I’ve read lots of books about political economy. Lots. They mostly resemble the parable of the blind men and the elephant. It is dangerous to ladle conclusions cooked up in a little financial saucepan over economies baked in industrial ovens. Certain things might be true, but hardly universal. Other things work great right up until they don’t work at all.

One of the most common economic tropes is creative destruction. While the destruction of livelihoods is painful, whatever gets erased is supposed to be superseded by something much better, or so they say. You lose your job making buggy whips, but get a new one assembling Fords.

What if your job goes away, and there’s nothing to replace it? Someone, somewhere is making more dough, but you’re out in the cold. This is not a theoretical condition for me. I’ve worked in a lot of industries that simply disappeared, one after another. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been standing in a bucket while yanking up on the handle my whole life. Most of America has made-up jobs, or no jobs at all at this point, due to creative destruction which isn’t very creative outside of a Goldman Sachs office.

In Mexico, I noticed a lot of people working who wouldn’t be in the United States. I have no idea of the reason why so many people in Mérida work at jobs that would be automated in the US. In Mexico, they send three guys to do the job of one man with lots of equipment in the states. The other two guys currently stay home and play X-box until they can collect Social Security here in the US, so don’t be quick to judge what “progress” means. Certain things are traditional in Mexico, I think, and stick hard. One of them is The Tout.

Many, if not most businesses in downtown Mérida have a tout out front. There’s a guy, mostly, or occasionally a gal, gladhanding passersby and importuning them to go inside and try the wares. None were hardcore car salesmen types. It was like they were having a city-wide contest to see who could project the most engaging personality. Andy the Cuban won, hands down.

We were walking down the sidewalk near our house one afternoon. This portion of the street was lined with shops and restaurants and banks and so forth. We espied an Italian restaurant we’d heard of, and decided to go there later in the day. A couple of doors down, Andy was ranging around the pavement, shaking more hands than a mayoral candidate, and getting people to go inside a cafe and try a free sample of their helado — ice cream.

Andy was two barrels of monkeys with a smile and a handshake like a bishop’s blessing. He shifted seamlessly from rat-a-tat Spanish to halting English when he saw us coming. Being a foot taller and several Pantone decks lighter than everyone else is a dead giveaway in Mexico. I can’t imagine what a pasty beanpole like me must look like to guys like Andy, nut brown, husky, with a beaming round face, breathing air below my stratosphere. He must have thought he was trying to sell ice cream to Eskimos, as the saying goes. Hell, to a Cuban, someone from Maine is an Eskimo.

Andy shook my hand like a locomotive getting going, complimented my wife’s looks just the right amount, and expounded on the wonders of ice cream simultaneously. I assured him that we had heard of ice cream, and had been meaning to try it for many years, but had never gotten around to it. I had trouble following along completely, because his English trailed his enthusiasm in the race for my attention, with my Spanish a distant third. I gathered that the helado inside would transform our lives like a trip to Lourdes. We’d be taller and better looking after eating it, which was a pretty high bar to clear according to Andy, what with us being rated as movies stars or something already, but this ice cream was up to the task.

I made a mistake. I told the truth. It’s the one thing a tout is unprepared to hear. They never hear the truth, so they don’t recognize it. A tout’s pitch is a form of pleasant persuasion, and the average person can’t deal with pleasant persuasion. You make up a lie to get out of the OODA loop of marketing. I’m allergic to ice cream. My mother died in a freak popsicle accident and I’ve never gotten over it. I have ten minutes to live if I don’t find an antidote to the snake bite I just received at the art museum. That sort of unanswerable lie gets you off the hook and walking again. But I told Andy that we were going to eat in the Italian restaurant two doors down that evening, and we would return afterwards.

He didn’t believe us, of course. He kept going, looking in the dark for the correct key to the lock of our attention. I was preparing to cut the cord and wander off, when a very attractive young lady came out of the shop and spoke something like seven words in the wrong language to my wife, and that settled the matter. We were inside testing little spoonfuls of helado in about seven seconds. Female humans get shit done where ice cream is involved.

We promised again to return, and they didn’t believe us. But we did.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting and recommending Sippican Cottage to your interfriends. It’s greatly appreciated]