by John Murray

This Cinco de Mayo, while some are celebrating Mexico’s past, most Mexicans are anxious about its uncertain future. Yesterday in Mexico City, national security minister Genero Garcia Luna remarked at the Reuters Latin American Investment Summit that the war against the cartels will in all probability take years before anything is accomplished. Citing other prominent examples of long-lasting wars on organized crime in places like Italy, Colombia and Chicago in the 1920s, Garcia Luna explained that expectations for a quick finish should be tempered against these historical examples that lasted “six years on average.”

Now that we are at what seems to be the peak of violence since the government’s war on the cartels began in 2007, it certainly is disheartening to think that such a level of mayhem could continue for years into the future. But this also raise the question: what will the completion of this war look like? Perhaps only one of the examples that Garcia Luna raised had a definitive end, the reign of Al Capone’s Chicago mafia, and the event that truly precipitated the finality of that era was the end of Prohibition. In Italy, despite that the out-in-the-open days of Mafia rule as a threat to the state may be past, organized crime is still a widespread and hugely influential force, despite that it may be a bit more behind the scenes.

The situation of Colombia in the 1980s is an even more problematic example, since it is so closely linked to the Mexican drug trafficking problem. Pablo Escobar was a figure who waged an outright war on the Colombian government, attempting to not only avoid extradition to the US but also to achieve some kind of government-sanctioned ability to operate his business, and he tried to do so through sheer force and violence. He bombed an airliner, set off enormous bombs in crowded cities, even assassinated supreme court justices and a prominent presidential candidate. Eventually, Escobar was killed with the help of US Delta Force commandos, but it did nothing to stop the drug trade. The Cali cartel took the place of Escobar’s Medellin cartel as the prominent drug traffickers in the country for a time, and later the Norte de Valle cartel. Today, the flow of cocaine out of Colombia hasn’t been affected at all.

It seems then that the conclusion Garcia Luna is referring to is less an assured victory in the government’s war against the cartels than a stabilization and tapering off of the horrific violence and upheaval the country is currently experiencing. This makes sense considering his audience, a conference of people trying to assess the potential and safety of foreign investment in Latin American countries like Mexico. In essence, then, it seems Garcia Luna isn’t referring to the government’s war on the cartels resolving at all. Instead he’s talking about the war between the cartels themselves, making a sort of ‘this too shall pass’ assurance on the situation. While this is categorically different than Escobar’s all-out war on the Colombian government, the outcome will be the same as in Colombia. No matter what cartels are destroyed in the current realignment of the industry, the drug trade will continue to exist. But perhaps there will eventually be an event or series of events that allows relative stability to reassert itself, bringing the appearance of an ‘end.’

The government’s role then is to look busy until that eventuality occurs. As evidence of the government’s commitment and focus on the cartel war, Garcia Luna brought up the recent removal of the Army and their replacement by the Mexican federal police as arbiters of law and security in Juarez. “We’ve had federal police (in control) in Ciudad Juarez for almost 20 days… and we are beginning to see signs of improvement in public security,” he said.

But this was the same thing the government said when they originally sent the Army to Juarez in March 2009. There was a lull in killings at first, and then they got worse than they were before. Why will the presence of the federal police be any different? The removal of the Army had more to do with public relations than the ability of another force to do a better job than them, as they were accused of human rights abuses, murders and rampant corruption-as well as expelling the Chihuahua state Human Rights investigator Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson from the country with death threats. If you need evidence as to the ability of drug gangs to corrupt the Federal Police, there is plenty.

It just goes back to the fact that the problem of drug trafficking becoming such a large, culturally ingrained and violent force in Mexico over the past few decades wasn’t a military problem to begin with, and it can’t be solved with a military solution. First and foremost, drug trafficking is a problem of capitalism, with a neighbor to Mexico’s north that outlaws drugs its citizens are willing to pay billions annually for. But it’s also a Mexican economic and social problem, with so much of Mexico’s dirt poor ruled by an oligarchical, supremely wealthy class that has done little socially for those citizens. As Hickerson noted, “The people of Juarez aren’t going to gain anything if the Juarez cartel or the Sinaloa cartel falls. I can assure you that the salaries of the people of Juarez won’t go up even a dollar if one of the two cartels falls.” The communities in which these cartels thrive and in which violence is most rampant are on the outskirts of Mexican society, stricken by poverty, close to the border or deep in the rural provinces. The investments that people like Genero Garcia Luna are trying to attract aren’t really going to do much of anything to help those communities, where the government can think of nothing better to do than deploy an authoritarian police force that threatens the civil and human rights of its own citizenry.

