Ciudad Juárez

Line 17:

And thus it was that Phase III began, on December 11, 2006, with 7,000 troops preparing to march on Michoacan, and 40,000 waiting for their birth-death certificates, and everything taking a turn for the terminally weird, with everyone involved, including the Government, not only fighting on any and all sides of the battle, but simultaneously at peace and at war with themselves, which didn’t make much sense, particularly to Raymond, which in turn led to another of those Raymond-type shrugs, and yet another assumption of the “wait and see” attitude, like wait at elevation on a hilltop in El Paso, and see if all of Mexico got wiped off the map.

On the glass-half-full side, when the Mexican Army had invaded their land, Zambada Garcia had called for a truce among Cartels, and brokered a simple peace pact between the warring factions, which resulted in a coalition called La Federacion, not to be confused with La Federacion, also known as La Alianza de Sangre, much less La Nueva Federacion, which in turn should not in any way be confused with itself, since La Familia Michoacana both did and did not want anything to do with it; this might be a good time to stop thinking trench warfare, with nice clean battle lines, and barren-stretch No-Man’s-Land warnings to civilians, and start thinking back to the Peloponnesian War, and battle lines drawn in the shifting currents of the Aegean, while trying to keep in mind that what Thucydides meant by stasis was a steady-state condition of constant civil war, a condition maintained, fortunately for historians, through the ceaseless suppression of any sort of impulse toward decency and moderation and a sense of shared humanity, which even on paper sounds hopelessly bland, in favor of unleashing the far more interesting forces of greed, fanaticism, and human depravity, without which human history would be a far different story; imagine a world without greed and depravity, and the next thing you know, you’ve never heard of Thucydides, you’ve just reduced one of the world’s great historians to the status, let’s face it, of a complete nonentity, just another nameless Greek, really no one in particular, kicking back on his sunlit porch sipping a kylix of Chian wine, staring off at the blue Aegean and the vast Alimos sky, caught up, just for a moment, in one of those out-of-the-blue moments where everything that is is just as it should be, and even his own rather ordinary gardens, full of lavender shades of agnos blossoms and crimson anemone and pure white asphodelos, are in harmony with themselves, and momentarily timeless, and then unleashing a sudden impulse to take his kids for a swim. Fortunately for Thucydides, as far as the drug wars are concerned, he won’t have to worry about taking the kids for a swim, because greed and depravity are basically immortal, and any sudden outbreak of a sense of shared humanity won’t last long unless it’s heavily armed. Zambada Garcia’s anti-Army Federation was a kind of Lions Club for Drug Lords, purblind knights in the crusade for utter darkness, or a let-the-free-market-function Chamber of Commerce, with yet another long list of inscrutable nicknames. In harmony at last, in a steady-state of stasis, the drug lords were now working together, to fight off the poorly paid and under-equipped Army, and when that didn’t work, they recruited their workers, using banners that criss-crossed the Sinaloa and Sonora and Chihuahua state highways, advertising better wages and working conditions: GOOD PAY, FOOD, AND HELP FOR YOUR FAMILIES. It probably goes without saying, just for the record, that senior Mexican Government officials have a whole different deal, based on a formula that goes back to antiquity, and with an entirely different approach to cost-of-living adjustments: Dónde están mis dólares putas? which translates loosely to Where’s my fucking money? and amounts to a, give or take, lifetime contract. On the glass-blown-to-shit side, peace is for lightweights, there’s not much point in amassing ungodly firepower and armaments exotica and overwhelming quantities of weaponry paraphernalia, unless it’s put to use for the betterment of man, through establishment of more open and democratic societies, and markets free to function without excessive intervention, bringing freedom and prosperity to our brothers in the fight, and raining a fucking shitstorm on the rest of you pussies: