Especially as it became clear
that this issue of The Panama News would appear at a time when a country
that's more than 80 percent Catholic was mourning the Pope's passage, it for
a moment seemed like the choice of cover photos that I had already made
ought to change.
But you know what? If you look
at the
editorial that goes with the picture above, it probably isn't all
that far from what Pope John Paul II believed. We might disagree about what
the law ought to be, but I think we would tend to disparage the same sorts
of attitudes and behaviors, for many of the same reasons.
It will take time to put the
long-serving Pole's pontificate into its proper historical perspective, but
maybe it's best viewed by reference to a snide remark by a former Orthodox
seminarian who turned out to be one of the worst enemies the Catholic Church
ever had.
In a wartime meeting among
Josef Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, the latter
mentioned the value of getting a papal endorsement of the Allied war aims.
"The Pope," the Georgian red czar asked, "how many divisions can he
mobilize?"
This pope used strategies,
tactics and forces of a very different sort, but can't it be said that he
mobilized enough divisions to send the Russians packing from Poland and the
rest of eastern Europe? Didn't he add that extra shove that toppled the
Soviet empire?
Like Ayatollah Khomeini and
Mahatma Gandhi but unlike any other pope, Karol Wojtyla was a national
liberation leader as well as a religious figure.
Like George W. Bush and Jerry
Falwell and Ralph Reed, Pope John Paul II was anti-abortion, but unlike any
of those guys he was pro-life. The difference is that Polish pope was also
against war, against the death penalty, against torture, against economic
structures that spread hunger, disease and early death across deprived
communities that encompass vast stretches of our planet.
Where the Catholic Church will
now go, under which leader, we shall see soon enough. But believe me, this
issue's cover story does not represent a change in editorial policy, nor is
it a gesture of disrespect to anyone. It's just a matter of calling them
like I see them.
The lurid case in which a
young prostitute died at the Plaza Paitilla Inn is but one of the strains
under which the institutions of Panamanian justice are cracking. In his
opinion column,
Raúl Leis notes precisely what's at stake since multiple
allegations of corruption on the high court emerged.
Miguel Antonio Bernal,
for his part, ponders the meaning of the legislature's summary refusal to
consider these allegations. What Panamanians --- and people around the world
who care to pay attention to the isthmus --- are seeing is a demonstration
of just how corrupt and dysfunctional institutions can be against a backdrop
of official denial. President Torrijos appointed a committee, comprised
mainly of representatives of the compromised institutions, to report back in
six months. Then the
legislature served notice that whatever may be reported, it won't even
look into circumstances that strongly indicate
that wealthy drug traffickers have bought
their way out of Panamanian
custody, or any of the other high court scandals that have surfaced of late.
So is everything for sale in
this society, and have all the deals been done? I hope that my hunches about
the answers to these questions are wrong.
You may have noticed how
woefully incomplete the previous issue turned out to be. There were a bunch
of factors, but at the end I was just under the weather with flu-like
symptoms for a few days and took the occasion to call a halt to the
production process well before it was done. Sorry for the inconvenience.
One of the things that didn't
get into the last issue was my report on a
Portuguese fisheries biologist's
presentation at the Smithsonian's Tupper Center. It's here this time, along
with a business section feature about the ongoing collapse of world
fisheries. Just because Panama means "abundance of fish" doesn't mean that
the name will always match reality, and this country had better pay
attention to such matters while it still has the ability to do things that
matter.
In the community section I
report on the
Easter Sunrise Service at the Museo Afroantillano, the travel
section takes us up the
Teribe River and in the arts pages we briefly
consider the
400th birthday of Spanish literature's greatest work. The
letters this time are dominated by people with opinions about the Terri Schiavo case, the news section glances at one of the perks of being
Rector Magnifico, and in the business pages we get a fish-eye view of how
China's
economic surge is cleaning a certain sort of debris off the streets of
Colon. And as usual,
Sparky the Wonder Dog stands guard.
Our March fundraising month,
like all such events recently, drew all manner of electronic assaults, as
was discussed in the previous issues. In part because snail mail from the
states is slow, I don't know how much these hurt us. I do know that a bunch
of people protested to the company to whose advertising site links were
inserted into our volume 11, issue 4. A company spokesperson belatedly
contacted me --- apparently not in response to my own protests to them of
several weeks earlier --- and said that while it was his company's spam that
was linked to this website, the hacker who did it was not part of their
operation. The same green links appeared on issue 5 shortly after it
appeared, but about the time that someone sent me an email saying that he
was signing up all the spam advertisers to multiple obscene sites all those
links disappeared. Don't know what to think, but I do know that I'm unlikely
to ever prove what I suspect.
Things are still a bit hectic
as I adjust to the consequences of February's computer crash, and now I am
told that shortly I will encounter an added extra distraction. The next