But maybe it is unfair to blame the Mexican government entirely for the focus on military intervention as the only response to the drug cartels, especially in the light of concern about foreign investment. One of the biggest foreign investments in Mexico is the Merida Initiative, the $400 million US aid package signed into action in 2008 that specifically provides Mexico “equipment and training in support of law enforcement operations and technical assistance to promote the long-term reform, oversight and professionalization of our partners’ security agencies.” For all the talk about “shared responsibility” that got Merida approved, maybe we should talk about better ways to allocate those funds when Merida expires in 2011and a new military aid package inevitably comes up for review.

John Murray is a lover of obscurity. He lives and writes in Arizona.

In another sign of our growing national rejection of all things brown, the Times takes a look at the world of whiskey, which is itself undergoing a caucasianation, at least among its more trendy adherents. Welcome to the world of white dog.

White dog, or white whiskey, is, basically, moonshine. It’s newborn whiskey, crystal-clear grain distillate, as yet unkissed by the barrel, the vessel that lends whiskey some or all of its color and much of its flavor. And white dog is currently having its day.

Well, every dog does. And I guess it’s nice to see that one of America’s oldest traditions is being revived and refined and commercialized to appeal to a wealthy elite who would otherwise disdain its low class origins. (Although I am certainly no less guilty of that than anyone else: The first time I drank moonshine was in the back of a country store in Columbus, Mississippi, where it was passed around in a flask. When I sipped it the first thing I said was, “This tastes just like grappa!” I remain mortified to this day and will probably go to my grave still cringing about it.) In any event, the article summarizes the growing popularity of these albino liquors, many of which are indeed excellent. Of course, much as with any other hobby, there’s a certain amount of snobbery which creeps in. This quote from an anonymous moonshine aficionado is pretty much the pro forma response to any previously obscure interest that begins to gain popularity:

He said he was not surprised by the advent of commercial white dogs. “I’ve been telling people for years that they have to taste corn whiskey, so that when they taste whiskey, they can find their way around the inside of their mouth.”

That said, he’s not overly impressed with what’s coming out. “The hobby distillers who are on the foodie bent are making better whiskey than you can buy. Period. No question about it. You just can’t do as good a job making 1,000 gallons at a time as you can making 10 gallons a time. There’s people making white dog that is mind-blowing.”

Expect a distiller to show up on the cover of Whiskey Drinker magazine wearing a T-shirt that says “Corporate Moonshine Still Sucks” any day now.

Family Research Council Founder Really Used Rentboy.com To Rent A Boy (For Completely Non-Sexual Purposes)

Baptist minister and non-liker of homosexuality George A. Reker has something to say about those allegations regarding his luggage-carrying rentboy that broke yesterday: “A recent article in an alternative newspaper cleverly gave false impressions of inappropriate behavior because of its misleading innuendo, incorrectly implying that Professor George Rekers used the Rentboy website to hire a prostitute to accompany him on a recent trip. Contrary to Internet stories based on this slanderous article, following medical advice Professor George Rekers requires an assistant to lift his luggage in his travels because of an ongoing condition following surgery. His family, local friends, and even another university professor colleague have offered to accompany him on trips to lift luggage. Professor Rekers was not involved in any illegal or sexual behavior with his travel assistant.” Hm! “Illegal or sexual”? Those seem like two odd words to link!

by Graham T. Beck

Last night, Pablo Picasso’s Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur (1932) fetched more at auction than any artwork in history ($106.5 million!) for the same reason that my whiskey chocolate chili never wins the annual firehouse cook off: popularity, whether measured in US dollars or cayenne-smudged secret ballots, has everything to do with the lowest common denominator.

In this regard, my chili, with its saccharine burn and dyspeptic bite, is unluckily awkward, while Picassso’s five-foot-by-four-foot, painted-in-a-day rendering of Marie-Thérèse Walter, his muse through the 1930s, is deliciously conventional.

She is an outstretched pink blob with the closed eyes and open neck of feminine submission; a vampire’s delight or a voyeur’s wet dream. Perched above this roofied Olympia is her visage again, as a bust in the gray of Grecian stone. Above that and behind it and folded into the blue background is Picasso’s silhouette somehow casting a shadow that rests on top of the pink blob’s breasts and neck in an impressive and impossible fondle. Whew.

As Times art critic Holland Cotter has it:

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust and other paintings from its period are old and easy, art as usual. They keep to the known, the pleasure zone; they keep old orders firm, artist over subject, man over woman, woman as thing, a pink blob with closed eyes.

As they will, some notable art writers disagree with this sweeping assessment of an entire epoch in the career of an artist who is one of the past century’s greatest and most significant, but when it comes to the auction block or the firehouse cookout, the proof isn’t stewing in the pot or penned on the critic’s page but in the dollars paid or the stumpy little fingers of the Napoleonic chief who never calls my name no matter how much salt and cheese I spill into that bubbling pot of ground round.

