The good, the bad, and the beautiful

Sometimes it seems as if all the news is dowright awful --- and of course, even if you aren't one of these "if it bleeds it leads" editors, if it's downright awful it tends to be newsworthy, while if it's its usual nice it can be easy to ignore. Sometimes it takes a visitor from afar to point out things that seem too common to notice.

A delegation from Louisiana came to see our ports and canal development and I talked with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin about that, and we also got into the subject of cultural ties and similarities. He noted some architectural similarities between the Casco Viejo and his city's renowned French Quarter, and diplomatically noted that San Felipe needs some "tender loving care." Above you can see an example of an architectural style related to that of New Orleans.

And the ornate unmaintained balcony that fell down the other day? The people walking down the sidewalk lucked out. If fell close enough to them to give them a shock, but not on top of them to shed their blood. Alas, a lost opportunity for the purveyors of sensationalist necro-porn. It was also a loss for Panama City's embattled historic preservationists, but one that might possibly, with a bit of will and some money to invest, be redeemed.

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Sometimes people complain to me that The Panama News is "too negative." When this comes from hustlers who are trying to sell something --- usually real estate or some investment scheme --- to foreigners who really don't know Panama, I discount this as a self-interested attempt to slant the news away from reality. Generally, however, the people who make these complaints are sincere, know quite a bit about Panama and have no ulterior motives for which their opinions ought to be discounted.

News media in general get this complaint, and a big part of the reason they do is that "news" is by definition out of the ordinary. There are extraordinarily good things that happen and those are newsworthy, extraordinarily bad things that happen and those are newsworthy, and then all the ordinary and expected good and bad things of life that may or may not merit attention, but in any case not as "hard news." Now sometimes the news is just so uniformly and profoundly awful that an editor who's prone to depression anyway will want to crawl into a hole. Usually it's not that bad, but usually the newsworthy things are more bad than good, even if each story is generally a mix of good and bad things.

What to say, for example, about this fanatic who walked into a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee with a shotgun and opened fire? Things don't get much more horrible than that, but the carnage would have been much worse had not some unarmed members of the congregation stepped forward and risked their lives to bring the gunman down.

This issue of The Panama News covers bad things, good things and stuff that's either uncertain or highly dependent on one's point of view.

Are the beach communities of Panama Oeste about to reach a tipping point that will prompt economic growth of an entirely different character? There are all these "ifs" --- will the proposed new school get off the ground? --- if it does, will that have the impact that one might expect? Then there are some people who prefer a slower, lower-traffic, less crowded, less expensive way of life and would view a new factor that increases economic development in the area as something undesirable.

In the culture pages, there is a bias toward the positive in The Panama News. That's mainly because of this idiosyncrasy of mine, but also because in the cultural field usually somebody has to think that an artist or a performer is pretty good for there to be an event to report upon in the first place. My own twist is that if I go to a restaurant or read a book or attend a play with a view toward writing a review and find the quality disappointing, I generally just won't review it.

Yes, the art of the creative insult in the course of a review is a valid cultural form in its own right. ("This is not a novel to be thrown aside lightly," Dorothy Parker wrote. "It should be thrown aside with great force.") However, it doesn't suit my personality to practice that art. Moreover, somewhere along the line Hollywood in particular and a large part of American culture in general blurred the distinction between the caustic wit of a Dorothy Parker and the general nastiness of a Don Imus.

In this issue's culture section we take peeks at excellence: Vitín Paz and his music students, Haitian sculptor Eddy Remy (who was in town with a delegation from the French-speaking Caribbean to celebrate Franco-Antillean culture), what looks to be an impressive painting and photography exhibition at Allegro, for examples. In the nature pages we get glimpses of Mother Nature in all her glory, holding out in Panama City.

This issue's Cool Internet sites go heavy on the videos. Depending on your tastes and point of view, you may be inspired, outraged and captivated --- or maybe not. You may be annoyed that I would include a tinfoil hat site, or glad that I have assisted your quest to buy what you really need, or have some other reaction (especially if you are part of an international conspiracy to control the world through the use of mind-altering rays). You might be incited to a martial arts rage at an editor who would dare reveal the secrets of the Yubiwaza Master. Good, bad, or some sort of mix? I leave that one up to you.