Los Zetas found themselves like a landlocked country, a drug cartel without its own plaza, and having also discovered that they were deeply tired of swatting at ~~mosquito’s~~ in coastal Matamoras, they decided to tackle both problems at once, first filling in the swamps with the cranial debris of Gulf Cartel trade reps in Neuvo Laredo, and then seizing the shipping lanes into Laredo itself, which hadn’t looked like much when viewed from the air, but has like 9,000 trucks, and 40% of Mexico’s exports, passing through it daily, jampacked with drugs; La Familia Michoacana, an evangelical religious group, whose spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, had long been heeding the call to the cloth and divine retribution and eternal salvation, through the beheading of nonbelievers in his family-values cause, became deeply disturbed by Federal Government depravity, having caught them in the act of committing the mortal sin of competing with La Familia in the methamphetamine business, and sent word of their disillusionment back to Mexico City, via twelve Federal agents who were so wracked with guilt that their mutilated bodies had to be shoveled-up and dime-bagged from the dust around a Michoacan roadside shrine, where they had come to do penance and atone for their sins, before traveling home with pieces of La Familia’s tortuous message; the Beltran-Leyva Sonora Cartel grew wary of supporting a tyrant named Shorty, perhaps as a result of El Chapo himself dropping a so-called dime on his partner, Alfredo Beltran, leading to a most unfortunate encounter between Edgar Guzman, El Chapo’s son, and 15 or 20 of the omnipresent Zetas, apparently still For Hire for special occasions, and by the time the Zetas had lightened their load of AK-47 8M3 hollow-points, and dropped off their smoking RPG-7s, now rendered grenadeless, in a Guzman-family shopping cart, it turned out that Edgar, El Chapo’s heir apparent, was about half the size of his own “Shorty” father; and to add insult and injury to grievous bodily harm, Los Negros abandoned their principles altogether, becoming the drug-war equivalent of Blackwater/Xe, killing Sinaloans, Zetas, Matamorans, Beltran-Leyvians, hanging severed human heads from the bridges of Cuernavaca, providing risk management consulting to every war zone in Mexico, and had to be replaced by the Thetas Ray’d encountered, in an excess of X’s and lager-bottle fragments and the plaguing of philosophers with arithmetical esoterics, having something to do with the subtraction of human limbs.

On the glass-half-full side, when the Mexican Army had invaded their land, Zambada Garcia had called for a truce among Cartels, and brokered a simple peace pact between the warring factions, which resulted in a coalition called La Federacion, not to be confused with La Federacion, also known as La Alianza de Sangre, much less La Nueva Federacion, which in turn should not in any way be confused with itself, since La Familia Michoacana both did and did not want anything to do with it; this might be a good time to stop thinking trench warfare, with nice clean battle lines, and barren-stretch No-Man’s-Land warnings to civilians, and start thinking back to the Peloponnesian War, and battle lines drawn in the shifting currents of the Aegean, while trying to keep in mind that what Thucydides meant by stasis was a steady-state condition of constant civil war, a condition maintained, fortunately for historians, through the ceaseless suppression of any sort of impulse toward decency and moderation and a sense of shared humanity, which even on paper sounds hopelessly bland, in favor of unleashing the far more interesting forces of greed, fanaticism, and human depravity, without which human history would be a far different story; imagine a world without greed and depravity, and the next thing you know, you’ve never heard of Thucydides, you’ve just reduced one of the world’s great historians to the status, let’s face it, of a complete nonentity, just another nameless Greek, really no one in particular, kicking back on his sunlit porch sipping a kylix of Chian wine, staring off at the blue Aegean and the vast Alimos sky, caught up, just for a moment, in one of those out-of-the-blue moments where everything that is is just as it should be, and even his own rather ordinary gardens, full of lavender shades of agnos blossoms and crimson anemone and pure white