Top Adviser Offers Blueprint of Mexico’s Future
August 1, 2006
All Mexican presidential candidates launched their 2006 campaigns by acknowledging that I more than anyone had mastered the essential issues and formed astonishing plans to propel our country out of Third World quicksand and into the cherished state of First World existence. I was thus going to be the foremost adviser no matter who won Mexico’s recent presidential election. At this point, it seems, I will be guiding Felipe Calderón, breathless survivor of a Bush-Gore style vote count against Andrés Manuel López Obrador. If the latter should somehow be granted the recount he is clamoring for, and win, then I shall dutifully lead him the same way.
On the marble floor of the grand entrance to the elegant Palacio de Belles Artes in the traffic-clogged center of Mexico City, I’m now unfurling political blueprints as one would a masterwork of architecture. Eager citizens encircle me and nod as I point to the future and pronounce that corruption must be stopped. Police must stop demanding bribes to ignore traffic tickets and they must as well cease framing motorists for illusory violations. Henceforth, any peace officer caught seeking unjust compensation, and any citizen so offering, will be mounted backward on a robust stallion in Alameda Park next door, and there the beast (with four legs) will be whacked thrice on the flanks and doubtless sent into a blind charge through this gauntlet of dense trees.
It logically follows that we must establish an adequate tax base so public employees can earn decent living wages and avoid augmenting their wallets in unethical ways. All Mexicans, and indeed countless millions throughout the world, were recently appalled by front page reports of postmen who refused to deliver mail unless granted ten percent of all checks in their bags, by teachers who declined to promote students before they paid a thousand pesos, as well as by politicians who withheld public highway funding until they received an astronomical cut of constructions costs. Since Alameda Park is likely to be jammed by an eternal cavalry charge, we will have to use different disciplinary techniques, and assign errant postmen to deliver gourmet food to the homeless, wield powerful paddles against unscholarly teachers, and impound the luxury cars of trusted officials who cynically undermine critical transportation.
Education is our launching pad into affluence, and our teachers, delighted by enhanced paychecks and deterred by certain corporal punishment, will daily enter their classrooms with superior lesson plans that motivate most students to learn and stay in school. Less than twenty percent of our young people currently graduate from high school. In an ultra-competitive world of computers and nuclear weapons, that is unacceptable. The few students who refuse to study will at once be drafted into the armed forces. Parents who cannot make their children do homework will likewise undergo basic training at the same boot camp.
Our newfound educational prowess guarantees the emergence of an elite workforce. We shall have legions doctors and scientists, reams of lawyers and economists, vibrant teams of artists and athletes. And who will these people be? They will be the very souls whose talents are currently wasted while they hustle on foot through traffic to wipe windshields and sell chewing gum at red lights. Mexico will be a high-tech heaven, and for menial tasks we shall import the fat Yankees who are daily growing more lazy and arrogant and menaced by debt. Soon, they will have to come to us. However, if too many of them march into our deserts, we will construct an impenetrable laser field across the Northern border. We may even have to sow millions of mines, as the Americans have done in so many distant lands.
This robust (even ravenous) Mexico will also need to be fueled by high-powered protein. True, in certain areas we already have plenty of frijoles and McDonald’s restaurants. But poverty and malnutrition have undermined our children’s ability to think and grow. Look at our hulking brothers and sisters after a generation or two in the United States. We shall soon have athletes like those in Yankee professional baseball, basketball and football. That is assured by the above-mentioned enforcement of good highway construction, which is essential in overcoming the massive rotting of our produce before it can be delivered.
None of these great plans can be realized, however, until we overcome this horrific problem: we need more air conditioning. When we swelter in our cars, offices, restaurants and homes, our energy and spirit are sapped. Our will to achieve is undermined. We’ve capitulated to nature and sentenced ourselves to an eternal oven. That is intolerable. Henceforth, every car will have an air conditioner, and it will always be turned on when temperatures soar above eighty degrees. Police will receive bonuses for ticketing sultry motorists. Likewise, all houses, apartments, and workplaces, in fact every building in the land, will have powerful cooling systems, and they will be in use or the computers monitoring everyone will alert climate cops to speed in cool cars to enforce comfort and national salvation.