in san miguel chapultepec

i've been thinking a lot since yesterday's post that perhaps it is not enough to know a place, but that a place must know you.

what inspired this was in thinking of the success that right has achieved in rehabilitating the legacy of their vaunted war-criminal hero, Ronald Reagan. I believe part of the way they have achieved this has been through demolishing the history of the united states, in such a way that places, with all of their associated memories, their public tributes fall away, along with a thinking public. With the buildings goes the public.

It is impossible to live long in a country with a public before one starts to realize that one has a role. Of course, i have written about this before, but one starts to realize that that role is often in reaction to, or in accordance with, ones surroundings and their particular histories. I can't tell you the number of times I have been lectured on the significance of certain places and sites and building and streets in Mexico and Mexico City. These aren't lectures to make me worship a given dead general or president, but are lectures to instill in me a sense of my role.

There are few places in history where conservatives have been right about anything. Where they are, as in the case of Ronald Reagan, you will almost always find seriosu white-washing of facts and a softening of the murders that accompanied the movement. Paving the way for the outrages in the United States, is a successfully defeated and a-historical public, a public that can not exist because it has been marketed into complete acquiescence. What is left but buildings, trees, streets ? They will remember so it will serve us well to pay attention to them.