Zócalo Public Square

Last March, responding to news of a killing, I found myself walking in the darkness at a crime scene in Quila, a small community outside Culiacán in Sinaloa, the state that is ground zero in Mexico’s drug war. I could hear helicopters overhead complimented by the sound of crickets on the ground as my feet made crunching noises on the gravel road. There was an orange glow from the flames of a bullet-riddled vehicle. There were no bodies immediately visible, until I ventured into the woods, following a police forensics team to encounter the body of a man killed by the Mexican military.

Twenty-four hours after Mitt Romney’s concession speech—as most of America nursed election hangovers, pundits opined on what went wrong for Romney and what’s next for Obama, and Florida continued counting votes—I gained perspective from an unexpected source: Mexico. I was at a hotel in Puebla watching the late-night TV hosts of Tercer Grado (the Third Degree) news commentary show bash the amateurish democratic process of their neighbors to the north.

Give Karl Rove a break. His meltdown on election night may not have been entirely about Fox News prematurely calling Ohio for President Barack Obama. After all, the poor guy had every right to get upset while watching the Republican Party nominee’s campaign crash and burn.

For all intents and purposes, Mitt Romney trampled on Rove’s once vaunted GOP playbook–and leaves a weakened GOP in his wake.

I just spent Election Eve and Election Day in the ultimate swing state and the heart of the presidential election: at a hotel in Capitol Square, in the heart of Columbus, in the heart of Ohio, which the state license plates tout as “the heart of it all.”

Even standing this close to the country’s electoral heart, it’s hard to hear much of a democratic heartbeat. The presidential election, experienced in this proximity, is less a living thing than it is a big, loud machine that drowns out other noises.

About a month ago, I received a letter from Mitt Romney’s campaign addressing me as “one of America’s most prominent Republicans.” This was news to me. I can assure you that if I were one of America’s most prominent Republicans, I’d be among the first to know.

The United States has lost its bearings in the world. Our foreign policy clings to a host of antiquated assumptions and no guiding strategic vision. It’s a bipartisan confusion, judging by this week’s foreign policy debate between President Obama and Governor Romney. The two men may have gotten personal in their sparring, but neither questioned the other’s assumptions about the places that matter most to Washington.

During my three years as a teacher at low-income schools in Washington, D.C., my students read about Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, César Chávez, and other famous Americans. But we never studied Christopher Columbus. The first school where I worked did not observe the holiday, and the second treated it as a parent-teacher conference day. So much for understanding the namesake of the District of Columbia.

I must have been 12 or 13 when my father suggested I go downtown with him to get some money from the bank. It was a Saturday afternoon, and, although he was a senior executive at the “Multibanco” in Chihuahua, I doubted he was going to be admitted on the weekend to help himself to some pesos. So I kept watching soccer on TV. My team, Atlético Español, was finding a new way to lose; that’s what they did.

To understand how public universities reached their present state of decline and near-crisis, you might look back a century and a half to July of 1862, when Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant Act into law. The act, to which we can credit many of the higher-education triumphs of the United States, did not, as is sometimes believed, give states acreage upon which to build huge public universities. Instead, each state was granted rights to federal land in the western territories, the income from which would be used to create: