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Speaking of things sacred...

The Union Church is an institution that lives more than anywhere else in the memories of Zonians, but mostly they are elsewhere and meanwhile that multi-denominational Protestant congregation maintains churches in Balboa and Gamboa and has gone off in different directions more consonant with the post-Canal Zone realities of our times. The man shown above is Reverend Luis Veagra, who nowadays presides over the Balboa Union Church and gave the English-language meditation at the annual ecumenical Easter Sunrise Service at the Afro-Antillean Museum of Panama. The meditation displayed a deep knowledge of history and human nature in addition to theology, and implicitly touched upon the Union Church's philosophy that Christians should be united about the principal tenets of the faith and free to disagree about the minor points of doctrine.

By contrast to Veagra's more cerebral meditation, the Spanish-language meditation, delivered in spellbinding fashion by Reverend Alejandro Douglas of the Mision Cristiana de Panama, was an appeal to accept Jesus Christ as a personal savior and thus be able to surmount daunting obstacles and obtain everlasting life despite the natural fact of death.

The lack of Catholic clergy at this year's service made it slightly less representative of Panama's West Indian community, which has always had a substantial Catholic minority, but nevertheless Veagra and Douglas well represented two of the main currents in the Christianity of our times, in complementary rather than competitive fashion.

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Production of this issue of The Panama News coincided with Holy Week, and also with preparations for my April 10 grilling by prosecutors in the case that erstwhile "Patriot" militia radio shill Mark Boswell, who's now an offshore hustler who is doing business through a number of Internet sites and who now goes by the "Patriot" militia alias of Rex Freeman, has brought against me. I stand by my story.

(See also this bogus  "partnership" claim and this thing about the context from which Mr. "Freeman" came to Panama --- after a few years of hustling in Costa Rica.)

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Anyway, let's get away from the profane and back to the sacred.

People in different cultures often have a much different view of what's "sacred" and what constitutes "religion." Especially in the Orient, there are people who don't embrace the idea that there's only one "true religion" and that any mixing of beliefs is a terrible sin punishable by eternity in Hell or at least a long time pushing a boulder up a hill in Purgatory. And so there was nothing at all that seemed incongruous the other day at the Chinese cemetery, where sincere Christians and those with other religious views performed Confucian rites at the graves of their ancestors.

The Chinese community also recently inaugurated a new addition to their cultural center, in ceremonies that included dragon dancing and the presentation of a new book about Chinese-Panamanian history.

One other story that includes an aspect of religion is the growing protest movement against the capture of dolphins in Panamanian waters. The proponents seek to portray their critics as these fanatical animal rights activists in the tradition of PETA's public image, but at the heart of the movement we have Panama's home-grown animal welfare groups, the mainstream of which flows directly from the Catholic Church. (Now if the dolphin capture proponents want to couch such an appeal in Panamanian traditions instead of engaging in what looks very much like imported US-style attack campaign politics, they might want to in very low-key fashion work the crowds at the nation's cockfight pits. A free round of seco and an argument that the same folks who would shut the dolphin project down would also close the rooster rings would be the classic pitch to the other side of the gender gap on the dolphin issue.)

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Because there were three weeks between the last issue and this one, we have a bit more content, including larger opinion sections in both our English and Spanish sections.

For a number of reasons The Panama News does not often follow other bilingual publications' practice of publishing the same stories in both languages. One of those reasons is that a lot of the English-speaking community here, and many of our readers abroad, read both languages. The two sections are not mirror images, and if you can read both The Panama News is a much more comprehensive publication, sometimes taking on the same topic from two different angles --- like we treat the subject of torture in the English opinions and the Spanish news.

A lot of arguments and declarations within the context of Panamanian politics --- like former President Endara's message on the occasion of his new Vanguardia Moral de la Patria party achieving ballot status or the leftist Partido Alternativa Popular taking a much smaller and less certain step toward the same --- get played out more in the Spanish sections than in English. Sometimes, however, things that originally appear in English but are ignored by our Spanish-language mainstream media appear in our Spanish sections. An opinion column by American economist Mark Weisbrot is a current example of this.

