A Return to Puerto Vallarta

And so we are back in Puerto Vallarta for another winter, this time for four months – December to March inclusive. Last year we had three months and the year before, two. Who knows what next year will bring? We arrived on Sunday afternoon after spending a night in Mexico City, entirely disoriented and pooped from schlepping about with our four heavy suitcases filled with the paraphernalia one expects to need during one-third of the year. Need I say that much of the transported mass was books? At any rate we are here, making our way into life in the beautiful southland.

We did a lot of walking on Monday – up to the fruit and vegetable market; a visit to a small health food store to check on the availability of Rice Dreams (rice milk); to the open fish market for on-the-spot filleted sea bass for our supper, and, to our close-by “gourmet” market for feta cheese and some lovely French beans. Later we took the bus out to Costco, looking for an electric kettle. We walked all over that enormous emporium, finding no electric kettles, but an over-priced one for the top of the stove. Next, the bus again to Mega – a jumbo-sized general store, rather like a Walmart. Here we found the desired object at a quite reasonable price and purchased it along with some essential beer and wine. Our bus home disgorged one and all about a mile or so from our condo. The yearly celebrations for December 12^th’s feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe have begun: the core of the old town is given over daily to parades in her honour. (I wrote about this feast and also more about the town last year in the first post on this blog.) And so, whether we wanted it or not, we had our first walk along the malecon, even stopping to pick up a container of the gelato at my favourite shop. Later we went along the main street of this area, Olas Atas, to visit Roberto at his shop, and to order the New York Times that arrives three times a week at his place. It was a lot of walking but it felt good after our several days of packing up and of travel.

I am continuing to read about the holocaust. On Friday mornings this fall I audited a course by Doris Bergen at U of T that traced the development of the Nazi state from 1933 when Hitler first came to power, to 1939 when Poland was invaded. In the spring term she will cover the war years 1939-45. I am now going through a tome by Saul Friedlander, his second, entitled: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination. His first covered the pre-war years 1933-39 and was subtitled: The Years of Persecution. I’ve had this book for a few years though have not studied it until now. Friedlander puts forth his theory elaborated in his first book, that the essence of Hitler’s bond with the German people was his positioning himself as a “redeemer,” a nicely Christian concept, or Jewish if one substitutes “messiah.” He was to redeem the Volk, the German/Aryan people by purifying it of foreign elements, especially by ridding it of the Jews whom he depicted as sub-human vermin on the one hand, and, world power brokers bent upon the destruction of the German people, on the other. Quite a contradiction to straddle! He also promised the “millennium,” a thousand years of German national prosperity and expansion.

It is interesting to see how the various students of this period position themselves and vie with one another for the best over-all analytical concept. In his introduction Friedlander dismisses Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s approach in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.”  Goldhagen identified the basic cause for the Holocaust in a particularly ingrained German anti-Semitic passion. Friedlander also questions the focus of Christopher R Browning on social-psychological constraints and group dynamics in Browning’s book “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.” However,  Goldhagen gets his own back in a review of Friedlander’s book published in The Washington Post, calling Friedlander’s thinking “woolly,” and in summarizing his comments saying, “Friedlander’s book provides a useful, updated panorama of the events of the Holocaust, but readers seeking more than an introductory narrative will have to look elsewhere.” Ouch! Such is the world of academe! Each of these works, regardless of the particular view they are ascribing, brings a wealth of detail based on recent research and scholarship. Friedlander, for example, makes generous use of diaries written during the war by people in ghettos and even in concentration camps -- hidden and later recovered. Since the fall of the USSR many documents of this kind previously in archives in the east have become available, shedding new light and perspectives on the period.

So I will read the works of all these fellows and learn from each, because as I have been saying for decades, many things can be true at the same time. I want to get a three-ring notebook so that I can put down the important pieces that I come upon in my reading. Otherwise, all the detail and the things I suddenly understand come and go in the ether that I sometimes call my brain as it stands at this rather “woolly” phase of my life. Good to have a record to review and to savour.

We have a new, magic phone that we can use here in Mexico just as if we are in Toronto. It is a 647 number. If you call my number in Toronto, the message will give it to you, so you can call either me without long distance charges. Is that magic or what? It is such a wonderful thing to be able to go out walking freely morning, afternoon, and/or evening and enjoy the breeze off the ocean and the loveliness of the scene.

I hope all are well in Toronto, Sutton, Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal, Nova Scotia, Vancouver, Kalamazoo, Portage, Lansing, or wherever else you might be reading this. Little notes back saying how things are going in your world are appreciated. All the best.