Misdirected Misanthropy

‘Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country… creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over-harvesting resources..the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable?'

A reported snippet from the manifesto of Patrick Crusius, the El Paso shooter; seemingly a ‘white supremicist’ in much the same way that David Attenborough is.

As I have noted before self-styled terrorists and racists are often just people who have a general problem with humanity, whilst erroneously imagining that their beef is only really with part of the species.

Like David Attenborough I am something of an atheist and a bit of a misanthrope, so I have some sympathy with the problem if not the solution. 

The experience of ageing, of being part of modernity is sadly often one of witnessing ruination — of oneself and of the people and places one senses are being slowly wrenched away as time passes. 

Take Antigua. It’s not the place I first came to in the 80s. Like Crusius I could start to play the blame game. 

For a start, it’s possible to have a generic rant about rising population, over-stretched resources, moral decay, corrosive capitalism and so on while sounding both bewilderingly conservative and radical-lefty at the same time.

Where it gets a bit more interesting is when one starts blaming specific groups of people, particularly those than are in some way other to one’s nostalgic fantasies.

If these invasive/destructive types are generally better off or more powerful than oneself, one is usually deemed to be a ‘terrorist’, especially when one takes up arms against them. Here in LAG these might either be braying gringos or affluent hedonists from the capital.

If however they are less well-off and powerful than oneself — in the case of Antigua ‘indios’ from outlying communities who pile in to sell their crap and generally clog up the streets — then one is typically deemed to be a ‘racist’.

Crusius named Mexicans as his problem. Not the ones in Mexico, but the one’s he believed were churning up his turf.

If this is racism, it’s rather different to the kind of racism that drove certain Germans eastward in the last century in the hope of finding new space in territory then occupied by those they deemed lesser beings. With the Nazis one could argue that the ‘hate’ started first, its targets blamed for nothing other than their own existence.

With the likes of Crusius there’s surely something more situational going on, where Hispanics crossing the border become the surrogate for a much deeper problem with his existence as a member of Homo Sapiens.

Northern Triangulation

Bernie Sanders observed at a recent Democratic debate that “We’ve got to ask ourselves...why are people walking 2,000 miles to a strange country where they don’t know the language?” Given that many of the indigenous people in parts of Guatemala struggle a bit with Spanish, they may not actually have to travel all that far before they start to experience communications difficulties. Yet the question is valid. Why indeed? I can imagine the sort of answer that Bernie has formulated in his own head. And the kind that he will expect his voters to come up with. These will, I suspect, be overly-informed by first world biases that beset both Left and Right in the US. Just hearing the question asked this way sets off my own shithole country dog whistle alarm. Google ‘Northern Triangle’ and see what you get. When I did it this morning the top item was titled ‘Central America’s violent Northern Triangle’. The term’s Wikipedia entry does at least explain that it is was originally formulated to frame discussion of economic interactions between these three nations, before finally moving on to the rate of intentional homicides in these parts. Intriguingly, this is also a way of looking at the northern part of the isthmus without considering Belize. Aside from the economic ties there are other ways in which this omission is instructive. Belize is a lot smaller, yet relatively more violent these days than the other three. Despite this, it is almost never mentioned in the context of factors driving Central American migration to the US. Now Google the top 100 news items on Guatemala and then do the same for Belize, before scoring them as positive, negative and neutral. I am sure you will surely start to perceive the signs of media bias even within this rather limited sample. President Trump did a safe third party deal with Guatemala supposedly in order to reduce the number of asylum seekers from El Salvador and Honduras yet Guatemala itself, (rather slightly) the least violent of the three countries, regularly sends more migrants north than its neighbours. Many of the Guatemalan migrants being detained right now at the Mexico-US border appear to hail from rural areas with a pronounced indigenous majority. The assumption in the external media is that these less-developed areas of the country must by definition be the ones with the greatest prevalence of the traditional litany of problems, the highest concentration of ‘appalling conditions’, as AOC puts it. They must also be the ones where discrimination is felt most severely. These assumptions are rarely if ever examined properly. 
In Guatemala the intentional homicide problem has tended to be highly localised — concentrated in specific micro-geographies — which have been used in effect to tar the entire the country with the same brush. (As if one could only ever talk about Italy in terms of the conditions prevalent just south of Naples.) Many of Guatemala’s rural departments with significant indigenous majorities have murder rates more comparable with Guildford, Surrey than New Orleans, Louisiana. Gang-related crime is also largely absent there. So to provide an answer to Bernie’s question that takes more than a moment’s reflection, one may have to look at both environmental and demographic factors more closely. One is also going to have to set aside first world conditioning which would otherwise project certain prejudices back onto this problem. For many of the underlying causes may not quite suit the standard progressive discourse.