asphodelos, are in harmony with themselves, and momentarily timeless, and then unleashing a sudden impulse to take his kids for a swim. Fortunately for Thucydides, as far as the drug wars are concerned, he won’t have to worry about taking the kids for a swim, because greed and depravity are basically immortal, and any sudden outbreak of a sense of shared humanity won’t last long unless it’s heavily armed. Zambada Garcia’s anti-Army Federation was a kind of Lions Club for Drug Lords, purblind knights in the crusade for utter darkness, or a let-the-free-market-function Chamber of Commerce, with yet another long list of inscrutable nicknames. In harmony at last, in a steady-state of stasis, the drug lords were now working together, to fight off the poorly paid and under-equipped Army, and when that didn’t work, they recruited their workers, using banners that criss-crossed the Sinaloa and Sonora and Chihuahua state highways, advertising better wages and working conditions: GOOD PAY, FOOD, AND HELP FOR YOUR FAMILIES. It probably goes without saying, just for the record, that senior Mexican Government officials have a whole different deal, based on a formula that goes back to antiquity, and with an entirely different approach to cost-of-living adjustments: Dónde están mis dólares putas? which translates loosely to Where’s my fucking money? and amounts to a, give or take, lifetime contract. On the glass-blown-to-shit side, peace is for lightweights, there’s not much point in amassing ungodly firepower and armaments exotica and overwhelming quantities of weaponry paraphernalia, unless it’s put to use for the betterment of man, through establishment of more open and democratic societies, and markets free to function without excessive intervention, bringing freedom and prosperity to our brothers in the fight, and raining a fucking shitstorm on the rest of you pussies: Los Zetas found themselves like a landlocked country, a drug cartel without its own plaza, and having also discovered that they were deeply tired of swatting at mosquitos in coastal Matamoras, they decided to tackle both problems at once, first filling in the swamps with the cranial debris of Gulf Cartel trade reps in Neuvo Laredo, and then seizing the shipping lanes into Laredo itself, which hadn’t looked like much when viewed from the air, but has like 9,000 trucks, and 40% of Mexico’s exports, passing through it daily, jampacked with drugs; La Familia Michoacana, an evangelical religious group, whose spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, had long been heeding the call to the cloth and divine retribution and eternal salvation, through the beheading of nonbelievers in his family-values cause, became deeply disturbed by Federal Government depravity, having caught them in the act of committing the mortal sin of competing with La Familia in the methamphetamine business, and sent word of their disillusionment back to Mexico City, via twelve Federal agents who were so wracked with guilt that their mutilated bodies had to be shoveled-up and dime-bagged from the dust around a Michoacan roadside shrine, where they had come to do penance and atone for their sins, before traveling home with pieces of La Familia’s tortuous message; the Beltran-Leyva Sonora Cartel grew wary of supporting a tyrant named Shorty, perhaps as a result of El Chapo himself dropping a so-called dime on his partner, Alfredo Beltran, leading to a most unfortunate encounter between Edgar Guzman, El Chapo’s son, and 15 or 20 of the omnipresent Zetas, apparently still For Hire for special occasions, and by the time the Zetas had lightened their load of AK-47 8M3 hollow-points, and dropped off their smoking RPG-7s, now rendered grenadeless, in a Guzman-family shopping cart, it turned out that Edgar, El Chapo’s heir apparent, was about half the size of his own “Shorty” father; and to add insult and injury to grievous bodily harm, Los Negros abandoned their principles altogether, becoming the drug-war equivalent of Blackwater/Xe, killing Sinaloans, Zetas, Matamorans, Beltran-Leyvians, hanging severed human heads from the bridges of Cuernavaca, providing risk management consulting to every war zone in Mexico, and had to be replaced by the Thetas Ray’d encountered, in an excess of X’s and lager-bottle fragments and the plaguing of philosophers with arithmetical esoterics, having something to do with the subtraction of human limbs.

