We can still consume our way to world domination - Yes! We can!

We Norte Americanos live next to a nation being torn apart by war. A nation teetering on the bring of becoming a failed state. We all know that nation is Mexico but what I find consistently missing in the reports of the progress of demise is the root cause of it all.

That would be us. The U.S. The tweakers, the potheads, the coke addicts, in particular ... all those people in those very large constituencies who get their fix from or via Mexico. But we should definitely throw in the arms manufacturers, too, because that's the other thing America still does well: sell things that destroy people.

I listen to the news from Mexico and think: yes, once again Americans' voracious appetites are someone else's ruin. And then I proceed to darker thoughts - perhaps because I've been reading about the Opium Wars (which were the quintessential notion of conquest via the drug market). ... Is there perhaps a higher goal to the United States' spectacularly failed "War on Drugs"? One that is perhaps succeeding?

Think about it. If Mexico out-and-out collapses, who stands to gain? Yeah, sure, we might have a big refugee problem - and that's what good fences are for - but what else could happen?

The U.S. could finally and totally win the Mexican-American War, is what. (After all, in the grand old days of empire-building, one did not stop at merely redrawing boundaries; the winner took the losing country over altogether.) Damn! After all those years of not remembering the Alamo, of not knowing what the Mexican-American War was about, of kinda wishing we had never gotten Texas and now wishing we could give them back California and its failed economy ... we could own Mexico. Without firing a shot. We could have not just the 51st state, but states number 51 through 82 (or 83 if you count Mexico's federal district).

Currently, though, we are doing something else the U.S. does really well. Sitting on our hands and humming while a problem we created destroys another country. Making it next to impossible for innocents fleeing the devastation to get out. Something that is particularly bizarre in those border cities where the Mexican side (like Juarez) is a war zone and the other side - El Paso - is fat and happy. (Fat: definitely; happy: comparatively.)

So I'm just wondering what all we will do, when the time comes to do something.