The somehow-always-escalating violence in Mexico over the last decade has just got to stop being so crazy. Thankfully, despite their brutality, our era's thugs still pale in comparison to both the brutal conquistadors and the psychopathic tyrants they supplanted, but still--come on.
It's like Mexico is an episode/season of Breaking Bad--the best show on television--so no matter how bad you think things are going to get they always get much worse and keep you on the edge of your seat.
One day you're a respectable family attending a provincial bullfight, feasting on all manner of delectable street meat, and dozing in the cool shadow of a mountain of used plastic silverware and putrid diapers trucked in from Texas, the next day you have a sack thrown over your heads, get fed into a sausage grinder, and become a hasty buffet for a pack of alpha-male pitbulls raised to ruthlessly erase all evidence of your existence. For no reason. Well, other than the fact that some asshole druglords want to send the government agents and their employers (aka taxpayers) a message that they are not to be fucked with or everybody will die eventually die a horrific, carnival death.
Mayors getting kidnapped and stoned to death in the woods, their corpses lying in the back of a pick-up truck for days before being found?
Wacko lieutenants becoming famous for dissolving bodies in vats of lie? Headless bodies hanging from bridges when the President comes to town?
People's faces being peeled-off and sewn onto soccer balls?
Danny Trejo's severed head riding atop a turtle's shell?
It's like the Mexican druglords have spent the last ten years one-upping each other, hell-bent on bringing home the Most Sadistic Would-Be Batman Villain Ever hardware every year at their annual, always-fabulous Mexican Druglord Conference in Cancun and things are really coming to a head here, the fate of a nation in flux until one of the longtime favorites (or will it be a darkhorse?) is finally cast by Christopher Nolan in his next movie already. [C'mon, Chris, don't be selfish here--think of the people of Gotham. -Ed]
Only then will a winner be declared. Only then will these men tire of the game and get back to being productive members of society, stop destroying whatever they can get away with.
If Christopher Nolan fails us here (he will), no living soul in Mexico is safe. People invited to dinner parties will start making ridiculous excuses like "Oh, I'd love to come, Sandra, but I'm afraid my entire family might be fed to dogs for absolutely no reason if somebody happens to see us in the street" and it won't be funny because they would totally mean it.
Dogs and cats will be murdered in cold blood and often later eaten by starving Mad-Max scavengers--or used as bait to lure a meatier human out of hiding if they feel strong enough for a struggle.
Even budding flowers will fall victim to the casually lethal boot-heels of restless warriors.
Harmonicas can be quite deadly
Eventually the Wild West will reign again, as all men remaining in Mexico will be pitted against each other in a relentless series of unscheduled, unregulated, him-or-me machine-gun duels.
In the end, some Mexican-Jeff-Goldblum eccentric-billionaire type (or perhaps total-Bond-villain Carlos Slim?) will square up against a rough-and-tumble bully from the other side of the tracks and smile knowingly as he smites him with a remote-controlled missile to win--finally--the entire vacant blood-soaked nation as his playground/torture chamber.
Hey, whatever--heavy is the head that wears the crown, right? Jeff/Carlos will kill 'em all, eat 'em, play the game, and figure the rest out later! Once he wins the competition!
After all, if the end result of all his efforts is for whatever reason less than ideal, he can always just drink himself to death at an abandoned luxury resort in Acapulco while writing one hell of a suicide note. If that is indeed Jeff/Carlos' path, I hope that he also has the foresight to attach the lengthy missive to a particularly-burly trained seagull's foot before he dies and send the winged slave to find A Living Person in America Who Would Open a Random Piece of Mail Delivered by a Seagull and Be Able to Make Some Sense Out of Nearly-Illiterate Post-Apocalyptic Pidgin Spanish with no delay.
Once I get my hands on that suicide note (ohpleaseohpleaseohplease) I can finally publish my (unrelated) bestselling novel about the unsympathetic, stomach-churning trials and tribulations of a notorious, suddenly-repentant-at-the-end, murdering asshole that The New York Review of Books will call "Lyrical, raw, and positively breathtaking--an astonishing debut focusing on a megalomaniacal prick who is so delusional he actually thinks he is a normal person, a person with strengths and weaknesses you can weigh, despite all evidence pointing to the fact that if he is not the spawn of Satan he may as well be."
That kind of success being something I could immediately take to the bank, I will probably set up direct deposit to an account in the Cayman Islands and never be seen or heard from again once the raucous celebration--for the humble but well-appointed launch of what will turn out to be the groundbreaking novel of a burgeoning Golden Era of Literature, the captain of the elite avant garde--winds down and I seize the perfect opportunity to sneak away unnoticed.
I will disappear in plain sight and live on the lam under the assumed identities of a series of retired international playboys who share a voracious appetite for women, adventure, and the fruits of the sea.
I will rewrite my memoirs for the rest of my life--on stained cocktail napkins stapled together--until I accidentally fall off a hotel balcony in paradise and nobody ever even figures out who I was, much less what wisdom I wanted to impart to the Earthlings I left behind.
But enough about me--what will all of you do, America? Will it even affect you? Will you even notice that your drunken trips to coastal Florida are not taking place in Cancun, a beloved resort you will never be able to visit for the rest of your life because murderous warlords own the streets? Will you join them or fight them when the furious, probing tentacles of their violence become too much to bear?
Please send me your well-reasoned answers and I shall peruse them with casual interest while traveling aboard one of my many identical yachts speeding in different directions across the vast watery stretches of globe, while wearing a clever disguise that just makes you want to weep for its beauty.
Thank you,
Goodtime Charlie
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