Damien Cave is a New York Times reporter whose recent story on less Mexicans coming into the United States was, like most things reported by the Times, about seven years too late and towing the elite line instead of talking to the street. But that's an issue for Navel Gazing; here, our beef with him is in describing Mexico City in an art story as a “cityscape with the color and curves of a tortilla.”
Um, what? ¿Qué que?
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This line makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. Mexico City explodes with colors; a tortilla is a uniform shade, whether the healthy brown of wheat, blue corn's violet tone, the healthy yellow of fresh corn, or the pasty white of flour, all broken up only by occasional flakes of char. Mexico City is in a valley, surrounded by mountains, and sinking; a tortilla is as flat as, well, a tortilla. Mexico City is a blob at its most defined, a nebula in reality; a tortilla, even at its most jagged, remains a circle. “Curves of a tortilla”? A tortilla has but one, and it's its circumference.
¡Qué pendejo! Of course, I'm sure the Times editor who saw it delighted in Cave's ridiculous turn of nothing, and probably hasn't eaten a tortilla since the days he was a college student and it was Multicultural Night. But, hey: tortillas? Mexico? Yeah! Easy metaphor, even if it's so fucked up it doesn't even aspire to be a mixed one!
In other news, another Columbia University School of Journalism-educated reporter recently compared New York City to a bagel…
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