For your latest dose of xenophobia, try Joel Achenbach's column in the Washington Post Magazine. Achenbach had hisself a trip to Mexico City, proudly announcing his ignorance of Spanish, and pretty much everything else.
Here are some choice bits:

"It's a miracle anyone gets out of this country alive."

"Fruit is out of the question. Also meat that's juicy."

Guess what, guy? The fruit in Mexico City is great, so is the fresh fruit juice, and so is the rare meat. Indeed, I drink the water out of my sink (in a central, but nice part of town) every day, and feel fine. I also take taxis, even though Achenbach tells his readers, "You avoid kidnappers by not doing anything reckless, like hailing a street cab."

Now, should you avoid a sketchy-looking cab? Yes. And have I gotten sick? Yes, once. But you take some antibiotics, and are fine a day later.

Mexico City is a big city, and a tragically poor one, but life there is pretty secure, and pretty cushy for someone, like Achenbach (and me) who has a couple of dollars to rub together. His column feeds irrational fears of Mexico City, and Mexico, without saying anything of interest. (Of course, this is par for the course for our friend Joel, whose previous column was a long, name-dropping piece of poop, serving solely to announce to the world that he had played golf with Bob Woodward.)


Adam Gopnick perhaps perfected this style in his series of New Yorker articles collected in Paris To the Moon. Gopnik moved to Paris to write a series of articles about moving to Paris. But then at least Gopnik can write, a little bit.


This kind of writing, if you can call it that, gets me all riled up because its self-involvement obscures the real issues at hand. Understandably, newspapers have acres of space to fill every day. But then, if a picture's still worth a thousand words (going rate of exchange, last we checked) then a picture of just about any aspect of Mexico City would better serve the readers than this column.