While their aims and ideals were no doubt pure, and both the Drug Lords and Government slept with the clear conscience of all perfectly ordinary socio-psychopaths, from serial murderers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the inevitable result of this Reap the Whirlwind Doctrine was a certain amount of confusion among veteran vexillologists and students of emblemology and normative blazonry prescriptive grammarians: the corpse-size Hefty Bag became the state tree of Tamaulipas, planted by the hundreds along the road to Reynosa, while the new state insect, the greenbottle blowfly, waited in San Fernando for the corpses to decompose; per fess azure and sable, three human heads caboshed, displayed senestré of the sun in splendor, became the mutilated blazonry of the Sinaloa Coat of Arms; the Mexican National Flag tore itself in half, right through the middle of the Eagle gripping the Serpent, and the two halves of the flag began feeding on each other, which didn’t leave much for the vexillologists to ponder; and a new aerial pennant was designed for the Airborne, trucking the body-parts to their homes in the empty Chihuahuan desert, a nasty piece of work, with the Agnus Dei lamb, no doubt slaughtered for Easter, lying beside a crozier flying a banner made of paper, the pink-and-black cross of a Juárez lamp post. If you’re hoping to understand the dynamics of the drug wars, or thinking about becoming a Juárez vexillologist, you might want to consider spending 8 or 10 years trading counterfeit currency for mortars in Mogadishu, while leafing through Wittgenstein on the mythos of volition. If you’re thinking that maybe the current alignment will hold, with Juárez, Zeta, Beltran-Leyva, and Tijuana Cartels on one side of the produce aisle, and Sinaloa, Gulf, La Familia Michoacana, and the Theta philosophers over there on the other, remember how well the Athenian Empire held together, and then loan us a dime, and we’ll blow the whole supermarket. If you believe that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that a Government cannot endure, at war with itself, welcome to Mexico, and God Bless America, who the hell said anything about needing a fucking Government. If you’re deeply troubled by the rate of civilian death, and the destruction of human life in acts of random violence, and the loss of the innocent and wide-eyed and wondrous to democidal maniacs too hideous to fathom, a bunch of beady-eyed weapons-crazed indiscriminate killers, you should download some photos of how we firebombed Japan. If none of this stuff makes any sense at all, and you’re not feeling all that, what’s the word, lucid, we could try doing a rewrite, or changing your meds, but as far as making sense of the war in Juárez, or even beginning to comprehend why it is that human leaders, members of a purportedly sapient species, tend to act, with some frequency, like messianic robots, our attitude is: frankly, why bother?

Ciudad Juárez: Difference between revisions

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 And thus it was that Phase III began, on December 11, 2006, with 7,000 troops preparing to march on Michoacan, and 40,000 waiting for their birth-death certificates, and everything taking a turn for the terminally weird, with everyone involved, including the Government, not only fighting on any and all sides of the battle, but simultaneously at peace and at war with themselves, which didn’t make much sense, particularly to Raymond, which in turn led to another of those Raymond-type shrugs, and yet another assumption of the “wait and see” attitude, like wait at elevation on a hilltop in El Paso, and see if all of Mexico got wiped off the map.
-On the glass-half-full side, when the Mexican Army had invaded their land, Zambada Garcia had called for a truce among Cartels, and brokered a simple peace pact between the warring factions, which resulted in a coalition called La Federacion, not to be confused with La Federacion, also known as La Alianza de Sangre, much less La Nueva Federacion, which in turn should not in any way be confused with itself, since La Familia Michoacana both did and did not want anything to do with it; this might be a good time to stop thinking trench warfare, with nice clean battle lines, and barren-stretch No-Man’s-Land warnings to civilians, and start thinking back to the Peloponnesian War, and battle lines drawn in the shifting currents of the Aegean, while trying to keep in mind that what Thucydides meant by stasis was a steady-state condition of constant civil war, a condition maintained, fortunately for historians, through the ceaseless suppression of any sort of impulse toward decency and moderation and a sense of shared humanity, which even on paper sounds hopelessly bland, in favor of unleashing the far more interesting forces of greed, fanaticism, and human depravity, without which human history would be a far different story; imagine a world without greed and depravity, and the next thing