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photo by Eric Jackson

A place at the table?

Or is custom cabinet and furniture maker David Levi resting his head on Paul Bunyan's chair?

Levi's work is becoming famous in certain circles, to the extent that it has been displayed and sold at the Weil Art gallery. This piece, in the form of a huge chair, was not commissioned by Yao Ming, but serves the function of a table. It was one of the pieces on display for the March 19 Pat a Cat artists' benefit for Spay Panama.

That event was one of the several distractions from my usual production Sunday for this issue. Another was my catching of a football game at Balboa Stadium, and then I had more bits and pieces of organizing to do for science and technology writer TA Heppenheimer's speaking events and return to the isthmus where he was raised after many years away.

(Then there was the car alarm blasting in front of the office for an hour or so that afternoon. I don't tend to be a very nice person, or a very productive one either, under such stresses. The following morning I noted with approval El Panama America's editorial calling for enforcement of laws against the sort of noise "that drives anyone crazy." Imagine what it's like if you're crazy to begin with. And imagine how the mayor's presidential aspirations would be boosted if he sent the municipal officers and tow trucks out to do battle with and conduct confiscations of car alarms and boom trucks. Our capital is one of the world's noisiest, and it's a huge political issue awaiting some leader to come along and embrace.)

This issue has a longer than usual opinion section, leading off with the US State Department's report on human rights and my gloss on it. Both Silvio Sirias's column and the editorial have to do with a bit of ugly racism that has besmirched the national baseball scene and requires some immediate and stern redress.

There has been some sadness in the community to report this time, with part-time Portobelo resident and retired Florida professor and labor leader Willis Truitt's passing and the untimely accidental death of 1974 Balboa High School graduate Jim Simonsson. The latter one might have known from some of the Internet discussion boards related to Panama. I met the man just once in person, but a bunch of times through the email or over the phone. Some of the stories that have been published in The Panama News have arisen from or been informed by things that he told me.

And then from Michigan, where I lived for many years, came another shock. My friend Faizi Faz Husain came down with a lung ailment and didn't survive the winter. Now Faz never came to Panama and I know that hardly any of you who read these words will have ever heard of him, so let me digress to something that doesn't have to do with this country.

Faz and I were born within a few days of each other in December of 1952. He started out in Patna, India and I came into this world in Colon, Panama, and within a few days of each other we moved to Michigan in June of 1966. Faz's dad, the late Safdar Husain, was the foreign student advisor at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti.

The Husains were Urdu-speaking Muslims from the capital city of the Indian state of Bihar. Did you see the movie where Ben Kingsley played Gandhi? That was mostly shot in Patna. One day in 1947, amid the chaos of India's partition, a riot started in Patna. When the smoke cleared some 15,000 people had been killed. A lot of the Muslims fled to what was then East Pakistan, where they got along uneasily with their Bengali-speaking neighbors. When Pakistan was partitioned in 1971, most of the Biharis remained loyal to Pakistan and many of their neighbors in the newly independent Bangladesh took bloody reprisals. And largely as a result of these horrors the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti area of Michigan now has a community of several hundred Bihari Muslim families.

Just like the most zealous members of any religion tend to be the converts, the most patriotic Americans of all are, as Faz liked to say, those who are "American by choice," the immigrants. Faz wasn't a "my country is never wrong" type of American, but that sort of "my country right or wrong" guy who would do his best to help right those wrongs that he saw.

I served a couple of terms on the Ypsilanti city council, was defeated running for a third term, and later Faz was elected to serve the people of my old ward. We were both elected several times as the Democratic precinct delegates for our neighborhood. For many years, I would do "Thanksgiving with the Indians." We'd get together at the Husain family's house, with a bunch of foreign students who had no place to go as the EMU campus became deserted for Thanksgiving, and with other neighbors, friends and relatives. I'd do the traditional turkey and stuffing with giblet gravy and cranberry sauce, and Faz and his wife Nikhat would do the Indian-style curried lamb with saffron rice. They were great feasts that introduced a number of foreigners to American culinary traditions and a number of Americans to the joys of one of India's ethnic cuisines.

(And what about the cuisine most popularly associated with Faz in the neighborhood? He ran a pizza shop, the source for Islamically correct Italian-American food that might be topped with turkey ham or kosher Italian sausage.)

These days from the United States and in the American community here we sometimes hear the inverse echo of Osama bin Laden's bigoted message, the notion that Muslims in general are America's enemies. But though he would never hurt a flea, Faz was one of the worst enemies that the vicious crusaders and jihadis could ever have. He was Exhibit A in the case to show that a new epoch of warfare between the Western world and the Islamic world is a completely insane idea. That so many American politicians have sought to cast suspicion upon people like Faz rather than to rally their support is one of the hallmarks of the current US malaise.

(And by the way, this may not be the last that you hear of the Husain family. Faz's son Ali is one of Big Ten baseball's brightest pitching stars, the closer for the University of Michigan whom the NCAA batters find as hard to hit as their Major League counterparts find Mariano Rivera. I suspect that Ali Husain will go on to greater things in the world of baseball.)

This being the second issue in March, we are still in our semi-annual fundraising drive. However, I don't want to take up so much of our front page for a "pledge month" appeal. You can go to the community section to read about the particulars, but I do want to use this space here to thank all of the generous supporters of The Panama News.

And where else have I been these past weeks? To the Amador Causeway, to catch the annual kite festival put on by the Association of Chinese-Panamanian Professionals. On the streets of my neighborhood by day and night, contemplating changes in the national sports culture and piñatas that talk back. Reading a consumers' guide by a former member of the Canadian Parliament who does some of his writing in Panama now. Going to a full moon and 70th birthday celebration at the Casco Viejo home of Bruce Quinn, whose next theatrical production is apparently not a musical. Shopping and taking pictures at the main municipal farmers' market. Checking out the Brooklyn Cafe.

I have also been keeping up my habit of attending the free lectures at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Tupper Auditorium. On Wednesday, March 22, they will be throwing their annual intellectual feast, the STRI Science Symposium, an all-day series of presentations by people doing cutting edge work in a number of fields at this brilliant outpost of American academia. If you can catch any or all of this event you really should. And meanwhile past lectures on ornithology and the social sciences are reported in this issue.

And is New Orleans culture part of Americana? Last I heard, it was, as troubled as that city has been since Hurricane Katrina. On the 24th at the Clayton Gazebo there will be a celebration of New Orleans tastes in jazz and food, and that's another event at which Americans ought to show the flag and those who are not Americans ought to go discover good things that they may not have known.

It will be three weeks between this issue and the next one, as March hath five Fridays and we publish twice a month rather than every two weeks.

In between now and then, there are these two events that I have been organizing, featuring TA Heppenheimer. On Tuesday, April 4 at 1 p.m. in the Tupper Auditorium, he'll be speaking to high school students and teachers about the cutting edges of science and technologies related to space. On Wednesday, April 5 at 7:30 p.m., he'll be talking at the Colegio de Abogados about the directions in which the space industry is moving and Panama's possibilities to participate. Both events are open to the public, with free admission.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson
the editor