Man's true pleasures and the twenty-month-later theory

Write twenty months later about a topic and you'll laugh at what you once wrote. Specially if it's about politics. Everything changes. Nothing's the same and you constantly look ridiculous when you re-read yourself writing about this shit. Because politics is shit and we all know it. We love to talk about it just as some people love to eat McDonald's everyday. It's not good, i.e. it's shit, but we still do it. We're humans. We're only good to do ourselves bad because those things are the only true pleasures. Sad but true, and not so sad after all becuase it's true: we do get pleasure from bad and dangerous and risky and rotten stuff. Until it's too rotten, of course—we don't like to swim in our own hedonistically-digested shit. We just like to walk on it—step on it all the time. So when we're full of our politics (one of the most elegant forms of pleasure excrement) we just step outside and usually try to forget everything about it, because it's suddenly disgusting for us. Just as McDonald's. And pop music. And gossip and lies. And self-help books. And Tom Cruise. And being depressed.

Write twenty months later about a topic and you're sure to be surprised of how everything has changed. Everything changes. Specially politics. It becomes difficult to think about it in the same line of thought (or the same way, anyway) and it's worst to try to write it down, but we're trying to do so. In the end it's just politics. If you start to smell, just go. Or read about movies or feelings or anything that's not so disgustingly fleeting.

One war, the other war

Drugs in the US are more a problem of people and their addiction, not of countries.

Mexico suffers from addiction, that's the fact. Another fact is that most of American people don’t give a fuck about Mexican people—or Latin Americans, whatsoever. They don’t mind that in certain parts of the continent, namely Colombia and Mexico, people are dying because of their addiction. It’s understandable: too much to ask for Americans (or maybe I’m just generalizing: for President Bush) to understand violence that they not directly generate when they cannot understand the one that they do provoke. United States of America is at war, we know it; is at war with most of the Middle East and is at war on drugs, which sounds a little too shitty to me, politically shitty. But that’s nothing but true. It’s a war that you name and we, Mexicans, endure. It’s a war that the US “fights” (please note the ironic quotation marks there), but it’s fought the wrong way. It is something normal in the Bush administration, anyway.

Yet, that’s not the issue.

So why is the war on drugs being wrongly fought? Because it centers its attention in countries, not in addicts. The US perspective is something like this: We have a problem with drugs. Where do they come from? Mostly Latin America. Let’s blame it on them, let’s fight them. But how are you going to control a business so well-crafted, so organized, so corrupting as drug trafficking? Simple: with a war. And this war, although it’s obviously targeted to foreign countries, it’s also waged against American people.

On the online Schaffer Library of Drug Policy, the author cites three areas in which the US would have to succeed in order to win the war on drugs:

1) Stop drug production in other countries.

2) Stop drugs at the border.

3) Stop the sale of drugs within the United States.

Easy, so easy—and please read the sarcasm. Practically, that war is lost, and people are starting to accept it, just as they’re starting to accept that the other war —the one in Middle East— is just as ludicrous and unwinnable as this one. “In their best year, US Drug Enforcement Agents working together with foreign governments seized about one percent of the worldwide drug crop, leaving 99 percent free to supply the US”, says the Schaffer Library. This is the state of things. So the efficiency is almost non-existent. Add the racial bigotry in prosecution, the impact on nature and on the life of local harvesters and the argue of legality, and you have a very serious problem: you’ve got all the evidence needed to corroborate that your way is the wrong way. You, in normal situation, would have to consider another way. Not in the USA, no way.

So Mexico suffers from addiction. From other people’s addiction. If the US has virtually no chance of winning this battle, imagine what Mexico could do. Nothing, absolutely nothing. Mexico is a State recovering from years and years of hegemony, which means corruption, and its institutions are still shaky. Although it’s certainly not a first world country, it’s not quite a third world country either. We have utterly no chance of doing anything at all to stop that violence that causes drug trafficking to the US. Colombia produces, US deals, but Mexico distributes. More than 2000 people were killed last year in Mexico by drug gangs, called cárteles. Acapulco, a former paradise city frequented in the 50’s by such Hollywood stars as Frank Sinatra, Brigitte Bardot, John Wayne, Errol Flynn and Rita Hayworth, is now a narco dominated town. Basically all the northern cities, such as Tijuana, Cd. Juárez and Nuevo Laredo, are infested with violence created by the gangs that distribute the drugs in the US. Those gangs are so mighty they, for example, build the so-called narcotúneles, underground tunnels with water and electric power that cross the border, which have amazed Mexican architects for years. This violence is so overwhelming, former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey has warned about the risk of the crime wave unleashed by enemy drug gangs crossing the border and reach American territory.

