Be that as it
may, it’s a glimpse of the place on Bartolome Island in
the
Perlas Archipelago where the “Survivor” television
show’s “tribal councils” will be held. It seems
that CBS has built reasonably good copies of some of the
architectural features of Panama’s old Spanish forts, in a
very beautiful setting.
The
“reality TV” game is underway, with most of the
action
taking place on the islands of Mogo Mogo and Chapera and the
production headquarters on Contadora. This photo and another in
our Travel section were surreptitiously taken and forwarded
to The Panama News courtesy of the Survivor Maps website. CBS
really doesn’t want such photos, and has Panama’s
coast guard --- which lacks the resources to adequately guard
our coasts from more serious threats --- working to keep
gawkers
and photographers away. I won’t be causing them any
problems. I don’t intend to intrude or to ruin any
surprises before the show airs in the United States this
fall.
One thing I can
safely say, however, is that the contestants surely must have
been drenched in recent days. Panama rarely gets hurricanes,
but
we were sideswiped by a tropical storm and got several days of
unusually heavy rains. For those of you who haven’t
experienced tropical cloudbursts, you may want to check out our
Outdoors page this time. If the folks at CBS
don’t
present the phenomenon to the North American audience ten times
better than I have, it will be fair to say that they blew
it.
Art Mokray does
some of the same things I do for his Art’s Bochinche column on
the Panama Canal Society of Florida website. Art’s mostly
a
chronicler, someone who summarizes events that have been
reported in other media. That’s what our Panama News Briefs and Business & Economy Briefs mostly are too. (You
may reasonably ask where the sources are mentioned. If an item
in the briefs is taken from one source it’s noted, but if
it’s from multiple sources it’s not. I’m always
open to discussion about whether that’s a proper procedure
and I point it out every now and then to keep faith with the
readers.) Anyway, Art also manages to slip in a bit of original
journalism into his columns from time to time and in one recent
example he tells an interesting tale of a little logistical
accident that the Survivor folks had.
I’m
getting
quite a bit of email and even phone calls from Survivor fans in
the United States and Canada, and am informed of at least one
group who have their plane tickets ready to come down to Panama
and see the site of the competition once it’s over. I
extend my welcome to Panama to Survivor fans who are thinking
in
these terms, and advise that it would be best to get around the
country and experience a variety of our many attractions.
Odds are that
some of these visitors will fall in love with Panama and decide
to come live here. There is a very useful English-language
Yahoo
email list, Viviendo En Panama, for folks who have taken such a
plunge, or who are thinking of doing so.
I was recently
a
protagonist in a ruckus in that email group when somebody made
a
request of the sort I get from time to time at The Panama News.
A couple wanted advice on lawyers, “facilitators” or
orphanages through which they might adopt a Panamanian kid. I
pointed out that this country’s laws discourage
international adoptions and added that I support that policy,
and away it went. Really, VEP is an advice group rather than a
forum for debates, flaming or otherwise, so I owe Melodye an
apology for my role in a protracted online argument.
The Letters page and Opinion section of this newspaper, on the other hand,
exist precisely for debate about this and sundry other issues.
To the extent that hard times have made The Panama News largely
a one-man show featuring too large a dose of my own opinions
that’s a shortcoming. On the other hand, when people like
you consider this a fitting forum to publish opinions it’s
progress toward my goal of producing a community newspaper for
the place and state of mind that’s The Crossroads of the
World.
(And as this IS
the news medium that serves Panama’s English-speaking
community, let us note an important milestone involving one of
our own. Dr. Marion Clarke Martin has been unanimously elected
as the dean of the University of Panama’s medical school.
As Earl Watson points out, she’s the first woman and the
first black person to hold that post.)
In the Opinion
section this time Dr. Bernal gets into international law and the quality of
Panama’s best jurists. Our Business section includes a bit
of original reporting, a presentation by a distinguished panel
of economic conservatives to an audience mostly composed
of Panamanian admiralty lawyers, at which I was the sole
representative of the national press corps.
Also in the
Business section, based on a variety of sources, there is the
continuing saga of Marc Harris. I find the web page defending him most
interesting. It reminds me of when I was a teenager working on
the underground newspaper in Ypsilanti, Michigan and we used to
get these letters from members of the Manson Family. “Our
Father, who art in jail” was the tenor of the weirdness
way
back then, but in Harris’s case it’s a set of wild
conspiracy theories and an appeal to send him money to spend in
jail (US Postal Money Orders only, so it seems). But then, the
whole point of Harris’s “octopus” and
“black
hole” financial webs is conspiratorial. I do not expect US
federal prosecutors to put anything close to the whole Marc
Harris story on the public record, for one thing because to do
so would likely embarrass prominent political figures in
several
countries.
“And what
about YOUR troubles?” someone might ask. Yes, the
newspaper’s troubles persist and prosecutors want to
formally question me about our debt to Seguro Social. However,
our slow readership month of June is behind us and both the
number of visitors to the website and our ad revenues are
growing. I don’t intend to flee to Nicaragua or anywhere
else. The plan is to hold out here at 9° North and bring
you, and people who have yet to discover The Panama News, a
newspaper that you’ll want to read.
I hope that you
do. Enjoy.
