COMMENTS: 3
Driving Through an Empty Tijuana in the Midst of the Swine Flu
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"Since everyone is dumping on Mexico these days, you might as well help me do the real thing."
My friend Marcos Ramirez (aka "ERRE") isn't kidding. He's building a new house in Colonia Libertad, Tijuana's oldest and most surrealistically colorful neighborhood, and needs to dispose of some construction debris. I ride shotgun in his pickup while his younger brother Omar, a poet-artist with eyes like Che Guevara's, sprawls in the backseat.
For once in a lifetime, afternoon traffic in Tijuana is unsnarled and ERRE spurs his Chevy Silverado through the Zona Rio roundabouts, past the giant statue of Father Kino and the utopian sphere of the Cultural Center, until we reach the Avenida Internacional, the long straightaway next to the corrugated steel futility of the border wall.
As the road climbs the mesa, there is a jarring view of landscape disfigured by National Guard bulldozers and the endless churning of terrain by Border Patrol jeeps. But today even the brutalism of Operation Gatekeeper is ameliorated by blue skies and a tickle of a sea breeze. ERRE catches the mood and puts on a Beach Boys CD.
I have a sudden inkling of what he must have been like when he was a 15-year-old outlaw skateboarder from Colonia Libertad, careening suicidally down its rutted slopes. Later, he briefly practiced law, but quickly turned away from its corruption to work for 17 years as a skilled carpenter and homebuilder in the United States.
In 1997, he confounded the Border Patrol by erecting a huge Trojan Horse (two heads, facing in opposite directions) at the San Ysidro frontier. It exactly straddled the international line. Tijuaneses loved it.
Since then he has created similar provocations from Reading, Pennsylvania, to Yunnan, China, attaining the kind artistic renown that usually guarantees studio space in Soho or Coyoacan. But he stubbornly prefers being, as he puts it, a "Libertarian."
The Silverado lurches into a dirt side street somewhere on the proletarian backside of Chapultepec Heights. ERRE pulls up along a fence, honks his horn, and the debris is quickly unloaded by elves in rags. He hands one of them 100 pesos, or $7. (The minimum wage in the sweatshop maquiladoras is only 55 pesos per day.)
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COMMENTS ( 3 )
Comments are closed-
Posted by: joeocho88 on May 6, 2009 8:48 AM
Current rating: 5 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Admittedly this new "Swine Flu" virus seems to have been mixed up in a lab and be race-specific in targetting indigenous people and since I am half Native American, I guess I should be worried about dying from this myself since I am considered as a useless eater, and worse, a sworn enemy of fakers, exploiters, crooks and hypocrites...I even THINK for myself and I shuffle to the Right when the News Media and my SOCIALLY SUPERIOR BETTERS tell me I SHOULD shuffle to the Left.
Elitists do not LIKE INDEPENDENT THINKERS!
And I HAVE studied MICROBIOLOGY enough to know a LABMADE VIRUS when I see one! THIS looks suspiciously like a LABMADE Virus, probably from the same lab that gave us all the ANTHRAX scare. After all, experiments were done with unwary military guys during the development of the Manhattan Project in the Southwest...and Agent Orange in Vietnam and biochemicals used in Desert Storm...
I have heard the CDC warning us about the NEXT BIG VIRUS that is going to dwarf the concerns about this one. Disasters always make good news copy but how many times have they cried Wolf about the NEXT BIG NEW THING -- the SUPERVIRUS. Well, I hear they have been working on a super resistant strain of the SPANISH INFLUENZA VIRUS THAT SUPPOSEDLY KILLED SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE EARLY 1900s and all the way to the 1930s.
Wonder which USELESS EATERS they will turn it loose on next?
No wonder that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us all against the military-industrial complex... the same kind of people who helped the international financiers put Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin in power.
[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]
Comments are closed-
Posted by: joeocho88 on May 6, 2009 9:26 AM
Current rating: 5 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
BECAUSE THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY PEOPLE!
AND TOO FEW RESOURCES!
And they need to STOP the IRRESPONSIBLE REPRODUCTION ASAP! Their surplus people who have no social connections or patrons are pushed into our country just as much out of dire necessity as they are in the course of their jobs as business development people for illegal laborers and drugs and prostitutes (human trafficking) as well...
THIS IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF WHAT OVERPOPULATION CAN DO TO A COUNTRY and so there are EPIDEMICS from time to time that THIN THE HERD!
There is NO excuse for these many people in ANY civilized country! It is economics --the more you have of a commodity, the cheaper the price and the more near worthless it becomes.
THINK ABOUT IT.
