January 16, 2016

The U.S. media is obsessed with the most recent capture of El Chapo, a chubby man in a filthy T-shirt, and an American male movie star who is not a journalist and a Mexican female soap-opera star who says silly things on Twitter. How stupid. 

Why are they not obsessed about butter? Maybe Sean Penn traveled to Mexico with his own stick. I can promise you, in the so-called “Golden Triangle” where they supposedly met and in most parts of Mexico there is nothing that approximates butter as we in the United States and many fortunate Europeans know it. Julia Child, bless her heart, could not have lived in Mexico. I will assume in Mexico City, an international culinary capital, there is butter somewhere. 

I do not wake up in the morning worried about people like El Chapo (who was “detained”—President Peño Nieto’s word, as if he was afraid the guy had not really been captured). I think about how bad the butter is in Sonora where I live half of every year (so scary—only three hours away from where they caught El Chapo). 

I buy Mexican butter and use it. It sort of behaves like butter but not really and it is awful. Tonight, I put a little sliver in my mouth. It tastes like petroleum. I went ahead and put some in the polenta. Does this product have anything to do with cows and real milk? How is it made? Why do they call it butter? Soon, we will go to the United States—utilizing a real petroleum product—so I can buy ten pounds of butter to bring back to Sonora to last until May. 

Note: I wrote this little diatribe several days after Chapo was recaptured on Highway 15 fleeing from Los Mochis, Sinaloa, and a few months after the asinine rendezvous concocted by Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo to interview Joaquín Guzmán in his lair in the Golden Triangle. The suckered readership of U.S. media, including such esteemed outlets as The New York Times and Rolling Stone, gobbled up their sinister yet ever-so-frothy meringue like voracious idiots while I fumed about something really important, the status of butter in Sonora. Eight years have gone by, and the U.S. media remains unchanged in its dismal coverage of Mexico.