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There are many people who just love hip hop culture and its Panamanian expression regueton (not to be confused with reggae), and then there are others who tend to approve whenever a rapper is sent to prison. If you are one of the latter, you're more extreme than I am. By and large I can't stand that noise, but I do draw a distinction between bad taste and criminal behavior. (I also draw a distinction between the quaint lowbrow stuff that I like and that reprehensible garbage culture that those rotten young punks embrace.)

So how will you take the news that a three-magistrate panel of the Second Superior Tribunal has reversed a lower court's acquittal and handed 30-year-old regueton rapper Japanese (Leavitt Eduardo Zambrano Haynes) a 40-month prison term for having sexual relations with an underage girl?

(Japanese is appealing. He says that she deceived him by showing him a cedula that indicated that she was 18.)

Me? I set aside my cultural preferences, take note of what the magistrates did and said, and judge them in accordance with my education and experience as a human being. Being possessed of two JDs --- the doctorate in jurisprudence and the juvenile delinquent record --- I will look at this a bit differently from a lot of other people.

Leave it to a female jurist, magistrate Elvia Batista, to write the decision overturning the lower court's acquittal and sending Japanese to the slammer. And this being a 2-1 decision, it doesn't particularly surprise me that the dissent was by a male jurist.

Magistrate Luis M. Carrasco held that because the girl was not a virgin before she met the musician, and because prosecutors did not show that her psycho-sexual development was harmed by her sexual relations with Japanese (although they did leave her with twins for whom to care), there was no crime.

Understand the political and legal context in which we live. President Torrijos's Penal Code revision commission sent a draft code to the cabinet, and the president and cabinet forwarded it as such to the legislature, which among other atrocities provided that a proposal of marriage would be a valid defense to a criminal charge against an adult who has sexual relations with a minor. A lot of people --- men as well as women, but mainly a number of women's organizations --- worked to get that bit of retrograde nonsense stricken from the proposed code. We had so much negative stuff to fight that it was hard to promote the progressive.

What would be "progress" in this instance? An ironclad shield law that prevents a trial for sexual assault or seduction of a minor from being a trial of the alleged victim, wherein the woman or girl is assailed by the defense attorney and portrayed as this horrible slut who's unworthy of the law's protection.

I deplore magistrate Carrasco's opinion and consider it an example of one of the pathologies afflicting Panamanian justice, but then it was, after all, a dissent. The other two magistrates did the right thing as far as I'm concerned. Soon enough we shall see where the Supreme Court stands on this matter of law.

And though I don't think that the defendant's occupation ought to matter in a statutory rape case, I generally don't care for that vile, disgusting noise they call regueton. My quaint lowbrow preferences are for the low-down, dirty blues:

Please, Mr. Judge
I won't touch that jailbait no more
I won't even look at her
'Less she's at least forty-four

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With an education in history, political science and the law, I have to work a bit harder when covering the arts and sciences. After too many weeks of a writer's block on the science beat, this issue I cover some things that were discussed at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) about Panama's geologic history and the worldwide decline of frogs and other amphibians. It's no secret that I was against the canal expansion proposal in the 2006 referendum because I thought that it was economically questionable and dishonestly presented, but now that the digging is underway it certainly is an opportunity for the advancement of several fields of science. The extinction of El Valle's golden frogs in the wild has piqued the interest of people well outside the scientific community, and we got to hear about that problem's context from one of the top experts the other day at the Tupper Auditorium. Now that I have found the time, energy and inspiration to get back to science writing, I hope that you find my work worthy and interesting.

(By the way, there has just been a changing of the guard at STRI. Long-time director Ira Rubinoff had taken an interim post in Washington during the interregnum following a series of scandals at the Smithsonian, and he comes back to Panama as director and scientist emeritus. Icthyologist Biff Bermingham, who had been serving as STRI's interim director, now takes that post on a permanent basis. Congratulations are due to both scientists, Biff for his new post and Ira for decades of contribution to science and to the growth of STRI.)

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