Escalona ain't Jesse Ventura, and Navarro's not Gordie Howe

Leave it to Mireya’s sleazy and incompetent Government and Justice Minister Arnulfo Escalona to emphasize the current administration’s creepy pettiness by committing a petty crime.

The Mireyistas banned the performance on the official Independence Day stage by this country’s most outstanding musician, Rubén Blades, for explicitly political reasons. Then Mireya compounded the insult by inventing a tale of a money dispute and insisting that Blades play for free when she was paying foreigners hundreds of thousands of dollars to perform.

Well, Blades did play for free, on a stage set up by the Panama City municipal government. But Escalona, claiming that under the Mireyista regime a singer can’t sing without presidential permission and that the city stage would inhibit the movements of Mireya’s official guests, tried to stop the show. Bottom-of-the-barrel lawyer that he is, however, Escalona neglected to serve the city with the relevant orders in time for them to have any legal effect. Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro pointed out that this is supposed to be a free country and pressed ahead with his plans.

So the Mireyistas banned Navarro from the official signing of the centennial document, which ironically took place at City Hall. Escalona, Mireya, the Arnulfista dead horse presidential candidate José Miguel Alemán, the pathetic centennial commission chairwoman Lorena Castillo et al just took over the mayor’s protocol salon. Outside on the steps of City Hall, Escalona took the opportunity to twice shove Navarro.

Now here in Panama, people can get sent to jail for “irrespeto” for shoving the mayor. In the Common Law jurisdictions, they call what Escalona did “assault and battery.”

In the violent Hollywood culture, that’s grounds for Escalona to get a beating that the audience would cheer. Hollywood, like the American mainstream, despises small-minded bullies in positions of authority and likes to see the expectations of impunity that such people harbor abruptly trumped.

But this was an argument about Rubén Blades, the man whom Escalona tried to vicariously shove off the stage, a man who has had substantial success in Hollywood and yet is one of its critics. Latin American men get portrayed as gangsters and Latin American women as whores in Tinseltown’s cliches, and Blades rejects many roles offered to him because he doesn’t want to perpetuate the slurs.

The subtleties of the cultural issues that Rubén Blades has had to confront fly right over Mireya Moscoso’s head. Even though she has so far been a more capable campaigner and party boss than Blades, the president is an uneducated, uncultured and uncouth person, who occupies her post mainly because when he was 53 and she was 15 Arnulfo Arias saw fit to chase after her skirt.

There is a truly vast cultural gulf between President Moscoso and Rubén Blades, who has earned international recognition as a singer, composer and actor. He is also a brilliant lawyer, whose most noteworthy legal accomplishment was as the litigant who scored a rare upset victory over a record company that cheated him and Willie Colon over their pioneering early salsa albums.

On the cultural continuum, Escalona is a lot closer to Moscoso than to Blades. The minister is the sort of undeserving political appointee who knows which side of the bread gets the butter and very little else. On the other hand Navarro, who came to the mayor’s office as an Ivy League-educated environmental activist, is closer to Blades’s end of the spectrum.

Juan Carlos Navarro isn’t so deformed by Hollywood culture that he gave Escalona a Roberto Duran-style thrashing. No, hizzoner the mayor just elbowed Escalona away and demanded respect.

But maybe Navarro should have looked to the north of Hollywood for cultural inspiration. That is, to the Great White North of Canadian culture. That is, to the example of one Canadian in particular, hockey superstar Gordie Howe, a/k/a “Mister Elbows” to those who took the ice against him in his playing days.

Alas, since the mayor did not elbow the government and justice minister senseless in the Gordie Howe style, the voters will have to wait until next May to give him and rest of the Mireyista clique the thrashing they so richly deserve. All indications are that it will be an unprecedented electoral defeat for a Panamanian ruling coalition, but let’s not let them off so easily. Let’s all go the polls and beat them so badly that the Arnulfista, MOLIRENA and Liberal Nacional parties lose their ballot status. Then we’ll see how tough Arnulfo Escalona is.

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