All the things that don't belong here...

When I first came to Central America there were many more ways for an outsider to suddenly find themselves completely out of their depth, particularly outside the major towns. These days the whole environment has become markedly shallower.

If there is an age-old tendency to predate on outsider, it has adjusted to this new environment, yet the works of Paul Bowles are (unjustly one feels) now often disparaged by contemporary American liberals who pride themselves on their seemingly all-encompassing comfort zones and perhaps don't appreciate their good fortune to be gracing this new era.

Bowles was a highly talented writer and composer, a gay man who found an extended temporo-spatial slither of liberation (along with undoubtedly enviable comfort) in the developing world, which confounds many in the mainstream today.

Pastor Dowe at Tacaté, peak Bowles one might say, is set amongst the Lacandon Maya and features some of his very best evocations of potentially mean landscapes. As with Lowry's Under the Volcano, the period is the back end of the Spanish Civil War, though the narrative itself was also written just over a decade later.

Its protagonist is a widowed protestant preacher who has come to this made-up settlement in the backwoods of Chiapas from his base in Ocosingo, having brushed up a bit on the local lingo and cosmology and, as is often the case with Bowles protagonists, his comfort zone soon segues into the tract of smothering discomfit.

This is in part because he has possibly failed to appreciate that his own modernity is compromised by his adherence to ancient credulities and when he tweaks the 'good news' to accommodate Mayan beliefs and divine personages, he permits his flock to turn the tables on him.

Intriguingly, we learn that these Maya possess a duo of creator gods, Hachakyum and Metzabok, venerated here in a pair of adjacent, hidden caves. 'Metzabok makes all the things that do not belong here,' the pastor is informed, and it is to this deity that he soon finds himself praying.

Task (HBO)

What bugs me a bit about the kind of biker gangs featured in Task, is that they are dealing in millions, but where exactly does all the money go, other than in corrupting the cops?  

Social mobility certainly doesn't seem to be their thing.

I almost passed on this show, partly because it was being led by Mark Ruffalo, currently a leading light of Hollywood's faux-righteous mob, but wisdom, he himself states during the finale's epilogue, is knowing what to overlook, so I am glad I overcame this qualm.

While there is some pent up passive aggressive sanctimoniousness in the character of Tom Brandis, he ends up being a likeable, if unlikely, Task-master, perhaps an American liberal fantasy of an FBI agent: a lapsed man of God, always steadfastly determined to do the right thing, even if it this occasionally blows up in his face. (In Tom's case, maybe a bit more than occasionally.)

This story seems to be an extended lecture about the dangers of testosterone-fuelled strategising, but it is undoubtedly the female characters who really stand out here, driving my own engagement with the narrative through the episodes, especially Maeve, Lizzie and Aleah. (Looking forward now to seeing Emilia Jones in Cat Person.)

None of these roles went to American actresses, so as with Mare of Easttown, the question of accents hangs in the air again. I can't really tell, at least not like a Pennsylvania native could, but I suspect that all the non-Yanks in the principal cast are generally coping better than American thesps would in an equivalent drama set somewhere in Britain with a marked regional accent even amongst the middle classes, like Liverpool, say.

The Perfect Neighbor (2025)

 

If you have Netflix, watch this extraordinary documentary, largely put together with bodycam clips and other 'official' footage. 

The villain of this piece is a textbook example of a stone cold soul, lacking any kind empathy...precisely the kind of uber-creepy presence you would never want to turn up in your own neighbourhood. 

There are obvious lessons for Florida police here, for their 'I have to believe both of you' / 'kids will be kids' approach undoubtedly fed into the final escalation.

(If you watch attentively, of all the cops who came to deal with her complaints, there was ONE who applied the correct approach.)

The Long Walk (2025)

Based on Stephen King's very first novel, which he began at college in the sixties and eventually published in 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

I read it 45 years ago, having already been partially fed it via intense, non-sequential gobbets by a Latin teacher who was clearly obsessed with it. An extreme authoritarian, I am certain he closely identified with 'The Major' and possibly anticipated this grim scenario more as utopia than dystopia.