Shithole Country?

I first came to Guatemala when I'd just turned twenty-one. My initial experience of the country was what you might call 'not propitious'. The vehicle that I was travelling in was pulled over by guerrillas and I faced a row of AK-toting teenagers. 

After this I made it safely to Santa Elena, crossed the causeway to Flores on foot, wolfed down a mojarra with some Gallo and have retained my fascination and affection for the country ever since.

So it pains me a little to read articles like this. One is left to conclude that at least the likes of Donald Trump come straight out with the 'shithole country' trope. 

American liberals on the other hand, produce an argument like this that is pretty much the same thing, but couched in terminology that makes them feel good. 

Statistcs 'compiled by non-profits' supposedly point to persecution of the LGBTI community here, but if one adjusts for the prevalence of powerful, interfering foreign organisations in Guatemala compared to many developed nations, how great is this danger, relatively? 

The problem is that this form of analysis has the inevitable tendency to associate countries like Guatemala with only the worst aspects of their social and political conditions. Just imagine that you were to do the same for the ‘greatest nation on earth’. 

To state that Guatemala is incapable of serving as a safe third country - without even reading the relevant agreement - is American liberal dog whistle for ‘shithole country’. 

(WTF with that donkey..?)

La Mara Apestatrucha

There's a certain well-lubricated set of gringos of an advancing age here in La Antigua. In the past we've referred to them as the 'Big Fish', not without a dollop of British sarcasm, for they are appear to be textbook cases of 'Big Fish In Small Pond' syndrome. 

The epithet is appropriate in another sense as well as they generally go about with the aspect of a fish that has been dragged down the road by a dog. 

In spite of this, many have married much younger local women — some on multiple occasions — and having opened some small bar or restaurant prance around town as if they were captains of industry or serial entrepreneurs worthy of a Forbes profile. 

Another common feature of the heavyweight lightweights that make up this gang — this mara — is that they appear to have scant regard for the rules and regulations of Guatemala. 

Badly Brung Up

Time passes but some things never change, such as the atrocious table manners of characters in American movies. 

The more wealthy and sophisticated they are supposed to be - like this couple in 1993's Sliver - the worse it seems to get...forks held in the wrong hand, stabbing almost sorrowfully at the contents of the plate. 

And in this scene it is the knickerless Sharon Stone who is supposed to be causing a stir. 

Even George Clooney does it. I bet Amal can barely bring herself to watch, thinking thoughts along the lines of 'Where was you brung up...the workhouse?'

Go Home

Someone I would very much like to tell to go home is a superannuated Trumpista from Texas who occasionally corners me in the Bodegona.

Last time he insisted on warning me about the crazed policy proposals of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who, he hissed, was dead set on introducing post-natal abortions.

It really does seem to be the Donald's key strategy right now to pre- 'energise' these muppets - as it is more than likely along the way to skew the Democratic selection process towards the potty end of the spectrum.

The Wedding Guest (2018)

I suppose Michael Winterbottom wanted to make The Trip to India but Steve and Rob weren't available, so instead he got Dev and Radhika and loosely fastened them to a plot about a road trip necessitated by the need to flee an arranged marriage in Pakistan.

Ben Keningsberg of the NYT began his review by suggesting he had been expecting a romantic comedy. 

Really? He saw THAT poster and still couldn't get past Dev Patel's type-casting? It would have to have been called Two Funerals and a Wedding.

The thing is that I really enjoyed this movie. The dialogue is almost perfectly tight.

It's almost as if, after having to put up with Rob Brydon's prattling on for three whole movies, Winterbottom self-consciously eschewed the logorrhea to excellent, enigmatic effect.

The Intruder (2019)

Not so much a collection of tropes as one big trope, The Intruder's rigid predictability is actually part of its charm. Remember Unlawful Entry from 1992? Well this is that movie (along with several others) plus a few zeitgheisty tweaks. Race is seemingly not an issue here, yet as in Jordan Peele's Us, it kind of is, as the film's title can refer to either the original owner — sporting a red baseball cap in one scene — or the new one: a mixed-race branding guru from San Francisco who brings a particularly ghastly modernist sensibility to home improvement in the Napa Valley. He has a wife who is dangerously sympathetic towards his potential nemesis and a best friend who is one of those obvious dead-men-walking from the moment he is introduced. And as Ray Liotta did back in '92, so too does Dennis Quaid here with a trope-transcending central performance.

