mexico, or about many of our other Latin American “allies” in the drug war – or of Afghanistan, for that matter. What for us is an ordinary law enforcement problem, and one of many social problems, and a significant economic factor in, by and large, just certain places, has become for them _the_ economic, social, and law enforcement factor, compared to which all others combined are insignificant. We're treated, for example, with the spectacle of entire national economies in Latin America given over to the drug trade – with us as the primary customer. And along with that baleful fact, the governments of those countries are almost invariably corrupt to the core, having a grotesque combination of bribes and control by the drug lords on the one hand, and other bribes by the U.S. government on the other hand. (Well, technically it's referred to as “foreign aid”, in pursuit of drug trafficking, but everyone on the receiving end treats it as a bribe, and rightly so.)

Now, one might think that, therefore, these places have got it made. They're doing the same thing Third-World countries have been doing for decades, namely playing both sides, and pocketing the proceeds. All true, if you're in one of the highly-tenuous leadership positions in those places. But for the man on the street, what he sees is an endless stream of headless bodies and bodiless heads... drive-by shootings... law enforcement at every level corrupted... the armed forces devoted to doing the will of the U.S., and not of the people they are supposed to serve... official corruption... and, overall, a dangerous and squalid set of conditions under which they are supposed to live. What becomes of national pride, and ethnic identity, and indigenous culture under those circumstances? They are all suppressed and drowned out by the extreme violence of what is, basically, a completely artificial set of circumstances. Because, again, we have the amplification effect – what to the average American citizen is a minor irritant becomes a way of life if you live in Mexico, or Colombia, or any one of dozens of other places. The violence is more pervasive, the corruption more intractable, and the daily sense of the absurd more acute. And then we wonder why so many of these places have rediscovered communism, and why they have chosen drugs as a weapon of choice with which to spite and torment the U.S.

I can only recall the scene in “Frankenstein” where the hunchbacked assistant (whose name was Fritz – not Igor, please note for the next trivia quiz) torments the monster with a flaming torch. The monster is big and strong, and Fritz is small and wizened, but doggone it, he has the torch, and the monster is, for some reason, scared to death of fire. By the same token, the U.S. is being teased and tormented by small, insignificant people all around the world because they have identified our Achilles heel, and are in no way hesitant to jump in and exploit it. As bizarre as our obsession with “drugs” must seem to them, they don't just sit around puzzled, but quickly take advantage, the way an antisocial type might take advantage of a person with a handicap. Of course, much of this is payback, based on resentment of our bullying ways over the years... and money enters in, of course. But I also get the feeling that, on some level, they simply enjoy tormenting the blind giant, the way the Philistines enjoyed tormenting Samson. We think we're so great -- “the” power – but we can be sent into a tizzy by a field of poppies, or a few bales of marijuana. Who wouldn't delight in making sport out of such an absurd situation -- out of our national neurosis? But the problem is, until they succeed in getting rid of us, and of our insatiable appetite for high-priced (because illegal) drugs, the consequences of the drug wars will continue to redound on them much more severely than they redound on us. Yes, our prisons are overflowing with non-violent drug offenders... and yes, shootouts occur on our city streets on a daily basis... but overall, drugs are not the 900-pound gorilla up here that they are in places like Mexico and Colombia. And the citizens of those countries, if they spend any time thinking about it, will come to the correct conclusion that their miseries are almost entirely the fault of American laws and law enforcement (AKA “drug enforcement” when exported to other places), aggravated by our relative (and, to them, undeserved) prosperity, i.e. discretionary cash with which even the highest-priced drugs can be readily obtained.

It's amazing to me that our government can even remotely dream of improving our relations with Latin America, and a few other places around the world, without getting an enlightened grip on this issue. But – just as in the Near East – we prefer to live in a fantasy world, where nothing bad that ever happens is our fault, either directly or indirectly. We are the pure... the ideal... the “democratic”, and never mind the real, everyday consequences of all of our various obsessions and fetishes. Fortunately, the reality testing of the citizens of most other countries far exceeds that of our own... and they are, one by one, catching on to the fact that the U.S. is a psychotic bully. Will their pushback ever enlighten our foreign policy? Highly doubtful. The most that can be hoped for is that they will, in a profound sense, declare independence, and finally become truly self-determining when it comes to this issue, as well as many others. At that point, we will be left with our obsessions and our rage, but will at the same time be impotent and helpless... the King Lear of nations.