Cantina Tolteca -- pissing away them Kokopelli blues (Joe Bageant)

[Tace]

(or)

Visions of el rio

--Live from the Cantina Of No Return

Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

Mar. 22, 2010 -- JALISCO, Mexico -- Cantina Tolteca is one of those manly Mexican watering holes, where you piss up against a tile barroom wall while ordering the next round from a passing barmaid. With a beer and three shots of mescal in your sails, and the jukebox playing La Paloma, a man feels about as free and unselfconscious here as he ever likely to in this world. Which is what men’s bars are for to begin with.

Aside from a couple of putas (and one puto) who roll in after 9 p.m., few women and almost no gringos come into the Tolteca. They pass by the Tolteca’s plate glass window, the gringo men in their new L.L. Bean Indiana Jones canvas hats, the Mexican mamas with trays of pastries for sale, the gringas in their long tourist shop skirts. Sometimes they glance briefly into the glass, which for them is a mirror, and then keep on walking. Watching them from inside the dim bar is rather like watching a brightly lit aquarium with countless odd fish floating by.

Occasionally a cop pauses in the doorway, silhouetted against the outside glare. But “the cop ain’t gonna do nothing,” says a tall sixty-something gringo named Larry. “Not unless you get inna fight. And if you don’t have sense enough to apologize and get the hell out of here immediately, he’ll probably arrest you.

Larry should know. He’s a former Chicago cop. Six two and lanky, he has a quick, darting energy in his eyes, as if he has spent a lifetime noticing things. The eyes are set in a face that has seen several facial reconstructions, thanks to a brick he took in the kisser during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Larry is a man of the old school who still admires Mayor Daley and Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo. He doesn’t see one bit of conflict in that he is also a Wobbly in the truest sense. Larry thinks America has become “a goddamned corrupt police state that needs a good old fashioned revolution, the kind where you bust some heads and dare the fuckers to ever try that shit again.” A wife and a life walking a beat have come and gone. What he has to show for it, he keeps in his left pocket, the black Bakelite police whistle issued him as a rookie, and a brass call box key. Fingering the call box key, he says, “Betcha ain’t seen one of these in a long time.”

“Never seen one in my life.”

“The ex got everything else. But I don’t give a fuck.”

Outside the front window is a tied horse. The horse has managed to get its neck far enough around to tear loose a burlap pack sack of dried foliage, and scatter the contents. The horse’s owner is at the bar. He can see the horse serenely munching away, but does not move. “He don’t give a fuck, either,” Larry chuckles.

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[tom_paine]

1. Bageant gets it. Unfortunately, "getting it" in our 21st Century Empire

is like "getting it" in 1931 Germany.

No one can hear you over the cacophonous carnival of the "gleichschaltung-ed" media and wouldn't believe you if they could hear you.