God, she had a 13-year-old daughter and still she killed herself? What a total dick. What kind of an evildoer does this to a girl who is entering puberty? Jeez.

At first, I felt compassion but then I read about the daughter and I have no compassion anymore for a self-centered prick who’d do that to a kid.

Knowing how to learn is a great skill. I wanted to write an article about film but I was completely ignorant about film theory. So I took a couple of weeks and taught myself film theory.

The article was accepted for publication with cosmetic changes 15 minutes ago. Both reviewers praised my deep knowledge of film theory.

I’ll soon be submitting my first article on Basques. I wonder if people will notice I’m a neophyte.

Howard Schultz, the outspoken executive chairman of Starbucks, will retire at the end of the month. He’s frequently mentioned as a possible Democratic presidential candidate.

Mentioned by what kind of an enemy of humanity, exactly?

The quote is from the New York Times. Note the cute use of the passive voice.

The 21-century maquis are actually fantasizing about having sex with Trump.

This is embarrassing to watch.

Historically, one of the biggest struggles of the first-year writing students I’ve worked with is their adherence to the “rules” of writing they’ve either been explicitly taught or implicitly internalized. The five-paragraph structure, which includes a thesis at the end of the first paragraph, and a concluding paragraph which starts with “In conclusion…” are two of the most common moves in evidence.

God, I would kill to get this person’s students for a change. It would be fantastic to struggle with these kinds of issues instead of discovering anew each semester that nobody has ever introduced students to the idea that a text should have a beginning and an end.

And so where do you think the chief organizer of the whole charade described in Volpi’s novel is right now? The fellow who came up with the whole plan of “let’s grab these innocent bystanders, torture and rape them with broomsticks and get them to confess to the kidnapping of these other poor bastards whom we tortured and raped with broomsticks a little earlier”? The fellow whose plan was wildly successful? Where do you think he is?

He’s where I am. In Florida.

And where are the real kidnappers? The ones whose crimes were not investigated even though Volpi has demonstrated that there is overwhelming evidence of their guilt? The ones who went free because the police was too busy organizing that whole charade with torturing innocent bystanders?

Hmm, what a mystery. Where can they possibly be?

I’ll let you guess.

At the turn of the 21 century, things started going very badly for Mexico. Of course, it’s not like the country was problem-free before. There was all kinds of bad stuff going on. But there was a definite feeling of things getting better and the country going in a positive direction overall at the end of the twentieth century.

In 2000, when the political party that had been in power for 70 years finally lost an election, there was a great enthusiasm and a confidence that now finally Mexico’s path towards a true, functioning democracy was complete. Mexico is quite unique among Hispanic countries in that it hasn’t had a military dictatorship in over a century but its democracy was always limited in scope by the fact that a single party was always in power. So when a true multi-party system finally arose, it was a big deal.

And then it all went to the dogs.

The new party of power wanted to score big victories fast and adopted a strategy of fighting drug cartels that was very counterproductive and only fed the chaos. The opioid crisis in the US was creating a growing demand for heroin that put more cartels in business. NAFTA was putting great pressure on an economy that wasn’t ready for such an intense plunge into globalization. I know there must be something else, another major factor I’m not seeing right now, but I know it’s there.

Mind you, I don’t in the least think that Mexico is hopeless or anything of the kind. Mexico is strong and will figure it out. Right now is a shitty moment, but this is a country I believe in.

So. How can I make the story of false imprisonments in Mexico more appealing?

Ok, let’s try this. Miranda de Wallace, the activist who has been the most vocal and aggressive supporter of keeping the falsely accused, raped and tortured folks in jail, is the person who organized the anti-Trump protests in Mexico in 2017. And the relatives of the victims she was trying to keep in jail were attempting to stop the protest.

These days, unless you make it about Trump, it generates zero interest.

There is so much to talk about in Volpi’s novel that now I won’t quit discussing it for a while.

One fascinating aspect is that this entire 500-page novel was written to erase the effects of a single video that was aired on Mexican TV back in 2005. The police staged a rescue of kidnapping victims and an arrest of kidnappers. “Staged” means it was all completely fake. It never happened. The police wanted to set up these completely innocent bystanders for kidnapping and the best way to do that in the absence of any evidence was to create a powerful image for the public to believe. Both the victims and the accused were raped and tortured by the police to ensure they performed well in the video.

Thirteen years later, all of the falsely accused innocent bystanders but one are still in jail, and the public opinion is still mostly not on their side. Nothing that has been said or proven since then has been stronger than that one poorly made video.

People hate to have to change their minds, especially about something they have seen. Whoever tells the story first, especially if it’s accompanied with a strong image, owns the situation.

The novel narrates the true story of a Mexican man and his French girlfriend who were falsely accused of running a kidnapping gang, tortured and incarcerated. Kidnapping people to get ransom is one of the most wide-spread types of crime in Mexico. By the most modest accounts, 18 people are kidnapped in Mexico every single day. When the victims are women or children, they are not only tortured but also gang-raped daily every day they spend in captivity.

Authorities in Mexico are desperate to show the public that they are tough on crime. But investigating crime is hard, so they routinely grab some poor innocent bastards, torture and rape them for days until they confess to be kidnappers (or narcos, or robbers, etc) and put them in jail. This happens all the time, and nobody gives a crap. The only reason why the case narrated by Volpi in his documentary novel got any attention is that this time the Mexican police made the mistake of arresting a French citizen on such false charges.

The French government – including president Sarkozy – fought hard for the liberty of their falsely accused and imprisoned in Mexico compatriot. A decade later, they actually succeeded in rescuing her from a Mexican jail. Nobody, however, fought for the Mexicans who were falsely accused together with the French woman and treated much much worse.

Volpi wants the world to care not only for the French victim of Mexican police misconduct but also for the Mexican ones. And what I really like about the novel is that he isn’t laying the responsibility for the shameful state of Mexico’s criminal justice system at anyone else’s door. I’m honestly very fed up with hearing how everything is the fault of the Spanish empire, the US, or the little green aliens from Alpha Centauri.

Volpi makes no secret of wanting to be a Zola-like figure in a modern rendition of the Dreyfus case. It’s kind of ironic since the most sinister figure in his narrative is a Mossad-trained Mexican Jew. But hey, if you’re bothered by anti-Semitism, abstain from Latin American literature. And Almudena Grandes, as we all learned recently.

The novel is completely documentary and based on truly extensive research. I deeply respect Volpi (Mossad-trained evil Jews notwithstanding) for doing this work. I believe that if more intellectuals in underdeveloped, corrupt countries like his and mine stopped dickering around and started fighting for human rights like Volpi does, it would make a real difference.