I somehow doubt that he knew that Bachman was a cover for a very liberally-minded upcoming horror writer and, were he still with us, he'd no doubt be horrified by the politics of the actor chosen to portray his hero in this movie.

In Prep school we'd long had a Latin teacher who could easily be persuaded to drop all the 'Sextus est in horto' bunk and just spend the lesson recounting the myths of the ancients in his engagingly camp manner.

But this one was driven by an inner mythology of a much darker variety and the only diversion we ever got were readings from this uplifting text where you 'got your ticket' if you proved inadequate to the task in hand. Every lesson came with its very own 'terrifying tomorrow'.

I'd been learning Latin fairly steadily since the age of five and I now associate this story fairly strongly with my decision to give it up prior to O level.

The source novel had a somewhat rumpled ending, perhaps a rather lame attempt to thwart the narrative's own predictability and the alternative fashioned for this adaptation is one of those you can see coming for roughly 350 miles.

Similar scenarios have been suggested to us periodically since this one popped into student Stephen's head. In a way, The Squid Game is the most recent. The trouble with the film is that it falls just short of sufficiency on many different levels, starting perhaps with budget, but also the dialogue, the back story and so on are not quite all there.

Possibly worth noting that this is one of those kinds of movies which may not get made once America is finally great again, because it was shot north of the border in Canada. (Spoiler: as were all but one of the participants in this event!)

Pas de Rois?

Further to all that No Kings exuberance in the former colonies yesterday, a tiny slice of history from Merry Old England...

It's approaching the end of 1386.

The King is an effete 19-year-old, an extreme narcissist obsessed with hygiene and social distancing. Without knowing it he has invented the linen hankerchief as a way of blowing or wiping his nose or indeed covering his mouth when interacting with his subjects.

He has a near absolute belief in his own authority and a form of personal rule which is disconcerting to say the least for the Lords and the Commons, who collectively maintain a rather different notion about the way that the interests of the realm ought to be managed.

The French are about to invade.

Not one of those putative invasions as with Napoleon (and later Adolf), for the troops and their horses and supplies were already on board hundreds of ships at Bruges that November awaiting a change in the weather. Bonne chance avec ça, but London's mayor has ordered citizens to stockpile food and in Kent evacuations are underway.

Addressing this very imminent danger on any level will require the raising of significant revenue and a level of governance approaching basic competence.

But the Royal administration is a complete mess: corrupt, inefficient, leaky and the monarch himself surrounded by a coterie of acquisitive and extravagant favourites, also rumoured to be hanky waving types.

This situation might be said to have had its roots in the end of the previous reign, generally considered by historians to have been highly successful, but which ended with the old guy in a semi-senile state being preyed upon by a notably materialist young lady and her family.

His successor and grandson has lately been refusing to attend Parliament, the agreed forum for handling disputes at the elite end of society "behind closed doors".

Faced with a sovereign who will not engage with any of the established channels of communication, who appears more interested in adventures in the opposite direction, over the Irish Sea, and who has even suggested that he might submit to his French 'cousin', rather be cornered by his own magnates, the Lords and Commons elect to stage a bit of a coup.

Out go the loathed Chancellor and Treasurer and, via appropriate statute, in comes a 14-man council which would reform the administration and effectively run an emergency government for a year in the sovereign's name.

The King stomps off on an extended peripatetic sulk with his hangers on, wandering from place to place across the North and the Midlands, plotting his royal revenge.

After six months he comes up with a cunning plan. He summons the country's most senior judges to a meeting place of his choosing and cajoles them into producing a written judgement stating that everything that has been done to limit his authority is thoroughly illegal and akin to the most heinous treason.

He then turns south and heads towards London...

