Think They're Getting an NEA Grant for This?

Tim Cavanaugh | June 8, 2006

How do you like these people? They come into our country illegally, they undercut our wages, they live it up on welfare, they speak that Jose Jimenez language, they smell funny and make too much noise. They even think they're too good for real Coca-Cola, for crying out loud! And now we're supposed to believe they're a bunch of "artists"?

The New York Times reports on the cultural boom in Tijuana, and includes a surprise appearance by everybody's favorite doomsaying L.A. sad sack:

It's not that these artists ignore the barrier that separates this city from prosperous San Diego. That might be unreasonable, given that many Americans long to extend the wall along the entire length of the border to keep Mexicans out.

So Marcos Ramirez's contribution to "Strange New World" is an off-site highway billboard for motorists driving south toward the border. It depicts a gray-haired man in camouflage—a reference to the Minutemen, as some American vigilantes patrolling the frontier call themselves—looking toward the wall and the cluttered Tijuana hillside beyond. (The model is actually Mike Davis, a Southern Californian urban theorist.) The billboard exhorts: "Don't be a man for just a minute, be a man your whole life." Only the back of his head is visible.

Best part: The article is by one "Elisabeth Malkin," whom I like to think of as being the Moriarty (or Mycroft?) figure to Holy Spirit High School's proudest daughter.

Comments

|6.8.06 @ 1:38PM|#

Mexican Coke tastes the way American Coke used to taste before the "New Coke" subterfuge allowed the American corporation to usher in a "Classic Coke" that was no longer made with sugar, but with high fructose corn sweetener.

Mexi-Coke has that biting tingling sensation in your throat that you might remember from your childhood. It is The Real Thing!

|6.8.06 @ 2:06PM|#

Dave W.? Is that you?

|6.8.06 @ 2:08PM|#

Are you sure Elisabeth isn't Michelle's daughter???

|6.8.06 @ 2:21PM|#

Evan, NoStar is right. You don't have to have Dave's obsession with HFCS to know that. I had Coke: The Renegade Version (Manufacturer's Cut)™ in Malaysia. It really was better, and I had to dig a little to find out why. Sugar, baby, sugar. I assume Mexican Coke is similarly blessed.

|6.8.06 @ 2:35PM|#

Mexican Coke is far better than the current American version, it is made with real sugar and a different level of carbonation. Coca-Cola unfortunately has taken notice of the popularity in certain areas and the company that I used to buy it from by the case has been sued by Coke and Pepsi for selling the Mexican versions of both, so far the judge has ordered that all sales must stop pending resolution of the case. I will have to make my own cross border trips soon. NAFTA my ass.

|6.8.06 @ 2:36PM|#

I'll second that. Coke with cane sugar does taste better.

|6.8.06 @ 3:12PM|#

It is US government price supports on sugar and subsidies to corn growers that makes HFCS the prefered choice for American soft drink manufacterers.

Plus in Mexico, they can buy cheap Cuban cane sugar on the open market.

|6.8.06 @ 4:06PM|#

The last time I bought Coke in a botella from the burrito place, it was the imported Mexican Coke, but the ingredients listed corn syrup. I was disappointed. The damn corn syrup industry has infiltrated Mexico.

|6.8.06 @ 5:29PM|#

Tim,

Mycroft Holmes. Someone should write some books about him. Good ones, I mean. And not where he's called Nero Wolfe, either.

|6.8.06 @ 5:35PM|#

Anything made with cane sugar tastes better than the equivalent made with corn syrup. Salad dressings, pasta sauces, marinades, or whatever -- I avoid buying foods made with corn syrup because I can taste that stuff right away.