The Moon Valley

During my sojourn in Mexico, there was a nasty feud between the Presidents of Mexico and Venezuela. From what I could draw out from the English translation, Venezuela's Chavez probably made a sexually suggestive link between Fox's anus and his privatisation and free-market reforms. Fox reacted as every professional middle-class man does to a lewd attack. He lashed out as far as he could without physical arms.

Between these two gentlemen there is no rapport. I suspect each sees in the other the malign shadow of himself. One shadow cast, Chavez's is short hunched and dark, Fox's is long angular and white.

Chavez may be the prototype of historical Hispanic America. The Americas are loaded with these millions of sallow short men and women. They are a black peasant bread, grown out of the sweat of a dry, ungrateful land. Their blood mixes from American Indian, southern Moorish Mediterranean and Negro. War and rebellion of all kinds defines the indigenous culture of Mexico and most of the rest of Hispanic America. It is no coincidence that the English word for guerrilla has its origin in the Spanish word for little war. In English you stick your neck out almost anytime you endorse guerrillas. In Spanish every guerrilla is an Alfred the Great – or more likely the Little.

President Fox in Hispanic America is near to pure Anglo. His blood is half upper-class Mexican and half Irish. The Hispanics have never picked up on the feud between the English and Irish. To them they are all Anglos. In Mexican ideology, no upper-class Mexican has anything but pure European Spanish blood – unless sometimes Aztec royalty.

Before he went into politics, Fox was the CEO of Coca‑Cola Mexico. That drink is the perfect epitome of Yankee imperialism in Hispanic America. It is all image and packaging, a drink so bland that by itself people cannot recognise it.

So is President Fox. As far as I know he is not offensively corrupt, but outside the image of affluence and the American dream, there doesn't appear to be anything there.

No wonder they hate each other. President Chavez is as hot and sweaty and probably as treacherous as a snake. Fox is as cold and bland as iced coke. The snake and the iced bottled coke are the perfect and actual symbols of the Moon Valley.

I am anticipating – within a year or two – a real guerrilla i.e. a little war between the devotees of Fox and the devotees of Chavez. When the dust and blood has settled after a decade or so, all over Mexico there will be statues, portraits, and street names of the Mexican followers of Chavez. In discreet places there also will be respectful street names and plaques of Fox. In true Mexican fashion, Fox, the Anglo-Mexican millionaire and ally of the Bush dynasty, is still a famous distinguished Mexican. That sanguine state of mind is perhaps what I most like about the Moon Valley.

update: 2010

Mexico instead went down the drug war road. Chavez on cocaine.