You KNOW the devil's always after the easiest pickings....

photo by Eric Jackson

Enjoy the parade, but you may
not want to be the hindmost

Independence Day and Flag Day have come and gone and we have a lot of photos of the parades for you in this issue. People here like to be Panamanians, are proud to be Panamanians and want Panama to be a better place.

However, there is nothing close to a consensus about what any of those three ideas mean and this year's month of patriotic holidays finds the nation conflicted in many ways.

This issue has tales of things that the government seems to have gotten right, other things that it has done that have gone horribly wrong and people out and about the land preaching different visions of how things ought to be.

The nation's law enforcement agencies have acquired this habit of shooting people and blaming it on somebody else, beating people to death and saying that the victim died in a fall, and otherwise laying claim to impunity. It's a disturbing trend. What's even worse from a reporter's perspective is that, in the course of breaking up a Kuna protest near the Bayano Bridge the police hit a photojournalist for La Prensa with birdshot, but because that daily is for the most part politically aligned with the PRD its management didn't bother to denounce this particular bit of brutality.

Yes, and the government continues its prosecution of yours truly at the behest of a most flagrant gringo hustler, not to protect anyone's improperly impugned honor but in an attempt to get all news outlets to cower the way that La Prensa does. Should I worry or should I laugh? My accuser, Mark Boswell alias "Rex Freeman," you see, says that he has a dream.

It has been, however, nightmare time in the town where I was born, Colon. Two bomberos were killed and several others maimed in a terrible fire at a cigarette lighter warehouse in the Free Zone. All sorts of things went wrong and I have already been called some nasty things for pointing this stuff out, but the problems that converged in a tragedy are newsworthy and ought to be front and center in public discussion.

A fellow Colon native wondered to me if there would be so many lame excuses if the fire had been in a high-rise tower in Paitilla or Punta Pacifica, where wealthier people tend to live. But actually, for this issue I went the Alliance Française to cover a forum on urban problems and one of the points of discussion was that, with our collapsing and overburdened city infrastructures, there are parts of those neighborhoods that not only lack water pressure for mundane things like bathing or serious things like firefighting for parts of the day, but which in any case have buildings much higher than can be scaled by anything the bomberos have. Set aside notions of confort for the haves and intolerable conditions for the have-nots for a moment --- our capital is becoming increasingly intolerable for the haves, and if the poor people of Colon have been neglected, not that some Free Zone businesses owned by folks who are definitely not poor have also taken some big losses.

(By the way, do you want to express your solidarity with and appreciation for the bomberos? I can think of no better way than to attend the annual firefighters' torchlight parade, which happens after dark on Tuesday, November 27. If you have little kids and it's past their usual bedtime, make an exception in this case and bring them along.)

But along with the sad and the sordid, Silvio Sirias has outdone himself and given us an inspiring story this time, the tale of an attorney and Wounaan activist who has come a long way, negotiating his way around poverty, misery, discrimination and violence to attempt something that hasn't been done before.

So what should we be inspired to do? Write a letter? Hit the campaign trail with the politician or party of our choice?

The 2009 elections are a year and a half away, but the campaign trail is still a very busy place. This time we take peeks at President Torrijos, who as the constitution now stands won't be running for anything; independent mayoral candidate Miguel Antonio Bernal; and a group of leftists, mostly from the labor movement and academia, who have commenced a steeply uphill effort to put a new political party on the ballot.

And if the state of public affairs in this country has you ready to turn away in despair, there are more attractive things underway. Boquete's new English-language theater group is putting on a Neil Simon play. Under doctor's advice I missed the high school play at the Balboa Academy but someone covered for me and I wonder if any of those kids will perform with the Boquete group some day. With the long established Theatre Guild of Ancon the question becomes not "if" but rather which of these kids we will see in, for example, the Guild's annual Christmas show.

Me? Well, I took my little Kodak for a walk on the semi-wild side to catch Samy y Sandra Sandoval on Halloween night at the Via Veneto Casino. Didn't get close enough to take any good pictures of the band but I heard the music just fine and had a good time people watching.

You see, tending the garden (which, maybe due to global warming, the bugs have feasted upon extra-ferociously this year) and appreciating the flowers, it's a good idea for an old buzzard to get out every now and then.

Enjoy.

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