Mental Maps

Perhaps the craziest journey I have ever undertaken was this one, in the late summer of '89 along the Rio San Pedro from El Naranjo towards Tenosique in Mexico.

I'm not going to recount it again in any detail, but tracking it today on Google Maps led to some novel reflections.

Back then, we had no map, no fully-formed big picture mental image as we moved along. Or maybe it was the medium-sized image that was missing.

So, arriving in El Naranjo we had no real concept of where it was in relation to where we were going. There was a border post with a Customs office in a shack, so we must basically be on the frontier, I then assumed.

Prior to each trip to Belize I had visited Stanford's Maps in Covent Garden where, stashed away in a big drawer at the rear, one could find massive folding aviation maps of that nation, marking the key townships and some of the features of the terrain, and these proved useful...but in Guatemala we were basically operating blind.

There was nothing in the guidebooks, because there weren't really any. Guatemala was best covered, via a page or two, oddly enough, in the South American handbook, and none of its maps were of any use here.

This attempt to reach the ruins of Palenque by exiting 'the top' of Guatemala began as a dare.

Someone, the sort of someone who regarded themselves as a living gatekeeper of local knowledge, had coldly informed us that it wouldn't be possible, that we should in fact believe the imaginary guidebook when it said one needed to commence this trek from the southern highlands, NW along the Panamerican Highway and up into southern Chiapas. Attempting the Petén route was soon going to make us feel like Lope de Aguirre etc etc.

What amazes me now is how willing I was back then to undertake such an expedition through what was essentially an active war zone with the absolute bare minimum of information, either prior-acquired or real time. I didn't yet speak Spanish either. Nowadays I have become completely Google Maps dependent, even inside rather straightforwardly laid out small towns.

V asked me once 'how did you even know where to start?' and I honestly couldn't answer that one. There has to have been some word of mouth, but whose mouth? My travelling companion was just as much in the dark as I was. I think perhaps a Texan archaeologist in Belize had mentioned El Naranjo to us and so we'd jumped on a Bluebird bus at Santa Elena that was displaying that name above the windscreen. Simples.

I have fond memories of the ride along the San Pedro, in a kind of motorised, long wooden canoe. We'd equipped ourselves with a bag of Gallos. (The road route and the new border post actually on the border at El Ceibo would appear later on, just after the Millennium.)

Less fond are the memories of Tenosique, the nearest substantial Mexican town, beside the Río Usumascinta. Maybe one day I will return to see if it is still as weird, but probably not via the same eastern approach!

The Tourism Whirlpool

“Vandals in sandals” was how the Consul memorably referred to tourists in Under the Volcano.

Perhaps the definitive text on how this Vandal invasion tends to pan out each time, is R. W. Butler’s The Concept of a Tourist Area Cycle Evolution: Implications for Management of Resources (1980). One wonders whether Wetback at INGUAT has read it.

Butler identified a set of stages, each one leading inexorably to the next...

1) The Exploration Phase > a small group of visitors show up. There are almost no facilities specifically catering for their needs. Transportation, and much else, is rudimentary. They depart or assimilate.

2) The Involvement Phase > word of mouth has increased the numbers and locals have spotted an opportunity to provide a range of new services.

3) The Development Phase > well-funded and well-organised groups, sometimes from outside the country, but almost always from outside the specific location, start to muscle in on the market, displacing the pioneers.

4) The Consolidation Phase > tourism becomes the dominant part of the local economy and people involved in the sector now outnumber everybody else. (A subset of locals and longer-term assimilated outlanders enters the increasingly ‘Pissed Off’ phase.)

5) The Stagnation Phase > a peak has been attained and there are all kinds of associated environmental and social issues emerging, along with unsettling economic distortions across the community.

Of this particular phase Butler noted, “The area will have a well-established image but it will no longer be in fashion.” Nostalgia has become chronic, seemingly endemic even amongst comparative newcomers.

Tulum might spring to mind here, but has lately hastened toiwards...

