Joe Bageant: Round midnight: Tortillas and the corporate state

Ajijic, Mexico

  Near midnight and I am making tortillas on an iron skillet over a gas flame. Some three thousand miles to the north, my wife and dog nestle in sleep in the wake of a 34-inch snowstorm, while the dogs of Ajijic are barking at the witching hour and roosters crow all too early for the dawn… while my good Mexican neighbors along Zaragoza Street sleep.

  Yet here I am awake and patting out tortillas, haunted by the empire that I have called home most of my life.

  I like to think that, for the most part, I no longer live up there in the Unites States, but southward of its ticking social, political and economic bombs. Because the U.S. debt bomb has not yet gone off, Social Security still exists, and the occasional royalty check or book advance still comes in, allowing me to remain here. And so long as America's perverse commodities economy keeps stumbling along and making lifelike noises, so long as the American people accept permanent debt subjugation -- I can drink, think and burn tortillas. Believe me, I take no smugness in this irony.