What Ten Thousand Commandments and Flock Cameras Can’t Accomplish

We’re renting a house in Mérida, Mexico. The clothes dryer was busted. I pretty much knew what was wrong with it, and probably could have fixed it, but I’m not allowed to fix anything. I’m supposed to call the property manager and tell her what’s wrong, and she arranges to have it fixed. They don’t trust occupants to fix stuff.  It’s a hard and fast policy, in writing on the lease.

I can’t say I blame them. These days, the average person is capable of breaking things further, but not fixing much. In my case, it leads to entertaining conversations when the property manager, who is a little girl (I’m getting old), asks me amusing things like, “The clothes won’t dry? Are you sure it’s plugged in?” I once made guidance systems for NASA and the Department of Defense, and I learned to check if the accelerometer test bed was plugged in, so I felt like I had that type of eventuality covered, but I didn’t mention it. And BTW, it’s a gas dryer. She sent someone out to fix it.

The repairman came. He spoke no English. That’s common around here. The Yucatan is barely Mexico, never mind an ersatz suburb of the US. Many people still speak Mayan here along with their Spanish. Learning English is way down the list of things to do. My Spanish is rudimentary, but I could manage a greeting and to tell him where the dryer is located (Adelante, arriba!). He got to work.

There’s a giant rubber band on the back of the drum that had snapped. The fellow had to take the whole thing apart from the front, which was a PIA, but it was a simple fix once he could get at the problem. He was a thoroughgoing type of guy, and cleaned the whole apparatus, and removed the exhaust vent pipe, which is one of those accordion metal things, and cleaned out all the lint in that, too. He was working in our cuarto de lavado, a hot, cramped little room for laundry, cleaning supplies, a few termites, and the water heater. I gave him a Coke while he worked, which he treated like a winning lottery ticket. It’s 95 degrees every day, so I could see his point. When he was done, he left in a cloud of English encomium.

The next day, I noticed two US quarters on the shelf next to the dryer. They weren’t ours, we deal strictly in pesos here. They’re the residue of tourists past, people who forgot them in their pants pockets. The fellow who fixed the dryer found them inside the washing machine’s drain, or maybe the dryer’s exhaust while he was cleaning it, but would not take them, because they were not his.

Think of that. Fifty cents is real money to people around here, almost ten pesos. I can buy a loaf of bread from the panaderia next door for eight pesos, for example. Fifty cents is not like a penny in the street in Boston, one that no one can be bothered to pick up. But even though no one was looking, and the money was actually a motherless child, and no one would be the wiser, he would not take it.

I’d aver that I’m as honest as the next guy, but nowadays, that’s faint praise indeed. I’ve seen the “next guy” who’s abroad in the country of my birth, and he’s basically feral. The fear of being caught is the only stumbling block for about half the population of the United States. The other half isn’t even afraid of being caught anymore. The idea of not taking something because it doesn’t belong to you is totally squaresville, man. Flock cameras have mostly replaced the role of the conscience, and bodyworn police cameras cover the rest of the waterfront. For the vast majority of people in the US, there is no internal check on their behaviors, and precious few external checks, at least if you watch YouTube arrest videos right through to the end to see all the charges dropped.

He would not take them because they were not his. It’s that simple. I doubt he even hesitated over it. I meet a lot of people like him here. They are what they is, as we used to say in the vernacular. Their behavior is not a veneer. It goes all the way through.

As Chesterton said, “If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.” The United States is now in the thrall of the ten thousand commandments, courtesy of the opinions of millions of Karens, with more on the way. But ten times ten thousand commandments will never be enough to make two quarters appear on the shelf in your laundry. Ten might.

Something Tells Me It’s All Happening at the Centenario Zoo

The Parque Zoológico del Centenario, that is.

The zoo is only a ten minute walk from our house, so we wander through from time to time to commiserate with the animals about the ambient temperature. The “centenario” sobriquet is because the park was founded in 1910, the 100-year anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. For about 50 years, the park was just a pleasant park, full of plants and benches.  Then in 1962, they made it into a zoo. It’s not huge, but its walls keep around 600 animals from wandering into traffic.

The park still retains enough of its original layout as a botanical garden to make it a pleasant place just to meander in shady allees, not simply as a collection of animals to gawk at.

It’s the second most popular tourist destination in the area, after the nearby Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza. I guess “tourist destination” is an inapt description for the zoo. The park is full of young families from the area. If anyone else in the park was speaking anything other than Spanish, we didn’t hear them.

Maybe a million people visit the park every year. That’s a lot, in a city with about a million people. They don’t have an exact count, because, get this, there’s no entrance fee. No one frisks you at the gate, either, to see if you’re packing weapons or your own lunch. You can buy booth food inside if you want, but many families brown bag it. It’s a decidedly peaceful and pleasant place.

There’s an interesting tradeoff that comes with a zoo built in the sixties. Unlike modern zoos, like the one in San Diego for instance, not a lot of the exhibits are vast naturalized pens with moats to keep the animals in instead of wire fences to keep you out. So here in Merida you’re mostly looking through a grid to see the critters, but on the flip side, you can walk right up to them. About eighty percent of the time in San Diego, the animals were slouching somewhere you couldn’t see them. They slouch here, of course, because it’s 95 degrees every day it’s not 100, but they slouch up close where you can get a look at them. And occasionally, a whiff. Zebras are horses with B.O., for instance.

The animals seem pretty contented. The mountain goats, for instance, were provided with a pile of rocks, which they stand on, because what else would they do? They wouldn’t do tricks or long division or anything if they had a more elaborate pen:

There’s always one animal at any zoo, anywhere, who’s always on duty. The lions lie on their backs and snooze, the hippos wallow, the monkeys lounge, but you can always find one of these beasts keeping constant watch:

Anybody with a house cat and a sliding glass door will recognize this behavior. That’s a melanistic, or melanic jaguar, depending on who you ask. That means it has the same spots as any other jaguar, but they’re hidden in its all black fur. I would have checked it for the sublimated spots, and I’d tell you if this jaguar was a male or a female, but I respect its privacy. Also, I got the impression that if I put as much as my pinkie through the chain link, it would suck me through the hole and eat me.

El tigre was much more mellow. He didn’t look like he wanted to eat you or anything. I assume he’d already eaten the guy that mucks out his cage, and was full. Unlike lions, who are clowns, tigers always seem pretty serious.

But all these animals are from the Holocene, I guess, and so am I, so I’m not that scared of them. It’s when the Cretaceous shows up that I get worried. Meet the final boss of the Centenario zoo:

So there’s no cover charge at the Centenario zoo, but the bouncers sure look ferocious. Behave yourself, and if you’re smart, avoid the bridge.