Maybe TS Eliot was right that April is the cruelest month. But here in California March was relentless. Atmospheric river after river doused hopes that the dark and cold might end. Even my third spring break sojourn to Los Angeles yielded downpour instead of sunshine, block-long puddles splashing down La Brea, the lake in Echo Park looking small and gloomy, bereft of swan boats. The mood of the city made me think of Humphrey Bogart getting drenched in Big Sleep, even of Harrison Ford in Blade Runner.
The native Seattleite in me loved it, at least mostly, and I got a lot of work done on my novel. But my hope that at least a couple of obvious urban policy themes for a March blog post would emerge naturally from some alone time in LA didn’t quite work out. We’re at tax day now, and I keep finding that all I want to write about here is an art exhibit I saw at the Broad Museum nearly a month ago on a rainy Tuesday, and a couple of articles I read about Mexico. So that, dear readers, is what I’m going to run with.
Darkness in Enlightenment
The art exhibit was dubbed “William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows.” To me the work of South African Kentridge speaks to how fundamental, physics-like concepts—motion, space, time—interact with human volition. As the the title to the exhibit suggests, Kentridge’s work also plays with light and shadow; in particular, the long shadow of colonialism.
One of the several short, flickering black and white films included in the exhibit featured an African man, legs spayed, digging in a shallow, grave-like pit, the sides defined as charcoal smudges. The pit is part of a colonial era mining operation, and a heavy set white mine supervisor in a suit walks up to observe the movements of the digging. The smudged shapes of the outdoor mining site then morph into a grand, symmetrical, European style home with a vaulted roof. It is the home of the mine supervisor. But the the African man is still there, still digging in the pit at the base of the house, which eventually splinters and crumbles back to … the start of the film, which loops continually, Groundhog Day style.
At least this is my memory of the film, which as the description above suggests has a dreamlike quality that would likely imprint differently on different viewers. I describe this particular artwork at length though because it is among the more narratively pointed of several pieces that speak to exploitation of people and nature, to abuse of power, to the uncaring application of scientific knowledge and technique. See for instance this photograph:
The exhibit made me think anew about the themes about enlightenment and progress raised in my review of Professor Joel Mokyr’s book A Culture of Growth. I enjoy being an “out” fan of enlightenment and progress; it feels like a pleasantly transgressive position to hold within progressive circles. But Kentridge’s exhibit now somehow sits in my mind juxtaposed uncomfortably with Mokyr’s book. The exhibit makes a subtle, refreshingly non-scolding case that horror and exploitation might not merely be a byproduct of enlightenment, but might instead be bound up in enlightenment itself. The culture of growth, the Kentridge exhibit seems to imply, need to develop a lot more in the way of wisdom and boundaries.
Moving forward, I now want to turn to one of the two news articles that struck me in March. The piece deals with synthetic opioids and assault rifles, two dark products of technological progress that very certainly disfigure society (and urban development patterns).
A Muscular Proposal on Drugs and Guns
The article I am speaking of is this Washington Post opinion piece by Sam Quinones, author of the recent book The Least of Us: True Tales of America in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. I commend the piece to you, partly for the sheer fun of Quinones’ muscular writing style. Take, for instance, this lead: “To anyone paying attention to the overdose crisis in the United States, it should be clear that the country no longer faces only a drug problem. It faces a national poisoning.” Bam!
Quinones backs up his muscular writing style with a sharp, muscular sort of analysis. He identifies the fentanyl and meth epidemic as being about “supply creating demand” (see here at around 19:00 on Derek Thompson’s Plain English podcast for a similar take). Then Quinones states that the supply is from a “single source, Mexican traffickers.” The traffickers, he asserts in turn, get their assault weapons from the United States, and the raw materials for the drugs from China, primarily through “a handful” of Mexican “shipping ports and airports.”
From this muscular analysis, in turn, comes a muscular proposal. Mexico and the US need to work together to aggressively interdict the supply of the raw ingredients used to make synthetic drugs at these key ports. At the same time, Quinones implies (though too softly for my taste) that the US needs to cut off the supply of the military style weapons that Mexican traffickers import with ease and impunity from el norte.