Our Spanish sections use a lot of things from the Brazilian Adital news service, which has a liberation theology slant to its politics and a Latin American perspective on the things it covers. That service is free for websites, and carries stories and opinions that our Spanish-language corporate mainstream media systematically ignore. Because Panamanian columnists own the residual rights to their work, I publish the columns of Miguel Antonio Bernal and occasionally others in English translation, with permission. What The Panama News does not do is copy things off of Google News and paste them onto our website as one copyright pirate who falsely claims to have a larger readership than The Panama News routinely does.

(If you want to get a rough estimate of where the news websites from Panama stand, just go to Google's advanced search engine feature, punch in the key word Panama, set the counter to bring back 100 responses per page, and see which sites come up in which order when you hit the search button. Most of the pages that will come up will not be news websites, and of course the Google order can also be manipulated in various ways. But just note where The Panama News comes up, and where those who claim to have bigger readerships come up.)

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One bit of original reporting that I often do usually has no competition, and I take that as a mixed blessing. The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) has these wonderful lectures, both in English and to a lesser extent in Spanish, that are open to the public. Rarely do I notice another reporter in the room when I go to report on them.

That's a shame, first because if we had someone with a better background in the sciences than I do they'd probably do a better job of reporting on the subjects that are discussed than I do, and second because for Panama to rise above underdevelopment it must live by its wits in more than just a clever business fraud sense. We, the Panamanian people, need to increase our general scientific knowledge and to do that the media need to report more fully on the scientific advances that are being made or discussed in Panama. It's more important to the nation's development that this be done in Spanish than in English.

This issue's report from the STRI lecture series is about a talk that drew more than the usual crowd of scientists, because it was by an ornithologist. Talk about the bees and the scientists show up, but talk about the birds and the Audubon Society is likely to turn out, as they did. And given the important niche that bird watching plays in Panama's ecotourism industry, the lecture might reasonably have fit on the business page.

The Smithsonian, you may know, is in the news for a shakeup in the wake of various scandals and complaints, and that has had its immediate impact on STRI, here in Panama. Cristián Samper, a biologist who spent some time here in Panama, is now the Smithsonian's acting chief. STRI's long-time director, Ira Rubinoff, has been promoted to be Samper's top assistant for scientific research. Biologist Biff Bermingham has stepped in as STRI's acting director while Rubinoff performs those other duties. My story on the situation at the Smithsonian is mostly derivative from articles in other media, with a bit of locally obtained knowledge that wouldn't be considered important in coverage of the Smithsonian's predicament elsewhere.

The bottom line? I wish Rubinoff and Bermingham well in their new posts, and hope that the Smithsonian can resolve its problems so as to remain so great in so many different fields for generations to come. I'm a dual citizen and as an American I feel fortunate that my country has such an organization dedicated to the furtherance of knowledge, while as a Panamanian I feel pained when I realize that so many of my fellow citizens are not only unaware of what STRI does, but haven't a clue about what scientific research is about or what a world class library is.

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I want to thank everyone who contributed to The Panama News during our March appeal for funds. I won't pester the readers again in this fashion until September, but there are still all sorts of ways one might help the cause. I hope that a legal defense fund won't be one of these ways. Sending your photos and articles, like Ivan Klasovsky frequently does for our travel page, is one way to help. We need additional computers and a better digital camera --- and so on.

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Finally, let me point out some fun things to do in Panama.

As these words were written, we were one game into the finals of the national baseball tournament, which pits defending champion Herrera against always strong Chiriqui. These games are televised here, but there's nothing like going out to the stadium for a ball game.

Also coming up is the Theatre Guild of Ancon's next play, "I Hate Hamlet," which starts at the Ancon Theater on April 19. If you are in Panama City or thereabouts you'll want to catch this show, more because it will be a good time than for the also praiseworthy purpose of supporting the cause of English-language theater in Panama.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson

the editor