Books, Arts & Manners: Mournings in Mexico

Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, by Alan Riding (Knopf, 385 pp., $18.95)

In Evelyn Waugh’s wicked novel Scott-King’s Modern Europe, a dim classics teacher on holiday finds himself in “a typical modern state, governed by a single party, acclaiming a dominant Marshal, supporting a vast illpaid bureaucracy whose work is tempered and humanized by corruption.” Mutatis mutandis—a dominant President is acclaimed, some bureaucrats are only too well paid, and graft has in certain instances outgrown humane proportions (“corruption has become corrupted,” as one politician said)— Waugh might well have been describing Mexico.

RR

About the Author

Robert Royal

Robert Royal is editor in chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.

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Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, by Alan Riding (Knopf, 385 pp., $18.95)

In Evelyn Waugh’s wicked novel Scott-King’s Modern Europe, a dim classics teacher on holiday finds himself in “a typical modern state, governed by a single party, acclaiming a dominant Marshal, supporting a vast illpaid bureaucracy whose work is tempered and humanized by corruption.” Mutatis mutandis—a dominant President is acclaimed, some bureaucrats are only too well paid, and graft has in certain instances outgrown humane proportions (“corruption has become corrupted,” as one politician said)— Waugh might well have been describing Mexico.

RR

About the Author

Robert Royal

Robert Royal is editor in chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.