"Mexico is sepia, old, and shadowy."
Dulce Maria Sauri

I'm in the middle of re-watching Steven Soderbergh's 2000 film Traffic, which is better than I remember.  It's an interesting snapshot of the time in which it was made.  Pre-9/11, pre-2006 Mexican drug war, and pre-gay everything, Traffic tells the story of a bunch of people embroiled in the world, before it went to hell.  Topher Grace takes Michael Douglas' fictional daughter into the ghetto to score heroin, and they aren't accosted by anybody, at all.  They're just walking down the street.  There are no looters, street fires, animatronic Fentanyl zombies high on demon rage, or tent cities full of knife-wielding maniacs anywhere to be seen.  In the ghetto.

Idyllic times, to be sure.

What's really striking about the film, however, is the use of the yellow NYC fallout filter on the scenes that take place in Mexico.  Whether Benicio Del Toro is shaking down some gringo tourists in Tijuana, or waiting patiently for some sort of corrupt military official to finish torturing somebody, all the Mexican scenes look like they were shot in New York City, just last week.

Is Benicio waiting for the J Train on a subway platform in Williamsburg in this scene, or sitting outside an official government cartel torture house in Mexico?  I don't know.  It's hard to tell.

Does this scene take place in the desert outside Tijuana, or a Mexican cartel police checkpoint on 5th Avenue in Manhattan?

Both, perhaps.  If anything, it looks like the air is cleaner in Mexico.  Mexican air as depicted in Traffic is yellow and glowing, as opposed to the orange and smoggy atmospheric filter God applied to NYC last week.  Is this the Empire State Building, or El Edificio del Estado Imperio from the spaghetti documentary Soylent Orange, which takes place in the year 2022, and in which people are encouraged to eat each other to save the planet from aliens and heterosexual gun owners?

Hard to tell, but remember that Edward G. Robinson's character's favorite color was orange, when he went to the assisted suicide clinic, which was as large and busy as an international airport.

I wonder, was he pining for the days of his childhood in New York, when everything was covered with the dusty Mexican poverty filter?

That was his last film, actually.  He died just a couple weeks after shooting.  Descansa en paz si puedes, viejo.

What about Eva Mendes?  Is she walking through Mexico in this scene, or shopping for a handbag in modern-day New York?

The yellow air makes me think she's in Mexico, but the random street fires and sidearm make me think she's somewhere in New York.  The Bronx, if not Manhattan.

Somewhere bad, to be sure.

So, why did God decide to apply the dusty Mexican poverty filter to New York?  Is He planning on filming a 3rd-world zombie movie ruled by cartel members there?  Is it a warning of impending doom?  Is it the harbinger of a freakshow of apocalyptic terror in which everything in the civilized West will be reduced to some sort of dystopian sci-fu film, a film in which masters of Tarantino-esque kung fiction sell drugs and gold-plated samurai swords emblazoned with scorpions carrying AK47s in sepia-toned taco joints while wearing sunglasses that glisten in the unholy, nauseating light?  Or is it just a stylized way of expressing an exotic form of poverty?

Is it possible to even breathe sepia air?

Let's ask the guys from Breaking Bad.

You can tell from the color of the sunlight that they're in New York.  The blasted-out, flattened wasteland behind them also suggests a futuristic NY scene.  Those aren't mountains in the background.  Those are either piles of rubble, or mounds of the moisture-proof dead.

Of course, it could be Mexico.

Again, it's hard to tell.

I took this photo on my last border crossing, which clearly shows the difference between the color of the air in the U.S. and Mexico.  Or did, before last week.

Obviously, the literal line in the sand stops all the dusty air from crossing over into the U.S., where it doesn't belong.

Or does it?

Is God trying to tell us something?  Will the cast of Sicario find themselves on the streets of New York for part 3 of the franchise?

Is this the Uber ride through the Brooklyn of the future?  Will we be escorted by armed guys riding in the back of pickup trucks, on our way to the assisted suicide airport on the set of Soylent Orange?

Or will we repent?

While most articles on the Mexican poverty filter are of the unrepentant self-righteous douchebag variety, and are usually written by some sanctimonious recipient of impending brimstone who sees racism in everything while simultaneously, hypocritically believing all white people are evil, therefore ensuring their own eternal destruction, Cracked makes an admittedly-interesting point when it states, "besides connoting warm weather, this oversaturated filter added a sort of grit and even dangerous or unhealthy subtext.  People began showing low-income countries and violent places with this yellow filter."

Hmmmm.  Low-income, violent countries.  Dusty yellow poverty filter.  Dangerous, unhealthy subtexts.

Hmmmm.

Has God given New York, and by extension the U.S., a major warning?

Is He about to turn New York, and by extension the U.S., into a dangerous, unhealthy place rife with low-income violence?

Hasn't He already?

How long shall we ignore the warning?