you know, you’ve never heard of Thucydides, you’ve just reduced one of the world’s great historians to the status, let’s face it, of a complete nonentity, just another nameless Greek, really no one in particular, kicking back on his sunlit porch sipping a kylix of Chian wine, staring off at the blue Aegean and the vast Alimos sky, caught up, just for a moment, in one of those out-of-the-blue moments where everything that is is just as it should be, and even his own rather ordinary gardens, full of lavender shades of agnos blossoms and crimson anemone and pure white asphodelos, are in harmony with themselves, and momentarily timeless, and then unleashing a sudden impulse to take his kids for a swim. Fortunately for Thucydides, as far as the drug wars are concerned, he won’t have to worry about taking the kids for a swim, because greed and depravity are basically immortal, and any sudden outbreak of a sense of shared humanity won’t last long unless it’s heavily armed. Zambada Garcia’s anti-Army Federation was a kind of Lions Club for Drug Lords, purblind knights in the crusade for utter darkness, or a let-the-free-market-function Chamber of Commerce, with yet another long list of inscrutable nicknames. In harmony at last, in a steady-state of stasis, the drug lords were now working together, to fight off the poorly paid and under-equipped Army, and when that didn’t work, they recruited their workers, using banners that criss-crossed the Sinaloa and Sonora and Chihuahua state highways, advertising better wages and working conditions: GOOD PAY, FOOD, AND HELP FOR YOUR FAMILIES. It probably goes without saying, just for the record, that senior Mexican Government officials have a whole different deal, based on a formula that goes back to antiquity, and with an entirely different approach to cost-of-living adjustments: Dónde están mis dólares putas? which translates loosely to Where’s my fucking money? and amounts to a, give or take, lifetime contract. On the glass-blown-to-shit side, peace is for lightweights, there’s not much point in amassing ungodly firepower and armaments exotica and overwhelming quantities of weaponry paraphernalia, unless it’s put to use for the betterment of man, through establishment of more open and democratic societies, and markets free to function without excessive intervention, bringing freedom and prosperity to our brothers in the fight, and raining a fucking shitstorm on the rest of you pussies: Los Zetas found themselves like a landlocked country, a drug cartel without its own plaza, and having also discovered that they were deeply tired of swatting at mosquito’s in coastal Matamoras, they decided to tackle both problems at once, first filling in the swamps with the cranial debris of Gulf Cartel trade reps in Neuvo Laredo, and then seizing the shipping lanes into Laredo itself, which hadn’t looked like much when viewed from the air, but has like 9,000 trucks, and 40% of Mexico’s exports, passing through it daily, jampacked with drugs; La Familia Michoacana, an evangelical religious group, whose spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, had long been heeding the call to the cloth and divine retribution and eternal salvation, through the beheading of nonbelievers in his family-values cause, became deeply disturbed by Federal Government depravity, having caught them in the act of committing the mortal sin of competing with La Familia in the methamphetamine business, and sent word of their disillusionment back to Mexico City, via twelve Federal agents who were so wracked with guilt that their mutilated bodies had to be shoveled-up and dime-bagged from the dust around a Michoacan roadside shrine, where they had come to do penance and atone for their sins, before traveling home with pieces of La Familia’s tortuous message; the Beltran-Leyva Sonora Cartel grew wary of supporting a tyrant named Shorty, perhaps as a result of El Chapo himself dropping a so-called dime on his partner, Alfredo Beltran, leading to a most unfortunate encounter between Edgar Guzman, El Chapo’s son, and 15 or 20 of the omnipresent Zetas, apparently still For Hire for special occasions, and by the time the Zetas had lightened their load of AK-47 8M3 hollow-points, and dropped off their smoking RPG-7s, now rendered grenadeless, in a Guzman-family shopping cart, it turned out that Edgar, El Chapo’s heir apparent, was about half the size of his own “Shorty” father; and to add insult and injury to grievous bodily harm, Los Negros abandoned their principles altogether, becoming the drug-war equivalent of Blackwater/Xe, killing Sinaloans, Zetas, Matamorans, Beltran-Leyvians, hanging severed human heads from the bridges of Cuernavaca, providing risk management consulting to every war zone in Mexico, and had to be replaced by the Thetas Ray’d encountered, in an excess of X’s and lager-bottle fragments and the plaguing of philosophers with arithmetical esoterics, having something to do with the subtraction of human limbs.