So Mexico undergo as much as US and its addicts, maybe more. What’s the solution? Unfortunately the US has the key. Without a good—a better— policy, we won’t be able to hold much longer. The United States has always tried to make things better nearly anywhere in the world, most of the times with ill-fated results; but why not do the right thing this time, whatever that might be, especially when its fate also depends on it? But, of course, must Americans must be thinking “Why the fuck do I care about Mexicans?”.

Children of men and, yeah, Cuarón

Alfonso Cuarón is quite something. He has an incredible range as a director. He has directed movies so different between them and yet he has managed to leave his mark, even when directing a big budget, hugely-anticipated franchise movie, Harry Potter and the prisioner of Azkaban. Y tu mama también is just a wonderful exploration of youth and death. A little princess is one of the best live-action family movies (I dare to say) of all time: a hidden gem. Now he offers this futuristic tale that is more of an analogy with the present, a metaphor, and an allegory in which he displays a immense politic consciousness (which can be seen in almost all his interviews), a sincere worry about the future, but, ultimately, a hope.

Every single Children of men review I’ve read starts something like this: “Children of men is a dystopian thriller”, “It’s set in a world where women can’t conceive anymore, so every hope is lost” or “Though is not a sci-fi…”. All these things are quite true. But Children of men is a lot more than that. It is not sci-fi, that’s for sure. It’s more of a reflection of the present, as Alfonso Cuarón, the director of the film, says all the time. It’s a very political film, setting the English government as a cruel, authoritarian bitch, but also England as the last remaining country (as we use the term now). It’s a very rough prediction of what could be happening twenty years from now.

But the most important feature of Children of men, besides of being wonderfully (and I mean wonderfully) shot and directed, is the heart of it. It’s not a feel good movie, you can tell just to look at the trailer or even catch a glimpse of the poster, but it’s conceived with love, with an incredible artistry. Cuarón really puts himself into his projects and you feel it. You feel the movie, that’s what makes it so great. You’re distressed, amazed, worried, you’re kept on the edge of your seat (forget the cliché, remember my point), all in the same movie. And Clive Owen has a lot to do with it. One of the most impressive features in the movie are those long shots you just have to see to believe. A car chase, a battlefield crossing, a look at the city, a bomb explosion: everything is as jaw-dropping as it is difficult to shoot, for the director and for the actors. So, because of that and everything else we feel because of him on screen, Clive Owen deserves an Academy nomination and more: he deserves to be on the Hollywood top list, or, at least, to be fully recognized as one of the greatest actors of his generation.

Children of men is one of the finest, more human movies in a while. And it's, without a doubt, one of the best movies in 2006. Sadly it didn't have a lot of Oscar success. It's not that bad.

Where the fuck am I standing?

Sometimes I wonder that. I know it makes no difference, but I still like to ask myself. Ask myself: torture myself. You know, listening to some subtly suicidal music like One for my baby (and one more for the road) or Take me home by Aqualung. I’m gay, you’re saying? Maybe, but a quiet one. In the meantime —I mean, while I’m not depressed and full of questions— I also think of other things. Like art and sex and people and money and future, the fucking future, and Hollywood and dudes and college and Internet and what the hell happened to Gregor Samza and the loyalty of my friends and the unfairness in the world and that bunch of issues that run through my head and I just can’t seem to take out. What else could I write about? So here it is, a magic blend of nothing-to-do-with-each-other blend of topics that will unleash the emotionally unstable inside of me. And the sexy beast. And the repressed student. And the politically-incorrect. And the gossip columnist (not so much, I hope). The mainstream and the alternative. The pseudoscientist. The confused. The teenager and the old man. The James Dean. And the wannabe blogger.