¡Ay Ay Ay! La Telenovela Es Muy Estúpido!

Living as I do, in Arizona, I all too frequently run across people who are prejudiced against Mexicans, specifically illegal immigrants. Their most common complaint is that “they come over here and take all of our jobs!” I don’t think that’s accurate, actually. They’re not taking all the jobs. I mean, I don’t see a lot of Mexican brain surgeons hanging out outside of hospitals or anything. It’s not like some guy with a pickup truck and a brain tumor is going to drive by and begin haggling for discount brain surgery. But I can understand how if your job was to hang out in front of Home Depot for money that you’d feel threatened because, yeah, the Mexicans have got that angle motherfucking covered.

And there’s a lot of indignant disgust over the amount of crime and violence down there, which is incredibly stupid because the crime down there is a direct result of our committing crimes up here. That’s like getting mad at the butcher for selling you meat when you’re on the Atkins diet.

The fact of the matter is that I LOVE Mexico, or at least I did before it got too violent down there. Everything was cheap, everyone was happy, and it was perfectly normal for a guy who sold you a t-shirt to whip out a bottle of tequila to celebrate the transaction. Think about how much more awesome America would be if we did that.

Walgreen’s Clerk: Ok, so just this bottle of baby formula and these diapers, then?

Tired Parent: Yes.

Walgreen’s Clerk: That’ll be $34.72. Now let’s do some shots!

Tired Parent: God bless you!

I used to like the strange scenes that I’d run across right in the middle of nowhere. One time I was in a Mexican grocery store when this really confused looking American guy saw me and ran up to me. “Hey! Hey! What is the fucking deal with this place?” he asked, obviously flabbergasted.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Look at the goddamn prices on everything! Look at these donuts! 52 dollars? For fucking donuts?!?!”

I looked at him for a good long while before I answered, “That’s in Mexican pesos. It’s like 4 bucks.”

I still laugh when I think of the look that came over his face after I answered him. It was a look that said, “Damn, and here I thought that I could keep all of that childhood lead paint consumption a secret. Now this guy knows I’m a moron too!”

I pity the fool that don’t know the difference between dollars and pesos!

Even haggling when you have no intention of buying can be fun if you know how to extract yourself from the situation without angering the seller so much that he tries to trample you with his burro. Once I talked a guy down on a massive Mexican blanket from a $1,500 price tag to $30. And instead of getting mad at me for wasting his time, we sat in this pleasant Mexican square and had a dozen beers. Watching a leering, drunk Mexican make lewd comments about tourist women is a hell of lot more entertaining when the tourist woman in question isn’t your wife. The funniest line he used was, “Hey, pretty lady. Let’s go in that alley. I’ll be in and out of you so quick, you won’t even notice.”

But yeah, there’s a lot of fucked up shit in Mexico as well, and I don’t know who is worse: The cartels or the police, or as they’re also known, the cartels and the people working for the cartels. It’s become too dangerous for my liking, and I’m one of those people who believes that the danger in most things is overblown. Bungee jumping? Hell yeah! Sky diving? Fuck, and yes please! Mountain climbing, running with the bulls, and blasting the shit of beer cans you just emptied in the desert? Yes, yes, and yes! Go to Mexico? Fuck, no.

Which means that we’re going to need to bring Mexico to us. Specifically, the wonderful people who created this awesome Mexican soap opera spectacle. (And you have got to watch the whole thing. It keeps getting better and better.)

I would actually watch American TV if it was this good. And it’s educational too! For instance, from the above clip, we can learn the following things about our Amigos to the South:

• It’s ok to knock over a crippled girl in a wheelchair
• It is NOT ok to kiss a crippled girl in a wheelchair
• Loud, overly dramatic music is pumped into every public building in Mexico
• Mexican maids are incredibly easy to kill
• A good Mexican brouhaha always attracts a crowd
• Mexican actors still think the epitome of style was Brad Pitt in Cool World

Muy magnifico!

That was a quality, Grade A freakout right there, wasn’t it? I fear that we, as Americans, are falling behind in this regard. The only person that is keeping us in the same ballpark is Roseanne, who once became angered at what she believed to be an inferior Big Mac and scaled the Chrysler building. It took two divisions of the National Guard to bring her down, and the whole area still smells like taco sauce and K-Y.

So before the drug-fueled violence rids the world of this very precious resource, I think we need to have an international, UN-based program established to rescue the Mexican Soap Opera from extinction. We could put them on C-SPAN, because nobody watches that fucking channel anyway. And then we’d be able to while away the days, drinking tequila, eating $50 donuts, and laughing at that Mexican Beiber-kid, who took a pair of safety scissors to the forearm like a complete pussy.

I’ll be honest with you: I’ve got a bit of a head start.