6) The Decline Phase > the writing is on the wall and some of the existing facilities attempt to swerve back to catering for locals or the more permanent kind of outsiders with apartment blocks, gated communities and retiree ghettos.

This is God’s Waiting Room on almost every level; terminal. Yet for a select few there is an available epilogue, a Rejuvination, more like the undead state than a whole new phase of life. (Some of Britain’s old seaside resorts achieved this transition by pitching to niches: Tech in Bournemouth, Gay in Brighton.)

I think most of us can quickly spot which phase any given destination in Central America is currently experiencing.

Though the world has changed a bit overall in other ways since 1980, and I might add some additional (or perhaps just intermediate) phases to the cycle.

Such as ‘Influencer Phase’.

Influencers are tourists who want to be taken for travellers, and they are unquestionably the very worst kind of vandals in sandals.

Their role is to arrive at a place that has already hit one of the later phases and act like the Explorer Phase is still chugging along nicely and to use their social media platforms to propagate this illusion.

I think I first became properly aware of this subculture back at the end of the last decade when I was on a minivan in Oaxaca state.

Many of my fellow 'travellers' were dressed like the pioneering explorers of old, but you could immediately tell that neither physically nor intellectually were they in any manner equipped for the journey.

With a grimace they were enduring its arduousness solely because of the selfie op they anticipated at its conclusion.

The shuttle had to stop several times so that they could be sick.

Saint Johnny Foreigner?

 

Well, for a start...yes, I can believe the Guardian published this. 

But the issue here for me is that I cannot quite work out whether the historical illiteracy is genuine or somehow put on.

And it's not just the name checks here for Turkey and Palestine. It's the failure to address why George was chosen as the patron saint of England c1350, effectively usurping card-carrying 'native' martyr and hero St Edmund (an East Anglian murdered by Danes, who probably had no real concept of England anyway.)

George was not picked because of any physical connection to the British Isles, but because he was then supposed to best represent a set of trans-civilisational values which on the domestic front went under the banner of 'Chivalric' and on the foreign policy plane as 'Crusading'.

He is thus the totem of an enduring us and them divide, Good vs Evil, but perhaps specifically Christian virtues perceived as the metric of good versus pagan and heathen ways perceived as the essence of all that is bad. (There was of course no GB News to get this message across back then.)

Mocking St George's modern adherents this way today, the Guardian either doesn't know this, or does not want to know it. They appear to be blocking their minds to the symbolism, as if that alone will be enough to make them appear more rational than the flag wavers.

Yet I suspect that the people who now march behind George's banner are, on some levels at least, aware of this ancient payload, and therefore the newspaper's attempt to paint them as ignorant and silly (which they may otherwise be, of course) is in this instance, some way off the mark and not really a winning gesture in the debate. It's all bit 'you hate foreigners, but your saint was himself a foreigner, haha'.

There's one more intriguing little component to the relationship of this outsider with his adopted nation, with perhaps a dollop or two of lasting relevance.

By 1350 the English had become used to having far flung foreign superheroes imposed upon them by the dominant culture across the channel, starting, one might say, with Jesus Himself.

After conquest and colonisation by a French-speaking version of continental civilisation in 1066, this process was amplified, as the local language and identity were actively suppressed, and alternative, more Anglo-Saxon legends, like that of Alfred, seriously underplayed.

King Arthur attained the status he did in the early Middle Ages precisely because he was NOT English.

So St George fit the pattern, but the pattern was in transition.

The Hundred Years War was in progress and for the first time many of the knights lining up against their French counterparts could speak English...and reportedly enjoyed doing so, especially when any Frenchies were nearby.

So as well as representing a set of Christian, chivalric ideals, St George also came to oversee a kind of cultural reunification of the ruling elites with the masses of England, in clear opposition to the other lot on the other side of the channel e.g. proper nationhood, with its own set of us and them narratives: "Cry God for Harry, England and St George!"