I will be done
with the corrections on this issue sometime on Panamanian
Mothers’ Day --- the Catholic Day of the Immaculate
Conception --- and by the time that the next edition is
uploaded Panama’s Jewish community will be celebrating
Hanukkah. In the meantime, Human
Rights Day, the 20-30
Club’s annual telethon for children, the mayor’s
Christmas parade and the Chiriqui Highlands Fair in El Volcan
will be taking place over the next couple of weeks.
Sure, we can
see this season as the annual peak for retail sales, a time
when television viewership and Internet readership dip a bit,
or the last rainy days of preparation for dry season and its
attendant tourist influx. It’s all of those things.
But this is
also a good time to take stock of who we are and what makes us
human.
The social
Darwinists are wrong. The human race did not become the
dominant species because we are bigger, faster, stronger and
more able to bully the rest of nature into submission. Nor did
humanity, or the various elites among us, come out on top
because individuals were able to outsmart everyone and
everything else.
The secret to
human success is cooperation. One on one, when a cave man took
on a mastodon the smart money would have been on the mastodon
(except that money hadn’t been invented back then). But a
group of cave dwellers able to make plans because of their
language, and moreover, armed with weapons made possible by
their inventors’ abilities to spread new technology
throughout society, could make a mighty holiday feast out of a
mastodon.
And how did
people come to inhabit caves in the first place? Bears and
large cats had first dibs on those shelters and it was another
human social trait, the ability to enlist the cooperation of
other species, that allowed our ancestors to conquer the caves.
Far from trying to go one on one with bears, the ancient ones
sent the dogs in first.
The Law of the
Jungle may contain elements of competition, but the fittest who
survive best are not the toughest and greediest individuals,
but the smartest and most cooperative groups. In one way or
another, this concept is recognized in all of the great
religions and philosophical systems that have endured the test
of time.
And this is the
season to reflect on that reality and help the kid who
can’t walk become all that she or he might be, because the
child in the wheelchair might turn out to be a Franklin D.
Roosevelt or Stephen Hawking, whose achievements may advance
the cause of humanity in general.
This also is
and has been the season to lend a hand in the fight against
AIDS, a plague that has inflicted enormous damage on this
society and can do much more harm if people either do the wrong
things or fail to do the right things. The photo above was
taken at the recent Walk for Life sponsored by the Foundation for the Welfare
and Dignity of Persons Affected by HIV/AIDS (PROBIDSIDA). Was the
event an act of compassion, the sort of affair at which
politicians and beauty queens like to be photographed? That it
was, but the wiser participants --- including most of the pols
and vixens in attendance, I think --- understood the stakes
that they personally and Panamanian society generally have in
the battle against this global epidemic.
This issue gets
around. We look at what’s happening with a couple of the
English-speaking community’s institutions, the Theatre Guild of Ancon and the Viviendo en Panama email group. We take glimpses of
the new lights on the Bridge of the Americas, Japanese symbolism in a Panama
City park, the transit zone’s topography and the difference,
according to Panamanian English, between saril and hibiscus. We go to a good new Italian restaurant. We consider what a German biochemist had to tell an audience at the
Smithsonian about the ways that beetles use plant substances
for their own chemical defenses. Sparky the Wonder Dog
considers The Cannibal Question.
Our occasional
contributors are active this time. Florida State prof Silvio Sirias ponders “Don Quixote, the mayor and
me.” Survivor Wezzie (a/k/a Louise Craven), takes the plunge
into some environmental consequences of the CBS television
show’s presence in Panama. Willy Carrera covers a Houston municipal runoff
election, in which a Cuban-American might become the
city’s first Hispanic mayor.
Not only
because Human Rights Day is upon us, but also in keeping with
our long-standing notion of what’s important, we look at
human rights situations in Panama, Cuba, Miami and Latin America generally.
Let me part
with a comment about a situation that involves the issues of
human rights, the law and different concepts of news
judgment:
The Panama News
is not oriented toward the lurid and sensational. From time to
time I get questions or criticisms about why I haven’t
reported on some murder or fatal car crash in which an American
was involved, and I have to say that people are people, my time
and resources are limited and regardless of nationality,
somebody being pushed from a balcony or splattered on the
highway is tragic but not in itself a big news story. Now if a
police officer or archbishop is assassinated or the president
is hospitalized as the result of a traffic mishap, then those
stories affect important social institutions and are
newsworthy. Also more newsworthy than individual incidents, in
my eyes, are the national trends in taffic fatalities and the
overall murder rate. This newspaper also pays more attention to
the misbehavior of public officials than that of athletes or
entertainers based on similar judgments about what's
important.
Those of you
who get a lot of your news from AOL/Time/Warner/CNN, Fox or the
major US TV networks will have seen and heard a lot about
whether a Southern California man killed his wife and unborn
child, and whether one of America’s weirdest and most
talented musicians is a pedophile. You will have been updated
on the fate of the Beltway Snipers, and have been told about
the bizarre German Internet cannibal.
Unlike the
aforementioned media corporations, The Panama News doesn’t
have the resources to send reporters to cover legal events
happening around the world. Come to think of it, however, the
corporate mainstream media’s tendency to emphasize stories
happening around Southern California, New York and Washington
DC is also largely resource-driven.
However, let us
put things in perspective. The “Trial of the Century”
for the 100 years just completed wasn’t about whether O.
J. Simpson killed his ex-wife and an acquaintance of hers, or
who killed the Lindbergh baby. Clearly the most important legal
event of 20th century was the trial in Nuremberg of 21 Nazi
leaders.
So, given that
this is my style of news judgment, let me say that despite
intensive coverage of other cases the most important legal
event of the past few weeks has been all but blacked out by the
corporations that bring most of the English-speaking world its
news.
It’s the
recent genocide conviction of three Rwandan newsmen, two radio
personalities and a newspaper editor. They incited mass murder
and pleaded freedom of the press as their defense. The court
rejected this, and treated them in much the same way (absent
the imposition of the death penalty) as the Nuremberg Tribunal
treated one Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stuermer, for
his commission of similar crimes.
It was a good
decision, and a case that deserved more coverage than it
received from the multinational corporate media.
Freedom of the
press is a universal individual right. You have it, Rupert
Murdoch has it and I have it too. It is not a license to kill
by way of incitement to genocide, nor to commercialize rape
through the dissemination of child pornography, nor any sort of
exemption from the obligations of common human decency.
And God help
me, and all of my colleagues, to bear this distinction in mind
at all times.
I hope that you
find this issue of The Panama News informative and
entertaining, and up to worthy standards.
Enjoy.
