Panama is about to celebrate its 99th year as an independent republic and the 181st anniversary of its separation from Spain. The high school and bombero bands are working out in earnest, and I plan to catch some of the parades in Panama City.

Portobelo is also set to celebrate the November 2 quincentennial of Christopher Columbus's visit there in 1502. Like Panama Viejo and Nata, Portobelo was a thriving town well before the Europeans arrived.

The displays of patriotic fervor began early this year, and got me drenched with beer. I was seated behind the goal where Panama's under-20 soccer team scored in the last minute to beat Guatemala. The crowd roared, the stadium shook, and all available liquids went airborne. Two more victories, against Cuba and heavily favored Mexico, won Gary Stempel's squad a ticket to next year's world championships in the United Arab Emirates. "¡Panamá! ¡Panamá!...." Read all about it in the Sports section.

Panamanian identity is still the topic of passionate debates. I recently participated in a forum at the Universidad Interamericana, where I was a member of a panel that discussed legislation to promote the teaching of English before an audience of students and teachers of the English language. The measure's proponent, Liberal deputy Arturo Araúz, doesn't speak English himself but is concerned about the economic consequences of unilingualism in a country that purports to be the Crossroads of the World. Earlier this year he unsuccessfully proposed a law that would have made English Panama's official second language, but that ran into constitutional and nationalistic objections and was withdrawn. His current proposal before the legislature is a bit more practical and his presentation of it is covered in our News section.

I think that the legislative debate would be more realistic were it not premised on certain ethnographic denials about the nature of Panama's English-speaking community, a mythology that's central to the world views of the Arnulfista Party, a snobbish fringe element of the American community and most of the banking industry. Araúz proposed his legislation because a bank complained that it couldn't find enough English-speakers to hire. He keeps repeating the figure that only three to five percent of Panamanians speak English. But most Panamanian banks refuse to hire blacks, and the biggest part of the English-speaking minority here is the West Indian community, which amounts to more than 10 percent of the national population. You only get down to the figure bandied about in the Legislative Assembly if you don't count blacks, and even then it's a lowball estimate.

Despite my irritation with the notion of Panamanian laws being based upon false premises or an industry's discriminatory practices, I think that Araúz has a good point. Panamanian education needs serious reforms, and one of these must be the more widespread and more effective teaching of second and third languages, the most popular of which is bound to be English.

The Hindus, who constitute a small but important part of Panama's English-speaking community, are about to celebrate Diwali. This country's Hindu community traces its ancestry mostly to Gujarat or Sindh, often by way of the Caribbean islands. Read about Diwali through the link listed in our Cool Internet sites if you are unfamiliar with the concept.

In my strange mind, thinking of the word "Diwali" sets off this doo-wop chorus --- dip dip dip diwali wali dip dip dip --- but let's not make light of the Hindu festival of lights, ordinarily an occasion for great joy. However, let us note that the worldwide Hindu community is mourning at the moment. You haven't heard much about it on the corporate McNews? Well, Bali is a mostly Hindu island, a place that was Hindu long before Islam came to Indonesia, and the recent bombing there was not only an attack on Australian tourists. It's one more proof that Osama bin Laden's crowd are hardcore bigots who aim to terrorize Indonesia's Hindu minority and impoverish it by destroying Bali's tourism industry.

I suppose that in an era when "zero tolerance" has been turned into a political mantra, we shouldn't be surprised by all the intolerance we see and hear around us. It's often ironic. For example, I heard the "it's cheaper and better to kill all drug users" screed the other day. This argument is almost invariably made by a heavy smoker or an alcoholic, and this occasion was no exception.

I have never heard death for druggies advocated when the substance abuser being discussed is a member of the Bush family. For the Bushes the standard is 10 days for crack, but 10 years if you're black.

By the time the next issue appears, the US mid-term election silly season will have passed. Here the campaigning for the 2004 elections is off to a ridiculously early start, with former Health Minister José Terán running television ads for his long shot bid for the Arnulfista presidential nomination.

Terán, you might recall, is the guy who bailed out of his cabinet post just as soon as it became known that more than two dozen cancer patients had been killed or injured by radiation overdoses administered by his subordinates at the Instituto Oncologico Nacional. Now he's asking the voters to give him far more responsibility than he shirked in his last public post.

The Arnulfistas, though they take their name from a physician, would be foolish to run on health issues. Mireya is, after all, the president who brought Philip Morris into the public schools to tell kids that smoking's a really grown-up thing to do.

However, that's not the health issue that's uppermost in the Panamanian mind at the moment. In recent days we have seen Mireya Moscoso's health director for the metro Panama City region, Carlos Rodríguez, on TV denouncing --- unfair competition. This stellar example of an administration that runs on nepotism and political patronage actually complained that Stone's, a popular nightclub, attracts all these promiscuous young women who are looking to get laid without charging for the service, and that's not fair to Panama City's houses of prostitution!

Stone's got loads of publicity out of this weird incident, and even if it won't prompt me to partake of a bar scene that's not my style, others will surely be attracted.

That's fine with me. Your preference may be soccer at the National Stadium or popular participation sports, beaches or mountains, Latin American musical genres or the trance scene, wild nights on the town or quiet encounters with tropical nature. There's even an outside chance that, like me, you would rather start your evening with dinner at Los Camisones and end it absorbed in a book. Panama's fairly tolerant and not too serious, and we have interesting attractions for just about every taste.

Eric Jackson
the editor

PS: As this issue was being produced, we heard the sad news about the plane crash that took the lives of US Senator Paul Wellstone and seven other people. We have added an homage to Wellstone by one of his friends and political allies, Rabbi Michael Lerner, to our Opinion section.

CORRECTION: In the last issue there was an error that's most embarrassing for a history major. Panama gained its independence from Spain in 1821, not 1823.

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