Beneath Us (2019)

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this is that - unlike say 1983's El Norte- you could imagine MAGA-cap wearing Trump supporters finding some soothing confirmation of their worldview here. In the main they are hardly what you would call knowledgable consumers of irony. At a stretch it could even be used south of the border as a propaganda film for ICE, a sort of soft alternative to the wall. Nevertheless, for liberals at least, this is a satirical, 'social' horror about undocumented migrants being used as captive slaves by members of the wealthy white elite in America. Yet I suspect it could just as easily have been set right here in Antigua within the milieu of a certain kind of gringo household complete with casual, grey economy servants. Such a switch would work primarily because director Max Pachman stresses two rather interesting points - that the view of the 'dream' of abundance from beneath is inherently corrupt and conjoined with noxious attitudes, and that said prosperity is ultimately also a travesty — for the affluence of those above is shown to be entirely based on the aggressive exploitation of an over-needy underclass operating in a more authentic economy and thus largely undeserved. And this is why, when (slightly unflattering) comparisons will inevitably be made with Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017), the movie I was most reminded of was the excellent La Zona (2007).

Birds of Passage (2018)

An essentially ethnographic proposition, which has been cleverly blended for added accessibility with a familiar pop cultural narrative, but then made subtly more weighty and mysterious by being framed as an ancient epic of the oral tradition. Think Nat Geo meets Narcos, meets the Godfather meets Homer. 

And it generally works pretty well. The end result is that, despite its appearance here as a windswept, post-apocalytic wasteland, I ended up wanting to visit the Guajira peninsula and its Wayuu occupants and Gallego and Guerra's film joins Burning and Shoplifters in consideration for my favourite flick of 2019. 

Quibbles. It makes the standard 'based on true events' claim at the start, but apparently there is no evidence that either the Wayuu or the Peace Corps had a significant role in Colombia's Bonanza Marimbera. 

And if one is paying attention here, they might just as well have been dealing in coffee rather than weed, because most of the unfortunate events derive from character faults and social fault-lines that were there anyway. And on a couple of occasions I found myself thinking 'he really didn't need to do that', which would be a serious failing in any epic of the old school. 

Rapayet's kingpin crib in the desert has to be one of the best stylised locations in recent cinema.

Pet Sematary (2019)

The adaptation suggested by this poster is the one I'd perhaps have rather seen. 

Something between zombie pet apocalypse and Wicker Man. 

Unfortunately, like a lot of Stephen King tales, this one has a bit too much back and side story going on and the potential for cat and dog-based creepiness ultimately gets a bit lost. 

Not a bad movie, just not really doing what it says on the tin.

Disrespecting the details...

'You can be in Timbuctoo or New York City, I don't care where you are. There's no worse trade for inefficiency than a builder's'  > Harry Pendel, The Tailor of Panama

In any complex project in any part of the world there is a danger that what at the planning stage at least looks like the final 5% can end up taking upwards of 50% of the total time. But here in Guatemala the danger seems especially acute. 

My former business partner used to have a handy analogy for this - the bowl of bananas. When it is first put out people rush in and grab the nice yellow ones, but the darker, spottier ones take longer to shift. 

Most of the Guatemalan contractors I’ve come across tend to assess any project in terms of the part they like best and do at the fastest pace - for example, the builders love lifting block walls, a task which comes with the pleasing routine of a production line. The details that follow barely register until the painful completion phase is upon them. 

Fake Foodie News

Another day, another slightly irritating, cliché-ridden piece in the US media about this place. 

If you saw the home of El Pulpo's Wilson Popenhoe in Antigua you’d realise that the origins of the Haas avocado were far from ‘humble’. Ah, but it’s grotty old Guatemala so they must be, right? 

And where did Lucy Sherriff acquire that canard about the birthplace of chocolate? San Juan del Effing Obispo? 

I suppose it’s rather like the whole ‘birthplace of tango’ thing, all very ‘don’t go there’. 

But the facts as currently known involve the detection of the chemical signature of this liquid on Mesoamerican vessels belonging to the pre-Olmec period in Tabasco, Veracruz and maybe even Chiapas. So, not Guatemala. Especially not Mixco. 

