We have worse problems than self-proclaimed little terrorists

Frente de Artesanos Terroristas?

The latest riots featuring those SUNTRACS members in training, the kids at the Artes y Oficios vocational high school, were about the workshops being unsuitable for use. Whatever one may say about the response, it was a legitimate complaint.

This time the masked adolescent boys from that school with a wild reputation were calling themselves the "Frente de Artesanos Terroristas" --- the Artisans Terrorist Front --- a name sure to grab press attention and to further horrify those with a predilection to feel that way. To the kids it was a joke, just as the most militant of the young rioters against the Vietnam War a generation ago had a great laugh and made a point of it to put on some extra bogeyman poses when that legendary practitioner of betrayal and corruption Spiro Agnew called them "the New Barbarians."

The alienation of Panama's youth is a serious matter. So is the inadequacy of a Ministry of Education headed by a guy who started public life as a psychologist for Manuel Antonio Noriega's espionage/torture G-2 unit.

Those are some chronic problems, but one aspect of these recent riots is cause for immediate alarm on two counts. The principal of Artes y Oficios, Luis Powell, was hurt in the confrontations and the PRD-aligned media played it in such a way that the casual viewer or reader would presume that it was at the hands of juvenile delinquents. Actually, however, the National Police shot the principal in the face with bird shot.

There you have it, folks --- ever more recklessly brutal cops under the command of old Norieguistas, and an increasingly controlled partisan yellow press. It's not just like in Noriega times, but it's moving in that direction. Thuggish cops and an obsequious press should be far more frightening than some teenage boys who call themselves "terrorists."

The stakes in the US election

Panama's "Mr. Democrat" for the past several decades, Richard Koster, says that the most important US presidential election in the lifetimes of most Democrats was the last one, which they lost to the Republicans. That may very well be. At the very least, this year's election will be in large part about fixing a lot of damage in a lot of areas.

And woe to the winner, who will inherit leadership of a country in severe debt, with its industries by and large exported or in shambles, addicted to expensive imported oil not only by habit but by decades of urban design, and infected with a culture of extreme selfishness that has progressed so far as to set the assumptions that judges and politicians take for granted. The next president will have some heavy burdens to bear and some unpopular choices to make, and will take the blame for problems that others created.

Americans are a strange people, however. In ordinary times they mostly prefer not to join organizations or champion causes. At other times, like the people of every other nation, demagogues can incite them to the ugliest sorts of mob hysteria. But in a time of true crisis Americans come out of the woodwork and voluntarily rise to the occasion.

We were told not to worry, that the sub-prime mortgage problem was a blip in the economy, that an emergency tax measure would bring things back into whack. And then Bear Stearns collapsed, Wachovia announced that it was in a $7 billion hole, Merrill-Lynch admitted similar huge losses and started letting employees go, and Citigroup is set to lay off 9,000. The economy isn't getting better in time for the November elections.

We were told that "The Surge" had put the United States on the path to a military victory in Iraq, that the decline in sectarian killings that accompanied the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad's neighborhoods was a sign of General Petraeus's success. Then Osama's boys in Iraq showed signs of revitalization, the death toll started climbing, on Petraeus's advice the draw-down of US troops was called off, and when an offensive was undertaken against a major Shiite militia, Iraqi cops and soldiers deserted or refused to fight in their thousands. There won't be any "light at the end of the tunnel" in the Iraq War in time for the November elections.

Thus it's most likely that the party that holds the White House will take a serious beating at the polls in November. In order to avoid that there will be another particularly nasty campaign. All the usual Republican anonymous and dishonest Internet smears are circulating, to the extent that about 15 percent of Americans wrongly believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim and most of these make bigoted inferences from this disinformation.

Mainstream US corporate media that have an insufficient sense of public duty aren't helping in this deplorable situation. Certainly there has been insufficient attention to the complicated realities here in Latin America, but the elite media personalities aren't even in touch with what's going on in the USA. Why else would you have editors and publishers willing to permit hack journalism of the sort that takes some rather obvious statements of Rust Belt realities by Barack Obama and styles it as a "gaffe," as "Bitter-gate" (sic)?

Polls show that it's not working, and that's a sign of the crisis that Americans face. It's a sign that people understand the severity of the situation and are not in the mood for all the old rhetorical games.

Today Obama appeals to Americans' sense of hope, but a time will come when the appeal will be to a rather grim determination in the face of lost wars, a weakened position in the world, a crushing debt and an economy based in too great a measure on toxic smoke and broken mirrors. The United States can't go on like this, and most Americans know it. There are tougher times ahead, but that dogged attachment to reality that treats a frank statement of some of our problems as a refreshing bit of candor rather than a scandal is a very good sign that the American people are disposed to rise to the occasion.

Bear in mind...

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

Nadine Gordimer

Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.

Miguel de Unamuno

A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the façade of his appearance.

Iris Murdoch

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