+On the glass-half-full side, when the Mexican Army had invaded their land, Zambada Garcia had called for a truce among Cartels, and brokered a simple peace pact between the warring factions, which resulted in a coalition called La Federacion, not to be confused with La Federacion, also known as La Alianza de Sangre, much less La Nueva Federacion, which in turn should not in any way be confused with itself, since La Familia Michoacana both did and did not want anything to do with it; this might be a good time to stop thinking trench warfare, with nice clean battle lines, and barren-stretch No-Man’s-Land warnings to civilians, and start thinking back to the Peloponnesian War, and battle lines drawn in the shifting currents of the Aegean, while trying to keep in mind that what Thucydides meant by stasis was a steady-state condition of constant civil war, a condition maintained, fortunately for historians, through the ceaseless suppression of any sort of impulse toward decency and moderation and a sense of shared humanity, which even on paper sounds hopelessly bland, in favor of unleashing the far more interesting forces of greed, fanaticism, and human depravity, without which human history would be a far different story; imagine a world without greed and depravity, and the next thing you know, you’ve never heard of Thucydides, you’ve just reduced one of the world’s great historians to the status, let’s face it, of a complete nonentity, just another nameless Greek, really no one in particular, kicking back on his sunlit porch sipping a kylix of Chian wine, staring off at the blue Aegean and the vast Alimos sky, caught up, just for a moment, in one of those out-of-the-blue moments where everything that is is just as it should be, and even his own rather ordinary gardens, full of lavender shades of agnos blossoms and crimson anemone and pure white asphodelos, are in harmony with themselves, and momentarily timeless, and then unleashing a sudden impulse to take his kids for a swim. Fortunately for Thucydides, as far as the drug wars are concerned, he won’t have to worry about taking the kids for a swim, because greed and depravity are basically immortal, and any sudden outbreak of a sense of shared humanity won’t last long unless it’s heavily armed. Zambada Garcia’s anti-Army Federation was a kind of Lions Club for Drug Lords, purblind knights in the crusade for utter darkness, or a let-the-free-market-function Chamber of Commerce, with yet another long list of inscrutable nicknames. In harmony at last, in a steady-state of stasis, the drug lords were now working together, to fight off the poorly paid and under-equipped Army, and when that didn’t work, they recruited their workers, using banners that criss-crossed the Sinaloa and Sonora and Chihuahua state highways, advertising better wages and working conditions: GOOD PAY, FOOD, AND HELP FOR YOUR FAMILIES. It probably goes without saying, just for the record, that senior Mexican Government officials have a whole different deal, based on a formula that goes back to antiquity, and with an entirely different approach to cost-of-living adjustments: Dónde están mis dólares putas? which translates loosely to Where’s my fucking money? and amounts to a, give or take, lifetime contract. On the glass-blown-to-shit side, peace is for lightweights, there’s not much point in amassing ungodly firepower and armaments exotica and overwhelming quantities of weaponry paraphernalia, unless it’s put to use for the betterment of man, through establishment of more open and democratic societies, and markets free to function without excessive intervention, bringing freedom and prosperity to our brothers in the fight, and raining a fucking shitstorm on the rest of you pussies: Los Zetas found themselves like a landlocked country, a drug cartel without its own plaza, and having also discovered that they were deeply tired of swatting at mosquitos in coastal Matamoras, they decided to tackle both problems at once, first filling in the swamps with the cranial debris of Gulf Cartel trade reps in Neuvo Laredo, and then seizing the shipping lanes into Laredo itself, which hadn’t looked like much when viewed from the air, but has like 9,000 trucks, and 40% of Mexico’s exports, passing through it daily, jampacked with drugs; La Familia Michoacana, an evangelical religious group, whose spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, had long been heeding the call to the cloth and divine retribution and eternal salvation, through the beheading of nonbelievers in his family-values cause, became deeply disturbed by Federal Government