Though Picasso’s most critically celebrated period-and the one that almost everyone pegs as his most significant contribution to art and culture-is his cubist phase, his most expensive works at market, paintings like Garçon à la pipe (1904), Dora Maar au Chat (1941), Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur and Yo, Picassso (1901) were produced on either side of the cubist window (about 1906–1921, for the nerds following at home). That said, few of those seminal pieces appear at auction or change hands. Arlequin (1909) is the most recent to get near the block. Its estimated sale price in 2008 was a mere (gulp) $30 million, but it was pulled before the sale for private reasons.

I’m certainly not suggesting that only second-tier work sells for exorbitant prices, nor that critical darlings don’t clean up on occasion. But in fine art, like in, well, everything else, critical hits don’t always turn out to be the money-minting endeavors that some middle-of-the road, center of the bell curve, high-testing features turn out to be. That shouldn’t be news to anyone, I guess, just like I’m not completely enraged that last year’s firehouse cook off winner told me his secret ingredients were ketchup and Cheez Whiz. Still, it’s gross.

Graham T. Beck writes about art, cities, the environment and his problems.

Here is the latest Internet prescription to cure your socially networked ills! “Google yourself at least once a week,” says strategic communications guru Richard Levick in a Wall Street Journal piece that has some more philosophizing about the new, high-speed brand of mean. (Sample sentence: “Drive over to Wal-Mart for a gallon of milk and you may end up on PeopleofWalmart.com.”) Given that Google is currently tweaking its results pages to be even more up-to-the-minute with its data, checking out your cyber-breadcrumb trail might not be at least as not-bad of an idea as, I don’t know, not putting stuff on the Internet that you don’t want “out there” in general! Although I have to say that it’s hard to take seriously any “DANGER INTERNET” piece that opens with this anecdote:

Steven Fink recently received an unsolicited email containing nude photos of a woman whose jilted ex-boyfriend wanted to embarrass her. The guy presumably hoped these private photos would go viral online, and now countless strangers are obliging him in his mean-spirited campaign.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I get “unsolicited” e-mails like this multiple times a day from people I don’t know! Because they are… wait for it… come-ons for spam sites. Note that Fink’s correspondent is not identified as a friend. I mean, sure, perhaps someone just happened to get this “crisis-management firm” honcho’s e-mail address and figure that he was the guy to start a smear campaign with. But maybe also Fink is using an example culled from his not-very-well-kept junk-mail folder in order to make a tenuous “people sure are vicious” point that isn’t brought up again at all in the rest of the piece? Honestly, all these “the internet is so mean” stories would be so much better if they were told by the people being cruel — because then at least we could all figure out why people act the way they act, instead of just getting scared that naked pictures of ourselves that we didn’t even take would wind up on the front page of Google News.

In honor of Cinco de Mayo-actually, scratch that. Here’s the trailer to Robert Rodriguez’s Machete, an outgrowth of the fake trailer from his half of Grindhouse. I have NO IDEA what is going on here, but clearly Robert De Niro wandered by the set one day and they were all, “You want to be in it?” and he was like, “Sure!” It’s… something. [Via]

There has been a request for Mexican recipes, as it is Cinco de Mayo. You have come to the right place. (My co-worker, Mr. Balk, suggested he might write one but I discovered it had Velveeta in it and he was denied.) Instead, lemme hook you up with fake Mexican holiday real Mexican dinner time!

I am presuming you do not own a tortilla press, because you are lazy. I also do not, as I will never make my own corn tortillas. But I will drive 25 miles to the edge of a local farming community where many migrant Mexican workers live and there I will purchase massive amounts of tortillas (and dried chiles and whatnot) from them. Ruinously, and first worldly, the gas to get there costs more than the tortillas, I think. I am never going to tell you where to buy tortillas, because I don’t want any white people in my tortilla shop, but if anyone in the place that is selling you tortillas speaks English very much, you are buying them in the wrong place. (THAT’S NOT RACIST, I AM DEADLY SERIOUS. I mean, when I see a ramen bar full of white people, I’m out of THERE too, after all, right?) And besides, you should support small Mexican-American-owned businesses, with their incredibly slim profit margins, because that is where the people shop who keep our economy functioning and they need these stores.

Also buy some stuff to eat on the way home, because, this will be the best Mexican food to be had EVER.

So if you have gone to get the tortillas, you’re halfway there. Dinner is nothing without good corn tortillas.

Okay now if it gets found out that I’m giving away this recipe I might be in some trouble but I care about you eating, so here we go.

You get your pinto beans. Like, you know, some! A couple cups, a couple handfuls. How many people are you having over? A bunch? Then make more. PINTO BEANS. There are no other beans. You do actually have to go through them as if this were 1862 and make sure there are no rocks and stuff. It’s weird, you actually still do find stones in your pinto beans.

