Picardia Mexicana

Presently reading the classic Picardia Mexicana of Don Armando Jimenez, and have been laughing all night. It includes a facsimile of a typewritten document stamped and sealed with all the majesty of officialdom, entitled

CLASIFICACION CIENTIFICA DEL P*ND*JISMO

and it gives a general listing, in which one folly is nailed and then its opposite number gets it too; the dejected and the cluelessly cheerful, the credulous and the suspicious; and here is picardia in its true role as philosophy in full satirical estocada, which, if the Mexicans have no monopoly on it, is certainly a national specialty (your editor, despite his Dutch name, is partly derived from that happy people, so he would know). Any scientific classification of the asterisked phenomenon comprehensive enough to cover the despondent and the ebullient, the smart and the stupid, would seem to offer an alarming take on the human condition since it apparently covers everybody (and really does, in some respects); but we're actually reading a gloss on Aristotle's doctrine of the mean. The manifold forms of that perennial human character, el p*nd*jo, find themselves caught blinking in the photo flash of Don Armando's mental camera, and holding their descriptions under their sorry chins. The document concludes

...estudie bien, companero, el cuadro precedente: haga un detenido examen de conciencia y clasifiquese a si mismo, pero, por favor, no se haga P*ND*JO solo.

No necesariamente todos los P*ND*JOS pertenecen a una clasificacion solamente: la mayoria participa de dos o mas categorias, y usted facilmente lo percibira cuando trate de encontrar el sitio de sus conocidos o el suyo propio. En este caso, despreocupese, usted no tiene culpa de haber venido en tales condiciones al mundo.


Of course, given that one of the first and greatest gritos of the Revolution was "abajo 'los cientificos' !" (a cry which expresses the very raison d'etre of picardia), such a scientific classification might itself be a prime example of p*nd*jismo; for one of the definitive traits of el p. in all his forms, is that he takes himself very very seriously. There are two apparent vantage points from which one can look at human folly: one imagines that it is above it; the other knows it isn't. The first, for all its pretensions to sober science, is p*nd*jismo at its most intractable; the second is picardia, which can, however, sometimes pose as the first. But picardia, of course, moves much faster than any of its masks.