And there are a few fruits and vegetables I can imagine not growing here. I've been particular unsuccessful with olive trees for example. 

Dumbo (2019)

Tim Burton's Dumbo is a big stinking pile of elephant caca.

This notion that the classics of the past need to be 'updated' to show off modern CGI and smooth away all the non-pc stuff, so that developing snowflakes are not exposed to anything that might 'trigger' them surely REEKS.

It's a given it seems that they will grow up immune to the agonies of mediocrity.

Soon we'll have a rebooted version of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner? where there's really no lifestyle choice one's offspring can make that might be the least bit bothersome.

The Hummingbird Project (2018)

At last a role for Salma Hayek where being a forever-glamorous, middle-aged Mexican woman who’s lived for years in the US, but never really learned how to speak English properly is not the absolute essence of it. Here she sports some specs and grey-painted hair and clearly has a lot of fun. 

The film owes a massive (unacknowledged) debt to The Flash Boys by Michael Lewis and I am sure I enjoyed it the more for having read that - as many of the plot devices that would have otherwise smacked of desperation on the part of the writer-director are in fact loosely based on fact.

The Beach Bum (2019)

‘Fun is the fucking gun’, proclaims the titular character in Harmony Korine’s new movie. This stoner non-comedy closely replicates the experience of enforced proximity to an individual who pitches him or herself as the living epitome of the good time. 

The trouble is that while it’s one thing to lead a studiously unconventional lifestyle, it’s another to rub it in everyone else’s faces, whether one is St Francis of Assisi or Moondog here. This is a phenomenon I am all too familiar with. I even knew someone called Moondog back in Belize in the 80s. 

Individuals determined to demonstrate that they have a free pass to live outside everyone else’s mores tend to act with eye-watering entitlement. There are even a few of their sort dotted around Antigua and I tend to feel the same way about them as I did about Matthew McConaughey’s on screen consummation of the type: a form of discomfort that is inevitably boosted by a developing world perspective. 

There’s another quite simple conceit going on here, rather like that of Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus — the jarring notion that great art can emerge from intense dickishness. Yet Korine appears to lack the screenwriting skills to place enough utterances of sufficient profundity into the mouth of his protagonist to carry this off. In fact there is one prize-winning poem set in Havana recited twice in the film by McConaughey, that suggests rather half-heartedly that satire was instead the aim here. 

At the outset one is led to believe that the audience will be placed within the framework of that familiar narrative featuring an essentially bad person forced to go on a journey of personal growth through which, in an altogether unlikely manner, they are transformed into a better sort of human being. (Think Central Station). 

Yet round the mid-point — when Zac Efron shows up in a brave attempt to drag his career below the low it touched in Dirty Grandpa — you realise that Moondog is never going to pull out of this dive, and that anyone he meets on the way down are simply there to emphasise the pull of gravity. 

More’s the pity as I really enjoyed Korine’s previous feature  — Spring Breakers — which was grounded in another OTT performance from a somewhat Marmite male performer (James Franco). 

Piratical

What does someone have to do to deserve the name ‘pirate’? What does a dish have to look like to deserve the name ‘ceviche’? Two of the questions I was mulling here at El Ranchito on Naos Island. 

It always used to irk me a bit how the locals around these parts referred to Drake as a pirate. Gabo was a repeat offender. Surely, I thought, the men who packed those galleons with gold were just as deserving of the title? 

St Augustine reported the opinion of a corsair captain that when it comes to maritime plunder, the difference between an emperor and a pirate is simply one of scale. Drake, like many, was awash in the flexible middle. 

The man who sacked and destroyed the original settlement at Panama City, Welsh privateer Henry Morgan, did so after the Treaty of Madrid between England and Spain in 1671. As a result he was taken back to London to answer for his ‘crime’, but successfully argued that news of the peace hadn’t reached the Caribbean and therefore it could not be enforced from the moment it was agreed. Instead of being hanged as a pirate, he was made Governor of Jamaica. 

Like many of his kind, it turned out he was just one step away from respectability. The same could not be said of that ceviche.

'Menos Pior'. But for us, not you..

The issue I have with the selection process that will place Boris in No10 is this: he said on the Beeb the other night that it's not as reprehensible of the way Gordon Brown was installed because there's a national crisis afoot. In fact that makes it WORSE. 