It’s an appealing proposal, on the face of it. The part about restricting guns I support wholeheartedly. I’ve stated before that gun control is the one area of public policy where I don’t see any merit in the opposing point of view. But the part of the proposal about drug interdiction at Mexican ports of entry strikes me as more complicated. If you read into the letters connected to the Quinones piece, you will find numerous pointed, often angry responses. Many people seem to hold great passions on the drug issue. These people, whether they are on the progressive left or libertarian right, appear to believe that any efforts to restrict drug supplies at the source are morally tarnished by the war on drugs, and doomed to fail in the first place. We need to focus exclusively, go these arguments, on policies that reduce demand for drugs and mitigate their harm.
On this one I truly don’t know. I definitely see intellectual merit in the “demand side purist” kinds of arguments expressed in the letters. But still, I wonder. Such arguments remind me a bit of post Iraq war critiques from both left and right that would take the US permanently out of nation building. To which I mostly have to say, thank God President Biden has not bought into this logic when it comes to Ukraine. And thanks to Quinones for articulating a case that the terms of the drug issue may have shifted utterly with the rise of synthetics.
A Daily Mansplaining at Breakfast
The other media piece from March that struck me powerfully also happened to be related to Mexico, where I plan to return this summer. It was this episode of the excellent if sometimes dry Financial Times– sponsored podcast Rachman Review. The short 30 minute podcast featured foreign affairs correspondent Gideon Rachman’s interview with Mexican political scientist Denise Dresser. It is absolutely worth a listen.
I’d be curious to hear readers’ takes, but for myself I was disarmed by Dresser’s clear voice and perspective. Even more I was struck by her depiction of Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In particular, I was struck that this is a politician with time and energy to deliver a two to three hour press conference seven days a week. It’s a striking pattern, when you think about it.
Dresser also paints a picture of a politician very much willing to demonize opponents at these press conferences, especially those people he can brand as opponents to a process he has described as Mexico’s “fourth transformation.” If you listen at around 12:00 into the podcast, for instance, you will hear that the Mexican president has mentioned the name of one Dr. Denise Dresser a shocking 86 times in speeches.
Maybe she’s against AMLO’s fourth transformation. I don’t know, but we apparently have a head of state obsessed with a college professor. The situation felt singular enough that I wanted to read more of Dresser’s work. So I looked up this article she wrote in Foreign Affairs. It reads as a careful, point by point critique of what Dresser perceives as the president’s lurch toward authoritarian populism. López Obrador has pledged, according to Dresser, to “make Mexico great again” (uh oh). He has dramatically expanded the role of the Mexican military, including giving it direct control over things like air traffic (I remember being struck by the odd presence of military personnel in the airport when I got off the plane in Mexico last summer). He has engaged in what Dresser describes as a strategy of “clientelism,” including the “distribution of cash to the poor.” He has weakened the independence, again according to Dresser, of key commissions such as the Energy Regulatory Commission and the Competition Commission, to the huge enrichment of the very billionaire crony capitalists he claims to oppose. All in all, Dresser concludes that, “By reviving the Mexican tradition of state capitalism and oligarchy, López Obrador and his party are emulating the PRI’s vision of governance as a system for distributing the spoils.”
It’s a sobering analysis, even if one walks away from Dresser’s work with a certain admiration for AMLO, a man she claims to have voted for herself three times. Perhaps curiously, as it relates to the urban themes of this blog, López Obrador’s first major executive role on a national stage was as mayor of Mexico City, no doubt one of the hardest jobs on the planet. According to this 2018 Brookings information piece, AMLO left this role with a whopping 85 percent approval rating, having “expanded social spending” without “busting the budget” and having managed to work cooperatively with wealthy national elites to refurbish the city’s historic center. This is a highly capable and experienced government leader, the opposite in many ways of our own cartoonish authoritarian populist, former President Trump. We can only hope that López Obrador’s recent authoritarian populist leanings abate, and that he gets back to the positive qualities that apparently made him such an effective mayor.