Latin America: An Open Letter

Dear readers,

I'm often accused of being parochial. "Youse blog is all !Welsh!, mun, apart from some Eastern Europe. Show a bit of cosmo-fycin-politanism, innit?"

So I am happy to announce a series of No Good Boyo Open Letters to the people, or peoples, of the world, highlighting their shortcomings and suggesting ways in which they could overcome them.

First off are the Latin Americans. Like most newspaper-reading types I thought Latin America had sorted itself out, but then along come the likes of Snr Chavez and various disgruntled Andean rustics and -!Ay mira! - they're at it again.

A young lady from Mexico, now living in Amsterdam, complained to a colleague of mine that Europeans use the term "America" when the mean the United States. Latin America is America too, and has an untold history that the rest of the world needs to hear, she opined.

I hereby reply to her, and all of her ilk.

Dear Maria,

If that's your real name. Given that you are a female native of Mexico now resident in the Netherlands, I assume that your professional line of work permits me to call you anything I'd like for a reasonable fee.

To hear a Latin American complain of injustice pains us Europeans greatly, given the fine record your continent has on human rights, fighting drug-funded organised crime and keeping the Catholic Church in business.

This unknown history of Latin America that you mention is a catalogue of madmen building Toblerone temples in the middle of jungles, then amusing themselves with unnecessary surgical procedures and scrawling glyphs on the walls with their fishbone-spliced members.

The Aztecs thought a syphilitic Spaniard was their god, the Incas ran around the mountain tops like ninnies when there was perfectly good llamas to ride, and the Amazonian natives never quite grasped that strapping a gourd to your johnson does not a fashion statement make. There are some histories that one simply choses to know less about.

Latin America is so benighted that the only vaguely normal people who considered colonising it were clap-ridden Iberians (who were in fact looking for Indonesia), confused Scots, some religious maniacs from Bala and the remnants of the Waffen SS.

America brings to mind an image of power and plenitude, whether you approve of it or not.

Latin America conjures up the tableau of an unshaven army officer in shades shoving a cattle prod up some student's arse.

!Hasta la victoria siempre!,

No Good Boyo

Anti-Danube: Chapter IV

In which I appreciate the virtues of heavy drinking

Sartre said that Hell is other people. I say that Hell is certain other people. One of these people is Zhloba Tschtjetz. Winning Radio Ruthenia's children's programme "Child, How Big Are Your Hands?" had propelled him from his father's mullet-trawler into the lower-middle ranks of the secret police via the People's (United) Youth League in the Name of Fast Trotzdem and, briefly, a mental hospital over all those fires. Lady Luck had belted him twice with her lead-lined garter-belt, as he was later assigned to monitor intellectuals, progressive or otherwise, through a win on the NAKRO lottery.

Years of accumulated opinions, theories and conjectures came spilling out between his tombstone teeth now that he had a captive and profoundly depressed audience. Topics that Tschtjetz had raised with me over the summer months included "Gypsy control", direct measures to correct bourgeois tendencies among schoolgirls, the relative flammability of hedgerow animals (based on his youthful experiences), and "so-called Hungarians".

Strategies of resistance amounted to taking Agent (II Class) Tschtjetz to U Branki, Zhakhiv's only bar with a strict "no food" policy, buying a bottle of "Four-Metre" Slyvovytz and letting him hold forth until it was whore-sorting time back at the central gaol - an event he never missed.

"D'you know how much Gypsy blood I've got in me, Zhatko? Not so clever then, are ye? Go on, then, ask me. Well, I'll tell you - none! And that's the way its going to stay, an' all."

I refilled his tumbler and turned as a stranger asked Branka whether he could have anything to eat with his glass of horilka. She hawked in it, and rang up the result as 50 stotinkas extra on the till.

Tschjetz chinked my glass and winked. "Perdlak!" he grunted in his coastal dialect. I could only nod, again.

"Anyway, Zhatko, the colonel, he said to me, he said 'Zhloba, son' - we're like that in NAKRO, us - Zhloba, get a few drinks down that boulevard cowboy Zhatko and drag him in before lunch, and don't, DO NOT, let him know I told you, got it?' Anyway, I reckon you're drunk enough to have no idea how much trouble you're in, but sober enough not to spoil his carpet. So let's go."

We decanted ourselves into Tschetjetz's Victory-45 two-seater and bored a path through the oncoming market-day traffic on Prospekt Pinteru towards the rear gates of NAKRO HQ.

Colonel Nadroth pointed me to a chair, and eventually I worked out what he wanted. Once seated, I committed myself to denying everything.