Mexico is a GREAT country. The REAL Mexican people are awesome -- Tijuana is no more a typical border town than Disneyland is a typical American city.
I lived in Mexico for five years but it would be suicidal to return due to the RULE OF THE NARCOTRAFFICANTES and the CORRUPT ELITES who are making billions of dollars together with their AMerican counterparts from the drug traffic. THAT is the REAL reason they aren't shutting down the border! And if these elites can get a few million of us ordinary people/useless eaters to die from some virus they cooked up in a lab, so much the better for them...
Mexico needs to learn what we figured out long ago and that is that ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. Even Red China has learned about POPULATION CONTROL..And when you have unrestricted breeding WITHOUT quality control, you are bound to have famine, disease, lack of resources,massive unemployment, pollution and a very large criminal class of folks generating social unrest because they want their share of the pie and have no legitimate way to get it without a job or wealthy family to back them up.
There is truth to the old cliche that "YOUR FAILURE TO ADEQUATELY PREPARE FOR A DISASTER DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN EMERGENCY ON MY PART."
[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]
» True, but over-population is a worldwide problem
Posted by: ozonehole
Comments are closed-
Posted by: joeocho88 on May 6, 2009 8:48 AM
Current rating: 5 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Admittedly this new "Swine Flu" virus seems to have been mixed up in a lab and be race-specific in targetting indigenous people and since I am half Native American, I guess I should be worried about dying from this myself since I am considered as a useless eater, and worse, a sworn enemy of fakers, exploiters, crooks and hypocrites...I even THINK for myself and I shuffle to the Right when the News Media and my SOCIALLY SUPERIOR BETTERS tell me I SHOULD shuffle to the Left.
Elitists do not LIKE INDEPENDENT THINKERS!
And I HAVE studied MICROBIOLOGY enough to know a LABMADE VIRUS when I see one! THIS looks suspiciously like a LABMADE Virus, probably from the same lab that gave us all the ANTHRAX scare. After all, experiments were done with unwary military guys during the development of the Manhattan Project in the Southwest...and Agent Orange in Vietnam and biochemicals used in Desert Storm...
I have heard the CDC warning us about the NEXT BIG VIRUS that is going to dwarf the concerns about this one. Disasters always make good news copy but how many times have they cried Wolf about the NEXT BIG NEW THING -- the SUPERVIRUS. Well, I hear they have been working on a super resistant strain of the SPANISH INFLUENZA VIRUS THAT SUPPOSEDLY KILLED SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE EARLY 1900s and all the way to the 1930s.
Wonder which USELESS EATERS they will turn it loose on next?
No wonder that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us all against the military-industrial complex... the same kind of people who helped the international financiers put Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin in power.
[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]
Comments are closed-
Posted by: joeocho88 on May 6, 2009 9:26 AM
Current rating: 5 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
BECAUSE THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY PEOPLE!
AND TOO FEW RESOURCES!
And they need to STOP the IRRESPONSIBLE REPRODUCTION ASAP! Their surplus people who have no social connections or patrons are pushed into our country just as much out of dire necessity as they are in the course of their jobs as business development people for illegal laborers and drugs and prostitutes (human trafficking) as well...
THIS IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF WHAT OVERPOPULATION CAN DO TO A COUNTRY and so there are EPIDEMICS from time to time that THIN THE HERD!
There is NO excuse for these many people in ANY civilized country! It is economics --the more you have of a commodity, the cheaper the price and the more near worthless it becomes.
THINK ABOUT IT.
Mexico is a GREAT country. The REAL Mexican people are awesome -- Tijuana is no more a typical border town than Disneyland is a typical American city.
I lived in Mexico for five years but it would be suicidal to return due to the RULE OF THE NARCOTRAFFICANTES and the CORRUPT ELITES who are making billions of dollars together with their AMerican counterparts from the drug traffic. THAT is the REAL reason they aren't shutting down the border! And if these elites can get a few million of us ordinary people/useless eaters to die from some virus they cooked up in a lab, so much the better for them...
Mexico needs to learn what we figured out long ago and that is that ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. Even Red China has learned about POPULATION CONTROL..And when you have unrestricted breeding WITHOUT quality control, you are bound to have famine, disease, lack of resources,massive unemployment, pollution and a very large criminal class of folks generating social unrest because they want their share of the pie and have no legitimate way to get it without a job or wealthy family to back them up.
There is truth to the old cliche that "YOUR FAILURE TO ADEQUATELY PREPARE FOR A DISASTER DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN EMERGENCY ON MY PART."
[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]
» True, but over-population is a worldwide problem
Posted by: ozonehole
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