When the repressed returns, it will be wearing rhinestones, ruffles, and fuck-me pumps
I have nothing useful to say about current events, just the powerful urge to clutch my head and moan. So let's just turn our eyes to Mexico, all right?
About a decade after the worst of the fighting of the Mexican Revolution ended, a religious war broke out. The Catholic Church went on strike -- that is, the Church refused to offer any sacraments at all for about 30 months -- in response to the anticlerical policies of the new, Revolutionary government (which were frequently rapacious and sometimes vulgar and cruel); some of the Catholic hierarchy in Mexico also organized violent resistance to the government's new cultural initiatives (which in practice meant raping and murdering schoolteachers.) It was an ugly little struggle, lasting almost three years and leaving perhaps twenty thousand dead.
Making peace between church and state, and keeping it for the subsequent eighty years, required that both sides give up their most extreme positions. But it also meant that the topic of the Cristero War became pretty much unmentionable in public. Historians know about it, of course; and I think it comes up in very briefly in high-school level history classes too. It's been almost a secreto a voces, an open secret, one of those things in Mexican public life that everyone knows but that everyone claims nobody knows.
Well, until this year's Miss Universe contest anyway.
Check this out. Or here's a similar story but without pictures and in English.
Yes, this year's Mexican contestant for the Miss Universe crown planned to attend the contest in a gown covered in the bloodiest images from the Cristero conflict. And sequins. She managed to offend nearly everyone in Mexico, secular and religious, leftwing and right, which is unusual in a beauty queen, and almost even admirable. So now she's editing the gown, apparently.
But the whole story is just so ... so Mexican, you know? Because, you know, some nations deal with the historical memory of civil war and religious conflict by having even bloodier wars later. Some nations practice ethnic cleansing. Some nations obsessively police their borders to prevent contamination by the ever-lurking threat of [insert menance here]. But not Mexico. In Mexico, they just take that unbearable memory and turn it into telenovelas and historietas and the tackiest possible outfits.
Seriously, I admire Mexican culture so much for doing precisely this, and doing it so well.
About a decade after the worst of the fighting of the Mexican Revolution ended, a religious war broke out. The Catholic Church went on strike -- that is, the Church refused to offer any sacraments at all for about 30 months -- in response to the anticlerical policies of the new, Revolutionary government (which were frequently rapacious and sometimes vulgar and cruel); some of the Catholic hierarchy in Mexico also organized violent resistance to the government's new cultural initiatives (which in practice meant raping and murdering schoolteachers.) It was an ugly little struggle, lasting almost three years and leaving perhaps twenty thousand dead.
Making peace between church and state, and keeping it for the subsequent eighty years, required that both sides give up their most extreme positions. But it also meant that the topic of the Cristero War became pretty much unmentionable in public. Historians know about it, of course; and I think it comes up in very briefly in high-school level history classes too. It's been almost a secreto a voces, an open secret, one of those things in Mexican public life that everyone knows but that everyone claims nobody knows.
Well, until this year's Miss Universe contest anyway.
Check this out. Or here's a similar story but without pictures and in English.
Yes, this year's Mexican contestant for the Miss Universe crown planned to attend the contest in a gown covered in the bloodiest images from the Cristero conflict. And sequins. She managed to offend nearly everyone in Mexico, secular and religious, leftwing and right, which is unusual in a beauty queen, and almost even admirable. So now she's editing the gown, apparently.
But the whole story is just so ... so Mexican, you know? Because, you know, some nations deal with the historical memory of civil war and religious conflict by having even bloodier wars later. Some nations practice ethnic cleansing. Some nations obsessively police their borders to prevent contamination by the ever-lurking threat of [insert menance here]. But not Mexico. In Mexico, they just take that unbearable memory and turn it into telenovelas and historietas and the tackiest possible outfits.
Seriously, I admire Mexican culture so much for doing precisely this, and doing it so well.