opinion

But by the time that happens, most of you don’t plan to be poor. By then a lot of you will be embarrassed by, and afraid of, the poor. If the description fits you won’t want to jeopardize your career by being associated with the causes that you now espouse.

Your faction may find Bernal expendable. He hasn’t submitted himself to the discipline of your particular Marxist-Leninist sect. He’s just a gadfly activist, and a popular law professor, and one of the very few Panamanian journalists who has won any sort of international honors for his work, and a guy who with next to nothing to spend came very close to getting elected mayor of Panama City a few years back --- in short, a deviationist element. Or at least, that’s as good an excuse as any to let him face the corrupt PRD university bureaucracy’s wrath all by himself. But there is no good excuse.

About Seguro Social, with the likes of Genaro López at the head of the movement and Miguel Antonio Bernal marching as well, you folks had no trouble at all characterizing the PRD as a sty full of decadent bourgeois swine and their militarist piglets. But after the militant march past the Palacio Justo Arosemena and then to the Presidencia, when you or your group have some ephemeral little benefit on the line back on the campus, so many of you seem to be far more understanding than the slogans you chanted downtown would suggest.

This test counts for enough of your grade to flunk you out of the revolution. It’s a reality check, a morality check and a gut check. It’s a test of your brains and political instincts as well.

“An injury to one is an injury to all” is _________________________.

Don’t get it? Hard to see much hope for you if that’s the case. It is, of course, the basic premise of socialism and of all working class movements worth their salt. There is no basis for any sort of labor union other than one of the racketeering or company-dominated varieties without that sense of justice and solidarity.

It’s even worse if you don’t see the injury. It almost goes without saying that you are walking around with the blinders of a closed mind if you don’t see how Bernal is harmed. If you don’t see how in the eyes of the world the diploma scandal will taint the licenciado, maestro or doctor title you pursue, then maybe the real scandal is that the University of Panama accepts dolts like you in the first place. And you’d have to possess an ego both as inflated and fragile as a balloon if you think that the “broad masses of workers, peasants and revolutionary intellectuals” are going to want to talk politics with you if you don’t understand that a faculty of chupamedias on their knees behind an authority figure who dubs himself “magnífico” and a student body of silent conformists that goes along with it all are impediments to social change.

The bottom line? By and large, you University of Panama student radical groups have disgraced yourselves. You have collectively demonstrated your political and moral weakness by failing to stand by Dr. Bernal. Too many of you have bought into your professed enemies’ values.

Not values in the abstract, mind you. Some of you, the very people who had no trouble quoting Marx about false consciousness and faulting the great majority of working class Panamanians for believing the blandishments and promises that politicians offered last year have fallen for even more preposterous lies. Journalism students have been persuaded that freedom of the press belongs to the media moguls and not every individual, in exchange for the false expectation that once they graduate their diplomas ought to be lifetime meal tickets. International relations students have been convinced that their degrees will get them the postings that if they cared to look they could plainly see go mainly to partisan hacks no matter who wins the election. A large portion of the student body has been conned into believing that massive cheating and nonexistent academic standards translate into easy money rather than a cloud on their individual credentials and the entire nation’s miserable underdevelopment.

A revolutionary process that can be bought? That’s the worst of the PRD. A movement that speaks in the name of labor but sides with the boss? That’s Tony Blair’s “New Labour.” It’s hard to believe that this is the level to which many of you campus radicals have sunk, but the fact that you are not at this moment howling for the Rector Magnífico’s scalp indicates to me that this is the case. I hope my preliminary estimate is wrong.

But the time for assessing grades is running out. The end of the school year is rapidly approaching. Will you fail the test?

(The passages italicized herein are by Tracy Chapman.)