depravity, having caught them in the act of committing the mortal sin of competing with La Familia in the methamphetamine business, and sent word of their disillusionment back to Mexico City, via twelve Federal agents who were so wracked with guilt that their mutilated bodies had to be shoveled-up and dime-bagged from the dust around a Michoacan roadside shrine, where they had come to do penance and atone for their sins, before traveling home with pieces of La Familia’s tortuous message; the Beltran-Leyva Sonora Cartel grew wary of supporting a tyrant named Shorty, perhaps as a result of El Chapo himself dropping a so-called dime on his partner, Alfredo Beltran, leading to a most unfortunate encounter between Edgar Guzman, El Chapo’s son, and 15 or 20 of the omnipresent Zetas, apparently still For Hire for special occasions, and by the time the Zetas had lightened their load of AK-47 8M3 hollow-points, and dropped off their smoking RPG-7s, now rendered grenadeless, in a Guzman-family shopping cart, it turned out that Edgar, El Chapo’s heir apparent, was about half the size of his own “Shorty” father; and to add insult and injury to grievous bodily harm, Los Negros abandoned their principles altogether, becoming the drug-war equivalent of Blackwater/Xe, killing Sinaloans, Zetas, Matamorans, Beltran-Leyvians, hanging severed human heads from the bridges of Cuernavaca, providing risk management consulting to every war zone in Mexico, and had to be replaced by the Thetas Ray’d encountered, in an excess of X’s and lager-bottle fragments and the plaguing of philosophers with arithmetical esoterics, having something to do with the subtraction of human limbs.
 While their aims and ideals were no doubt pure, and both the Drug Lords and Government slept with the clear conscience of all perfectly ordinary socio-psychopaths, from serial murderers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the inevitable result of this Reap the Whirlwind Doctrine was a certain amount of confusion among veteran vexillologists and students of emblemology and normative blazonry prescriptive grammarians: the corpse-size Hefty Bag became the state tree of Tamaulipas, planted by the hundreds along the road to Reynosa, while the new state insect, the greenbottle blowfly, waited in San Fernando for the corpses to decompose; per fess azure and sable, three human heads caboshed, displayed senestré of the sun in splendor, became the mutilated blazonry of the Sinaloa Coat of Arms; the Mexican National Flag tore itself in half, right through the middle of the Eagle gripping the Serpent, and the two halves of the flag began feeding on each other, which didn’t leave much for the vexillologists to ponder; and a new aerial pennant was designed for the Airborne, trucking the body-parts to their homes in the empty Chihuahuan desert, a nasty piece of work, with the Agnus Dei lamb, no doubt slaughtered for Easter, lying beside a crozier flying a banner made of paper, the pink-and-black cross of a Juárez lamp post. If you’re hoping to understand the dynamics of the drug wars, or thinking about becoming a Juárez vexillologist, you might want to consider spending 8 or 10 years trading counterfeit currency for mortars in Mogadishu, while leafing through Wittgenstein on the mythos of volition. If you’re thinking that maybe the current alignment will hold, with Juárez, Zeta, Beltran-Leyva, and Tijuana Cartels on one side of the produce aisle, and Sinaloa, Gulf, La Familia Michoacana, and the Theta philosophers over there on the other, remember how well the Athenian Empire held together, and then loan us a dime, and we’ll blow the whole supermarket. If you believe that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that a Government cannot endure, at war with itself, welcome to Mexico, and God Bless America, who the hell said anything about needing a fucking Government. If you’re deeply troubled by the rate of civilian death, and the destruction of human life in acts of random violence, and the loss of the innocent and wide-eyed and wondrous to democidal maniacs too hideous to fathom, a bunch of beady-eyed weapons-crazed indiscriminate killers, you should download some photos of how we firebombed Japan. If none of this stuff makes any sense at all, and you’re not feeling all that, what’s the word, lucid, we could try doing a rewrite, or changing your meds, but as far as making sense of the war in Juárez, or even beginning to comprehend why it is that human leaders, members of a purportedly sapient species, tend to act, with some frequency, like messianic robots, our attitude is: frankly, why bother?