The Blue Monkey Review

Later that night I wonderd why I always end up staying more or less at the margin of tourism, in places where you can find ex-hippies and young people, the kind who often go camping and do without elctricty. As I drove south from Cancun earlier in the day, I´d seen several mega-resorts; they must have cost a fortune, but had to include all the possible comforts. They probably possessed comforts I don´t evevn know exist. And from these favored rooms and hallways the residents take intersting excursions, do fun things like snorkeling and ziplining. Instead of figuring out the highway system in Quintana Roo province and searching for reception on the rental car radio, I could be taking air conditioned bus rides with intersting people and walking through the ruins of Tulum with a knowledgable guide.

So, it would be a trip without bed bugs and light swtiches that don´t switch on anything. But, I would also miss the opportunity of sitting in the Aquarium´s empty restaurant watching Desafio de Estrellas (singers compet with one another and face the judgment of a panel of experts) with the owner, manager, and staff of the hotel, Felipe.

As we sat watching the young men and women compete and face the unforgiving opinions of the experts, a comercial came on for Obrador, one of the candidates for president in Mexico this year. I casually asked Felipe, a man in his early to mid-sixties, who he favored among the candidates. ¨It doesn´t matter who is president,¨ he said, ¨they all take their orders from the United States.¨

I´m accustomed to some anit-American sentiment wherever I travel--I expect a little, and find that it´s usually mixed with both admiration and attraction. But this wasn´t exactly the case for Felipe. He was very pro-American, and he soon outlined a plan to me in which the U.S. would adopt Mexico, make it into sevral new states. ¨You tell us what to do,¨ he said, ¨we´ll do the work.¨

I couldn´t exactly see this happening in the North America that I´m familiar with. I mentioned that ther might be many Mexicans who would object to this plan. ¨They need to be told what to do by those who think and understand.¨ We might have pursued this further, but somehow the conversation took an unexpected turn when Felipe hapend to mention that in the U.S. the Jews run evrything. He could see my incredulity pretty quickly, which only ecouraged him to expand on this notion. ¨They control the capital,¨ he said, ¨so they control the politicians.¨ And as I struggled to decide wher to begin to argue about this, he added, ¨And there´s another Jew in England, another in Russia...¨

Well, I made some attempts to respond--feble enough, because big ideas like this have a self-referential quality that makes them the intellectual equivalent of quicksand. Anyway, Felipe to larger themes. The U.S. (in spite of the Jews? because of them?) is at the height of its power, its maximum point. We should become one world, he said, under the leadership of the U.S.

And how will this happen? ¨The U.S. will guarantee employment, health, education.¨ Once ths problems are solved, Felipe said, the other countries of the world will follow us with no resistance. I´m not so sure about his conclusion, but I pointed out that we who live in the U.S. don´t have those rights.

We had spent about an hour talking, completly ignoring the young beauties singing their hearts out on Desafio when Felip said that the U.S. had to act soon--it had already begun the long, slow process of decline. Well, Democrats have ben saying that for years, but I asked him why?

¨Women´s liberation,¨ he said. Again, he got my incredulous look and I began to talk about economics. He told me, though, that as families changed, as women went out to work (and made more than their husbands) the three children in each family who wer growing up without mothers, without her guidance and assistance, what was hapening to them? ¨Prostitutes! Drug addicts!¨

No telling wher this would have gone, but Felipe had to eat his dinner. By this time I was kind of tired, so took a beer to my room to think about the margins of tourism.