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Ven pa' Bocas... Ven y ven y... ya no ven. from Guacho Panameño on Vimeo. A young artist's parody and protest, because Air Panama transported the riot squads that opened fire on striking banana workers and indigenous protesters in Changuinola. The airline got this and a similar video thrown off of YouTube due to a copyright claim, but Vimeo is taking a different attitude. Under US and international rules it's "fair use," but here in Panama we had a court decision a few years back that declared all satire to be criminal.

There is a Chinese curse which says, 'May he live in interesting times.' Like it or not, we live in interesting times.

Robert F. Kennedy

1966 speech in Cape Town

The Confucian philosophy centers around order, deference to authority, and proper relationships and behavior. Like the ancient religions that have withstood the test of time, Confucianism persists because it is adaptable across the many different situations that history confronts. The compassion, moderation and humility preached by its anti-authoritarian rival and partner philosophy Taoism, of approximately the same age, also help to smooth out the rough spots of "interesting times," given that the two Chinese belief systems do not include the jealous prohibitions against syncretism found in the monotheistic religions that trace ancestry through Abraham.

It seems, however, that the curse is Occidental and not so ancient.

In interesting times, there are conflicts whose outcomes are not so predictable. Terrible and wonderful things happen. Established orders get rearranged. The best and the worst in people comes to the fore.

And where is Panama on the continuum these days? We have a president who's insisting on an order that many Panamanians reject, and getting unusually violent about it. It's so serious that there has been a lot of international commentary about it. And if the president wants to blow it all off as a bunch of leftist propaganda, it's not just the left that is concerned.

On the other hand, President Martinelli is very insistent about how the rules that others are supposed to follow don't apply to himself. As in, flagrantly rigged no-bid purchase contracts for the government to buy food from his Ricamar company at inflated prices, and the president who has been caught red-handed at it sees no need to make an attempt at explanation.

This is one of the slow times of the year for readership, even if there are certain electrifying things happening in the news. There are also other things running along at less than full speed at The Panama News, as the office is getting a makeover, computers are breaking down and being fixed and improved and a lot is going on with help from many friends.

For some time now, one of the most important and energetic individuals who have made The Panama News a community institution has been Sue Hindman, who has been half of our corrections team. But now Sue is seriously ill and it's unlikely that we will be able to replace the work she has done with that of just one person.

We are looking for volunteers of many sorts, but right now somebody who has an excellent command of written English and a sharp eye for details --- actually several somebodies --- are needed to lend a hand with the corrections. If you have the time and ability to help out with this, send me an email.

Yes, we're into the "dog days" of people taking a vacation from their computers as well as everything else, there are some very unpleasant things happening in Panamanian society and production of The Panama News is almost down to a crawl.

But meanwhile, we have this vibrant cultural scene in Panama, which in part feeds off of the social tensions. As in, for example, four plays opening in three nights in Panama City. Starting on August 5 the oldest theater company in Panama, the English-language Theatre Guild of Panama, starts a six-night, two-week run of Noises Off, a comedy. Over at Teatro En Circulo the next night, Bruce Quinn is directing a three-week run of a Spanish adaptation of Butterflies Are Free. That same night at Teatro La Quadra, Edwin Cedeño's Spanish production of Little Shop of Horrors opens. Then on the 7th, also at Teatro La Quadra in a different room, we have an original Panamanian play, W. T. Sittón's Enantito, opening. (That latter one, in keeping with this season of foxy Russian spies, is a tale of a femme fatale --- but I don't think that it has either a stupid moose or a flying squirrel.)

The theater is not the only thriving cultural scene. We are seeing a renaissance of El Cangrejo, led by two clubs in particular, the Pangea on Alberto Navarro and the Rayuela nearby on Via Argentina. Much of the activity at the latter revolves around Rómulo Castro and his friends, who have skipped from place to place for years and now seem to have found a stronghold.

Over in the Casco Viejo the Platea is still going strong, La Casona carries on in its third (or is it the fourth?) location, an ambitious and multi-dimensional project is taking shape at Espacio Comun, and the presence of the Danilo Pérez Foundation in the old Conservatorio is feeding musical activity all over the city and the world.

