The recent street battles in Tijuana, just a few miles south of San Diego, California, but a world away from even the meanest streets of Southern California, once again brought Americans’ focus to the slow-motion but seemingly inevitable collapse of the government of Mexico at the hands of the drug lords.
This is likely the only civil war in history in which the rebellion is being financed in large part by university and high school students in another nation.
Worst of all, this is not even a rebellion based on ideals. There is no high-minded call for democracy or reforms: No, the drug lords simply want to eliminate a government that is getting in the way of profits - they seek not political power, but simply unfettered access to their customers.
Newspaper and television reporters are being assassinated when they report on the drug lords. Police chiefs and their officers are being gunned down if they attempt to enforce the law. Mayors and governors and other elected officials are regularly killed as a message to society at large: Do not resist.
That the U.S. media largely ignores this story ought to be a source of shame. It is only when the violence spikes to levels impossible to ignore (as during the recent takeover of Tijuana by the drug lords) or Americans are killed or wounded that our own media pays even the slightest attention.
With the Mexican media largely having been terrorized into silence, it’s a part of history that is being overlooked when and where it is happening.
Clearly, the legalization by numerous states of marijuana has not, as promised, lowered the level of violence. Illegal pot is constantly being seized in California. With Oregon now effectively legalizing even harder, medically addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin, usage of those substances is likely to dramatically increase as well.
All of which makes the cartel leaders very happy.
I’m not suggesting that we ramp up the so-called “War on Drugs” of the 1980s - which was never more than a minor skirmish (very expensive for U.S. taxpayers, terribly ineffective at interdicting much of the drugs).
I would like to see the Biden Administration launch a public relations campaign the likes of which we haven’t seen since the height of the anti-smoking efforts of the 1980s and ’90s, though.
Cigarette usage in this country plummeted during the 1980s and ’90s - largely due to a broadcast and print campaign designed to illustrate the health costs of smoking. Ads showing a woman who had had her vocal chords removed due to smoking and had to breathe through a hole in her throat brought home those costs in a powerful, visceral way.
(In the late 1960, when the American Lung Association was first beginning to ramp up its anti-smoking message, our elementary school class took a field trip to the natural history museum in Dayton. There we were shown two laminated cross-sections of a human lung - one from a healthy nonsmoker, the other from a three-pack-a day smoker. Holding that plastic-encased slide of diseased lung made me decide right then that I would not smoke. And outside of bumming a cig time to time while shooting billiards at a pool hall, I stayed true to that.)
If we want to impress upon young Americans (who consume most of the illegal street drugs in this country, the profit of which flows directly to the cartels to purchase more weapons), put ads on popular television and streaming shows that display the bodies of Mexican bloggers hung from bridges for reporting on the cartels. Publish the photos of the journalists killed by the cartels for telling the truth. Share photos of the bodies of slain police officers, teachers and elected officials assassinated for trying to serve their fellow Mexicans.
I’d make it as graphic as possible. Show the reality of what that purchase of coke, meth or pot is underwriting. Let Mexican orphans beg Americans to stop using drugs so they can have their country back.
Right now, too many Americans are still too ready to look down on Mexico as a backsliding Third World nation - refusing to acknowledge the role our nation is actively playing in financing the violence gripping Mexico.
These kinds of campaigns do not yield immediate results. And it’s no cure-all - after all, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, some 12.5 percent of American adults still smoke.
But when you compare that to smoking rates in the 1950s and ’60s? In 1954, 45 percent of American adults smoked.
So we cut that rate by almost three-fourths over a half-century - all without the massive social disruption that banning tobacco would have entailed.
A similar approach toward recreational drugs and their human costs ought to result in positive results as well.
And beyond the horrific human costs of the illegal drug trade on our neighbors in Mexico (plus Bolivia, Afghanistan and other countries where the allure of the U.S. street drug market is too great to ignore), there are the health risks incurred by those who use these drugs as well.
Lay it all out there: What you do to others and yourself when you buy pot, coke, meth, heroin, etc.
The romanticization of illegal drug use is a powerful force in our society; too many young people get caught up in it - thinking using drugs will make them cooler, hipper - just as their grandparents got hooked on cigarettes trying to emulate Sinatra or Bogart.
An entire nation is in danger of collapsing because of the growing use of recreational drugs in our country - we ought to at least acknowledge this reality, take ownership of it, and try to do something to at least lessen the profits flowing from the United States into the pockets of the drug cartels.
Back in the 1980s, there were a variety of different things percolating beneath the surface of pop music: electronic music on the new synthesizers coming out, African and Asian rhythms, wholly improvised music, non-religious but spiritual music. A lot of it got slapped with the label “new age” out of a lack of anything better, before New Age became its own genre of quiet meditative music.
One of the acts labeled “new age” was a band that still doesn’t have a handy label to describe it: Penguin Café Orchestra.
Started as a performance unit by guitarist / composer Simon Jeffes in 1973 to play his compositions, the band was perhaps best summarized by Jeffes himself who called it a “modern chamber” group.
As with Steely Dan really being a twosome with a rotating cast of supporting musicians, so too was Penguin Café’ Orchestra the vehicle for Jeffes’ musical vision. PCO was Simon Jeffes, and vice versa.
Their 1976 debut was rough, but the essential elements were there: An acoustic (mostly) string quartet playing music that combined African rhythms with Brit folk and classical. It sounds a bit as if classical flautist James Galway had sat in with an early incarnation of Fairport Convention. Notably, and appropriately, their first gig in support of the record was opening for German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk.
It would be five years before their next album, 1981's “Penguin Café Orchestra.” This is where Jeffes hit his stride: The sound has been polished, the songwriting tightened up.
“Broadcasting From Home” only sharpens Jeffes’ presentation of his musical ideas. Unlike much of what was marketed as new age, Jeffes’ songs tended to be no longer than a standard pop song, and maintained a tight focus on the melodic theme. The lead-off song, “Music for a Found Harmonium,” became one of their concert staples.
“Signs of Life” would be the highwater mark for both Penguin Café Orchestra and Jeffes, who was already in poor health. It contained both some of Jeffe’s finest songwriting, as well as the loosest, most joyous playing of his ensemble. “Bean Fields” opens the album sounding like a hoedown held on a space ship. “Horns of the Bull” is a stripped down fingerstyle piece for guitar and mandolin, while “Swing the Cat” is another country-infused piece.
A live album, “When in Rome,” was issued in 1988, then “Union Café” was the final release, in 1993.
But one of the most interesting projects Jeffes did under the Penguin Café moniker was his 1991 ballet, “Still Life at the Penguin Café.” I’m not conversant enough on dance to pronounce judgement on the choreography, but this is one of the few modern ballets that has music that is absolutely memorable - music you can hum to, music with melodic hooks to get stuck in your head.
Jeffes wasn’t active much after that; he was only 48 when he died in 1997 of a brain tumor. His old bandmates and his son both occasionally perform his music - and both outfits get good marks from those who have seen them in concert.
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