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For the record...

by Eric Jackson

"Only the very young have a clean slate. The rest of us must live forever with everything we have ever been." Arthur C. Clarke & Gentry Lee, Rama II

One of the hallmarks of good science fiction, like all good fiction, is the ring of truth of the propositions that it sets into made-up contexts. Maybe the time has come for some of Panama's politicians to read more science fiction. Just maybe.

If Mireya Moscoso signs a law recently passed by the Legislative Assembly, employers will surely be reading more fiction. In a country whose previous president spent a lot of public money claiming a doctorate that he doesn't actually have, fiction has long been a staple on job applications. It will no doubt become more common if police records are no longer available to the public, which would be the case under legislation proposed by deputy Felipe Cano (PRD-San Miguelito) and duly approved by the solons.

Cano has his reasons. He argues that a minor conviction in one's youth, or even an arrest without a conviction, can mark a person for a lifetime of unemployment and deprive society of talents that should be developed and used.

I can relate to that, in a way. I was violently opposed to the Vietnam War, and I sided with the Black Panthers when that closet queen who used to blackmail others about their personal lives, the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, made war against them. I have a misdemeanor record arising from my political activities of those days, and I believe that it has kept me from being hired for certain jobs that I have sought over the years.

I am not bitter about this. Call it a case of sour grapes if you will, but I wouldn't want to work for employers who are that petty anyway.

I have been on the other side of it, too. What's worse than a hostile Aussie with no ethics gunning for your job? Having her trying to assert her superiority by citing fictitious job experience, which elicits laughs when a few checking phone calls are made to Australia.

(No, I don't want to see your photo on your job application, nor am I even very interested in your resume. I want to see samples of your work.)

Cano's legislation has elicited many complaints from bankers, who don't want to hire people with records for fraud or embezzlement; and from schools, which try to keep the pedophiles away. Those objections are well taken, and to be expected.

As a journalist and as a citizen, I'm more interested in the harm that Cano's legislation does to the public's right to know things that its government knows, and to have free access to public records unless there's a very good reason why we shouldn't have it. The bottom line for me is that the Cano law is another blow to freedom of the press in this country.

Our trials are closed, unless a judge wants to turn a case into a show trial. Our court records are closed, unless a prosecutor wants to boast. Public discussion by law enforcement authorities of a case that's under investigation has been expressly condemned by the Supreme Court - unless the defendant is black and the police want to show him off to TV crews. I think that such routine government secrecy and its whimsical applications add up to worse abuses than do employers' arbitrary hiring decisions.

Some of the things that Cano is trying to do ought to be done. Employers should not be allowed to ask certain irrelevant questions, or to use certain discriminatory screening methods. The police should be careful about which permanent records they keep. People who want access to a police record or any other public document should be expected to pay a reasonable fee for the clerical work necessary to provide it.

But still, if somebody wants to know about my record for destruction of property or the El Siglo editor's record for murder, that's no more ghoulish than my interest in knowing where the Panamanian government spends its money. All that stuff should be a matter of public record.