Then you put a pot on the stove with the beans and a couple cups of water and a couple cups of chicken or vegetable stock and a few slices of (good) bacon and half an onion and some pepper and salt and maybe half a dried ancho chile. And then you cook it until it’s done! It could be like an hour and a half. Could be more, could be less! Don’t let it get dried out. In the end it should be, you know, soft and beany and the house should smell like YON DAYS OF MEXICAN YORE.

During that extremely prolonged time, I whip up some salsa. (Um, chop up a tomato or two and maybe a tomatillo and half an onion and a handful of cilantro and a TINY bit of hot pepper, usually serrano, or whatever you have, and some salt and pepper and a ton of lime juice. It’ll taste like SALSA when you’re done. THIS is the world’s NUMBER ONE DISH THAT YOU CANNOT RUIN. But go on, try! You know, you can put anything in there. Garlic, mango, pineapple, ginger, bell pepper, parsley, key limes, whatever doesn’t sound too gross.)

Also you should put some sour cream in a bowl. May I recommend Wallaby organic “European-style” sour cream? That stuff is GOOD. I eat it with a spoon.

If you eat fish or meat, now would be a decent time to either:

1) Throw some olive-oil and salt and peppered mahi-mahi on the grill (which you should have lit, then!) and/or

2) Throw some hamburger into a pan with salt and pepper and a chile negro and a little this and a little that.

Also you could make guacamole! Do you know HOW HARD this is? Avocados. Lime juice. Salt. A little cilantro again. A little cayenne or cumin? A little garlic? If you spice it, add a tiny bit of VANILLA. Shh! Don’t tell. You should also put vanilla in the hamburger meat. The thing is? Never forget when cooking Mexican food just where vanilla came from. MEXICO BABY. You can actually put it in nearly everything Mexican. Did you know that the vanilla orchid can only be naturally pollinated by ONE SINGLE BEE? A wee little bee, called the Melipona bee!

Almost all of the vanilla you eat is either chemically synthesized (FAKE) or from hand-pollinated orchids (AND REAL), because that bee is TOO LAZY to cross the border out of Mexico, so suck it, Arizona. You can fix this, but it involves moving to a tropical climate and learning how to hand pollinate vanilla planifoliia, one of the GREATEST PLANTS IN THE WORLD.

Not so hard, right? You too can have sex with plants!

I appear to have become slightly distracted, however we are pretty much done? Except the most important part.

Put all the stuff up above on the table in dishes and, as everyone’s ready to eat, then, to prepare tortillas for the table, you get a little bowl or napkin-lined basket and you get your tortillas out and you put them on the stove burner until warmed and/or slightly burnt. The end. Toast ’em on the burner, toss ’em in the basket, take them to the table and ASSEMBLE THESE FOOD ITEMS into ONE FOOD ITEM. If you need directions on that part, you’re beyond my help.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Coming

Each generation needs to learn anew the lessons previously inculcated upon their predecessors, so it perhaps in the spirit of public service for the youth of that that ladysite The Gloss offers up this guide to blowjob etiquette. The moral is simplicity itself: When the receiver becomes aware that he is soon to express his pleasure in the performer’s face, it is courteous that he should so indicate. The Emily Post of hummers suggests uttering a simple phrase such as “I’m going to come,” or “I’m about to come,” but I’ve found that singing a sped-up version of the chorus to Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes The Flood” is just as effective (although for some reason it does not result in many repeat performances). And don’t forget to leave a tip on your way out, just to show your appreciation. Now you know!

Here are a few things that the FDA found while checking out the Pennsylvania plant that produces the liquid versions of children’s Tylenol, Benadryl, and Zyrtec — all of which were recalled last week by manufacturer McNeil Consumer Healthcare: “Thick dust and grime covering certain equipment”! “A hole in the ceiling”! “Duct tape-covered pipes”! Also, “raw ingredients contaminated by an unspecified bacteria” and, perhaps most importantly, corporate knowledge of many of these conditions. Yum. Production at the suburban Philadelphia plant has been suspended while the cleaning crews get called in, which is probably for the best since the facility also makes adult-appropriate products. But there’s a bright side, at least: “The latest recalls of children’s Tylenol probably means there’s just less upside to J&J;’s earnings estimates,” one financial analyst told Reuters, which helpfully noted that McNeil’s parent Johnson & Johnson rakes in about $62 billion in sales a year. But wait, does less “upside” mean less money for fixing pipes? So many questions!

Editor Jon Meacham talks to the Observer about the sale of Newsweek: “We have to figure out what journalism is going to be as the old business model collapses all around us. And I want to be — I want to try to be — a part of that undertaking. Will it work? Who the hell knows. But I’m at least going to look at this.” He did not exactly go on to reveal a business plan. Also, he is not returning his voicemails from billionaires. We know you’ve had a busy morning, Jon, but it’s not 1985, buddy!