Snowed Out and Witnessing History

Today I did not teach. The snow did not let my students come in; I was there though, but that is not enough, you need two to Tango.

I came home and there they were; on commercial TV in Spanish here in the US, Vicente Fox Quesada and Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa. One handed the presidential sash to the other, without giving it first to the head of Congress, they corrected themselves, and the sash went to the proper person, who dutifully gave it to Calderón. This man breaking protocol put the sash around his neck all by himself, as if it were a Boy Scout medal or something. That was the most important political symbol of power in my country!

A sad and historic moment. Mexico is divided and incompetent people are in charge. Vicente Fox acted like the simple rich man that he is, and Felipe Calderón, as the eager economist with one year at a finishing school in Cambridge Massachusetts, named Harvard University.

We give ritual so much importance, and thinking about it, it might as well had been the good Boy Scout medal, from the head of the troop, to the best little boy in the troupe.

Sad and historic day.