The manner of these Tory hustings and TV interrogations, where a very narrow range of views on the national predicament have come to the fore, combined with Labour's absurd absence of a position, give the false impression that this Tory discourse, in which Rory Stewart's fairly common sense objections are tagged as 'maverick' or 'insurgent', is the NATIONAL discourse. 

Both traditional parties are now in effect addressing Farage rather than the country as a whole.

I Am Mother (2019)

Spoilers...

This medium-budget Aussie sci-fi (which was picked up by Netflix after Sundance) is plainly derivative, yet has a claim to be more than the sum of other movies’ parts based on the way its premise contains an important thrust of novelty. 

This being the (clearly dubious) notion, familiar to totalitarian systems in the last century and before, that all that is bad in human nature can be nurtured out of us. 

So this time an over-reaching super-AI, having decided that humanity represents if not a threat to it, at least a bloody nuisance, presses the re-set button and starts again with a single (kind of) first woman with the plan of carefully educating this ‘daughter’ within a bunker-like Eden in such a manner that humanity 2.0 is primed to value the claims of the many over the few. 

Why would a supposedly well-informed machine intelligence come to believe that this plan, attempted unsuccessfully (and brutally) in an albeit less pure form by various human societies, work better under its tutelage? Surely it would have swatted up and found out that we ourselves have figured out that the perfectability of man plan has been discredited?

Only the ability to keep trying over and over again until it gets it right seems to justify the programme — that and the fact that compromised humanity appears to have contributed to its own demise. Yet the essential problem remains: how to stop fundamental human nature re-asserting itself. 

The movie has other problems, such as a third female character that ultimately makes only partial sense. Meanwhile, although young Irish-Danish actress Clara Rugaard is at the heart of much that is good about the movie — as are the voice acting skills of Rose Byrne as the personality of her robot ‘Mother’ — we both couldn’t help feeling that a lone human child brought up in this way would be noticeably stranger than the script ultimately allows ‘Daughter’ to be. 

I suppose the director felt he needed to give his film a relate-able YA vibe, but this has the effect of dampening the deeper and darker stuff that might have made it a better. 

Midnight in Chernobyl

Higginbotham makes it clear that the RBMK-1000s (Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalnyy) had rather obvious design - and manufacture - flaws from the outset. One of these was the sheer size of the reactors, a product of a Soviet penchant for the colossal.

“The RBMK was so large that reactivity in one area of the core often had only a loose relationship to that in another. The operators had to control it as if it were not a single unit but several separate reactors in one. One specialist compared it to a huge apartment building, where a family in one flat might be celebrating a raucous wedding, while next door another was observing a funeral wake. Isolated hot spots of reactivity might build deep inside the core, where they could prove hard to detect.”

This inherent instability made life in the reactor control room exhausting and stressful as engineers were constantly pushing buttons on the panels in the hope of evening out reactivity. When one former nuclear submarine officer first took his seat at the desk in Chernobyl’s Unit One, he was horrified by the colossal size of the reactor and how antiquated the instrumentation was. “How can you possibly control this hulking piece of shit?” he asked. “And what is it doing in civilian use?"

This preference for quantity over quality in the USSR is something I pinpointed in an essay in 1985 following my second visit. The point was illustrated with an anecdote about our guide to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, who joyfully rattled off statistics relating to the number of works of art in each of the massive rooms we passed through. That the space might include two of three great masterpieces which were being crowded out by odds and ends of lesser significance was a suggestion that brought a puzzled frown to his face.

Shoddy workmanship was another endemic problem in the USSR. One of my travelling companions in 1984 quickly acquired a reputation for being able to accidentally break almost anything of Soviet manufacture that he came into contact with.

Higginbotham writes: ‘The valves and flow meters in other RBMKs, used to regulate the crucial supply of water to each of the more than 1,600 uranium-filled channels, proved so unreliable that the operators in the control room often had no idea to what extent the reactors were being cooled, or if they were being cooled at all. Accidents were inevitable...the serpentine plumbing of the reactor was riddled with faults: the water-steam coolant pipes were corroded, the zirconium-steel joints on the fuel channels had come loose, and the designers had failed to build any safety system to protect the reactor against a failure of its feed-water supply—eventually, the Chernobyl engineers had to design and fabricate their own.’ (Chapuz, chapuz, chapuz...)

Meanwhile, Alexander Sokurov’s one-take feature film set in the above-mentioned museum - Russian Ark (2002) - is indeed a masterpiece that I would recommend to all.