I’ve been talking with a few friends about Mexico, and it’s interesting. My sister and her husband work with some people who came to the States in order to escape cartel violence. Other friends mentioned cartels as well.

I used to teach Cultural Geography and one of my favorite exercises was to ask students to write down a country, then write down five things they knew were true about that country. They liked this: showing their own expertise.

Then I asked them to explain why they knew each of those things. Their faces would fall. “What do you mean how do we know it,” one of them would inevitably say. “It’s, like, common knowledge. Everybody knows Russia is always cold.”

Slowly, inexorably, through a process that had some of them rolling their eyes and others looking thoughtful, we peeled back the layers of movies, parental attitudes, and casual news snippets that had formed their “certain knowledge.” (College students aren’t big on news; they tend to be the core around which their own world turns so any important info emanates from them.) And they began to recognize, at least the smart ones did, how little of what they knew was based on either direct experience, or actual verifiable information.

There’s a metaphor in there for the age of disinformation white noise we are in, and the fact that the volume will go up to 11 on Monday, but let’s go back to those Mexican cartels. One per square foot across the country, right?

Wrong. It’s not that they are not there, it’s that they are not everywhere, controlling everything, any more than we are a nation of nude beaches bent on pulling all young men into corrupt lives (waves cheerfully to Iran). If we want to believe of other nations the propaganda that our nation (or a few allies) have put out about it, we might be, you know, easy to manipulate.

Just thinking out loud here, folks. No biggie.