Charles Bowden - Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

Also by Charles Bowden

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BLUES FOR CANNIBALS

THE NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Charles Bowden

FOREWORD BY AMY GOODMAN AND DENIS MOYNIHAN

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright 2002 by Charles Bowden

The Charles Clyde Bowden Literary Trust

Mary Martha Miles, Trustee

Foreword copyright 2018 by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

All rights reserved

The first edition of Blues for Cannibals was published in 2002 by North Point Press.

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bowden, Charles, 19452014, author.

Title: Blues for cannibals : the notes from underground / Charles Bowden.

Description: Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. | The first edition of Blues for Cannibals was published in 2002 by North Point Press.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017050181

ISBN 978-1-4773-1687-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1688-7 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1689-4 (non-library e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Bowden, Charles, 19452014TravelUnited States. | Bowden, Charles, 19452014. | Bowden, Charles, 19452014Political and social views. | United StatesDescription and travel. | United StatesSocial conditions1980 | United StatesMoral conditions. | National characteristics, American. | MesquiteFolklore. | CannibalismFolklore. | Authors, AmericanBiography.

Classification: LCC E169.Z83 B667 2018 | DDC 973.92dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050181

doi:10.7560/316870

For my compaeros

Arturo Carrillo Strong and Chris Clarke,

who showed me the way to go home

after midnight.

They will never leave my side

so long as I stand my ground.

And I know no way to leave.

Look harder! After all we dont even know where real life is lived nowadays, or what it is, and what name it goes by. Leave us to ourselves, without our books, and at once we get into a muddle and lose our waywe dont even know whose side to be on or where to give our allegiance, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We even find it difficult to be human beings, men with real flesh and blood of our own; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace, and we are always striving to be some unprecedented kind of generalized human being. We are born dead, and moreover we have long ceased to be the sons of living fathers; we become more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring a taste for it. Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea.

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, Notes from Underground, 1864

Contents

Foreword

AMY GOODMAN AND DENIS MOYNIHAN

I understand dead white guys are out of fashion, but lets be tolerant... they used to be somebody.

CHARLES BOWDEN, speaking at a Lannan Literary Program Event, Santa Fe, NM, December 15, 2010

Deep, lyrical, brutally honest prose thunders across these pages, casting an arc as wide open and at times as unforgiving as the western skies under which Chuck Bowden lived most of his life.

Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground is the second of six connected volumes that Bowden referred to as his Unnatural History of America. In an endnote to the third book, he identified what became the premise for each of the six books, that they all flow from a single question and a single hunger: How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death? Thus sown, his trenchant narrative unleashes a whirlwind, part memoir, part reportage, part ruthless criticism of everything existing.

We met Bowden in his role as one of the foremost journalists covering the increasingly violent Mexico-U.S. border and the war on drugs that fuels the misery there. Bowden would appear on the Democracy Now! news hour and describe in his gravelly voice the corrupt institutional forces driving the abject suffering of the regular people in places like Ciudad Jurez and Nogales. Weve been at it forty years, he told us in 2009. Weve dropped hundreds of billions of dollars. Weve created the highest prison rate in the world enforcing these laws. Anybody thatll walk out of the house knows drugs are more prevalent now. Theyre higher quality, and theyre cheaper than theyve ever been. This is a failed policy.

Chuck Bowden connected the extreme violence of the border to U.S. policy, to NAFTA. What weve created, with foreign policy, meaning our free-trade treaty, is, one, slave factories all over the country, where nobody can live on the wages, two, generations at least of feral kids on the street. Fifty percent of the kids you call high school kids in Jurez neither go to school nor have jobs... Forty percent of the kids in Chihuahua, young males, want to become sicarios, professional killers, he told us in 2010. Weve created something so bleak that crime and murder is actually a rational way to live.

He cared deeply for his brother and sister reporters, especially those on the Mexican side of the border, who suffer one of the highest murder rates of journalists on the planet. People ask me, you know, Chuck, is it dangerous down there? Its nothing for me. The Mexican reporters are being killed. The Mexican reporters are being tortured. And yet theyre putting out more honest news, in my opinion, about whats going on in Mexico than the whole U.S. press corps.

Bowden described the case of Emilio Gutirrez Soto, a Mexican journalist who fled his home country to the U.S., seeking asylum. In February of 2005, he published a tiny story in a daily in Chihuahua, reporting an incident where these drunken soldiers had gone into a third-rate hotel and robbed the patrons. For that, he was threatened with death by a Mexican general whos in charge of the zone and told never to do it again. For the next three years, Emilio never wrote a story about the army.