An Alternate History
I'm enjoying the views from this flight. After a decent nap, I woke up to clouds that look like this:
I've done a lot of flying, but I don't think I've seen clouds quite like this before, so towering, so bright, so puffy, so much contrast! And of course, the photo doesn't do it justice.
The landscape's interesting, too. It's even harder to get a decent photo of that, but it's easy to describe to anyone who's flown across the American Southwest, especially in the Mountain Time Zone: very dry and very rocky. Occasionally you see a town, say, along a river, or by a hill that for some reason has a lot of trees on it, unlike any other within view. Some of the towns are quite significant, but unlike the time zone I mentioned, they're connected to two or three windy dirt roads, not the beautiful highways you'd see in New Mexico. And while I haven't seen that much, every square kilometre I've seen of the United Mexican States is like this.
And this leads me to ask: what if New Mexico was still part of Mexico, and more significantly, what if California was?
You'll know part of the story, even if you're not a student of American history, provided you've heard They Might Be Giants' song about President Polk:
In four short years, he met his every goal:
He seized the whole southwest from Mexico...
California supports most of the United States. For a start, a huge proportion of fruit and veg come from the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, and a couple of years after Polk did his thing, the California Gold Rush happened. I went to the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park with hopeforyou a few weeks ago, and was impressed at how prominently it acknowledged the devastation to local indigenous communities-Australia should take note! It also mentioned that it wasn't exactly a picnic for the Latinos that lived there, either.
So how different would the world be today if California, the world's fifth largest economy, was still part of Mexico? I doubt Mexico would be impoverished, and probably not nearly as corrupt, either. I also doubt the United States would be the world power it is today. And that would have obvious effects on many of the big wars of the 20th Century. Would there be anything in the world like Silicon Valley? Hollywood?
BTW, I lied at the top of this post: the first thing I saw when I awoke from my nap wasn't the clouds; it was a land form I couldn't explain. At first I thought it might have been the Panama Canal-this flight lands in Panama, after all, and was possible I'm confused about the canal's proximity within that country. But there weren't any ships in it, and it was really, really windy... not twisted like a ribbon; lots of straight lines connected by acute angles. No idea what that's all about. It was way too wide to be an aqueduct>, at least like any aqueduct I've seen!
Anyhow, right now there's only water as far as I can see, and we're about to land in Panama City. My Central American geography must be really pisspoor. It's sad that Copa Airlines apparently doesn't have map screens like on most international flights I've been on. There's plenty of tropical fruit juices, though!
Update:
I've looked at the map. I was over part of the Caribbean, and the clouds were most likely over either Honduras or Nicaragua.