Then there are the larger concert venues. José Ponce caught a show at one of these, wherein Yomira John and friends did a benefit at ATLAPA to raise money for bicycles for needy kids. (Now if we could only get a system of safe bicycle paths, especially in the metro area....)

It seems to come with the package: "interesting times" that feature scary social situations also tend to coincide with unusual spurts of cultural creativity.

Being a Panagringo, I can't help but notice what's going on in the United States. It was quite predictable that, given the enormity of the country's economic problems and the flat-out denial in which much of its population is mired, that whoever succeeded George W. Bush would have a hard time. Two major wars, the one in Iraq which should have never been fought and one in Afghanistan that morphed from a justifiable conflict about that country being used as a base from which to attack the United States into an insane "nation building" project, continue to drag the US economy down with them. (Half of this issue's Cool Internet Sites feature, by the way, is a miniature online teach-in about Afghanistan and its history.) The continued US addiction to petroleum carries with it financial ruin, foreign wars and environmental destruction. Dealing with any significant portion of any these serious problems is a pretty good recipe for political unpopularity, but staying the course is not a viable option in any of the situations either.

And so wouldn't you know that out of Dick Armey's lobbying firm and from a truth-challenged demagogue on an Australian billionaire's TV channel we'd get the Tea Party? Wouldn't you know that from the people who pulled off the "let's shut down the government" stunt during the Clinton administration we'd get nearly complete Republican obstructionism in both houses of Congress and an ensuing "See, they can't do anything" campaign? (The latter punctuated with, when things do get passed, screeches about how an elected majority "shoved something down our throat," of course.)

It has now gone well out of control. In many states, any Republican willing to deal with the Democrats or unwilling to call Obama a communist or a socialist (which he's not) is being hounded out of the party. We have an extremism on the right that would make Barry Goldwater blush.

And thus we see a race-baiting campaign like we have not seen since Selma, Alabama's mayor Joseph Smitherman's infamous epithet against Martin Luther King, Jr. The worst of it has come from the Australian billionaire's channel and has then been picked up and embellished by a plethora of far-right websites.

Thus a couple of fools dressed in black at a Philadelphia polling station, one of them carrying a nightstick, which resulted in the stick-wielder's prompt arrest and then the Bush administration dropping the criminal charges, becomes Exhibit Infinity in the case that Obama is "racist in reverse" because his Justice Department, having obtained an injunction against the guy with a stick but handicapped by the fact that no witness said that she or he was intimidated, let the civil matter end with the injunction.

Thus we see that a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush, having found that the village of Port Chester, New York, had violated the Voting Rights Act by rigging the local voting system so that the nearly half of its residents who were Hispanic got no representation on the six-member city council, gave the village government some options to remedy the situation. The one that was chosen, cumulative voting, has been misrepresented as giving Latinos six votes while whites only get one, and as giving illegal immigrants representation in local government. Thus another specious campaign about how Obama is bringing in swarthy foreigners to displace white Americans. That the remedy gives every voter six votes for city council regardless of race or ethnicity and that one must still be a citizen to vote is beside the point for the far right.

Republican US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to repeal that part of the 14th amendment that provides that every person born in the United States is a citizen of the United States.

Well, yes. The ancestors of today's hardcore GOP base lost the Civil War and they opposed the 14th amendment that came in its wake. The arguments about how unfair and how illegal the constitutional amendments resulting from the war that freed the slaves are can be found among the standard items in the Ku Klux Klan litany.

The more recent ancestors of the people to whom McConnell and Fox News play didn't and don't like the Voting Rights Act either. Recall how violently they resisted the registration of black people to vote.

Every day we hear the constant drumbeat of false and inflammatory rumors designed to whip up white fears and white resentments, and cast the blame for the American Predicament on dark-skinned others in general and Barack Obama in particular. Such are the reprehensible and irresponsible tactics of people who have no solutions to offer. We shall see whether they get away with it in November.

It's a jungle out there! And while working through the night, I got this visitor who came to check out my computer monitor.

Walking sticks and praying mantises are protected species in my household. They eat less desirable bugs and maybe the light of the computer screen is a lure for this guy's dinner. Or maybe it was just a comfortable place for his yoga exercises.

Enjoy.

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