Doña Georgina Bids Farewell

Right, so I had some really important things to say about the situation in the Muslim world, since I had spent the weekend busily figuring out what was wrong with the 1.2 or 1.4—don’t remember and don’t care—billion people who practice the religion.

And what’s wrong, you ask? Well, according to the Canadian Muslim Irshad Manji, the problem with Islam is the Muslims, who…

…but wait, let Manji speak for herself, since—as someone once said of Rachel Maddow—she couldn’t look stupid if she spend a month trying. Click on the clip below. Oh, and by the way, better have the fire extinguisher handy, ‘cause those sparks really fly….

Right, then I had to worry about “Islam—A Religion of Peace or Violence?.” So there Christopher Hitchens was—do I have to tell what side he was taking?—butting heads with Tariq Ramadan at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. The problem? Hitchens I understood completely, but Ramadan? Well, I guess you gotta be religious to get it….

So that meant that I had to watch a documentary about Islam, during which I learned that the only reason we have this thing is that Mohammed spent 22 years going into trances, much of the time alone in a cave. He then came down and dictated the whole thing to his buddies, all illiterate, so what did they do? They memorized it, and then, a couple decades after the death of Mohammed, the third Caliph—or somebody or other—decided it should be written down. So there was a great to-do, and versions were checked against each other, and there had to be two eyewitnesses, and now we have the Koran, WHICH IS THE ABSOLUTE AND FINAL WORD OF GOD. See?

In fact, so immersed was I in the Muslim world that I had gone into the website of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), since Manji had mentioned that the imams, contrary to what one sheik averred, had not been quick to denounce the September 11 attacks: they had to be pressured into it. And since the sheik, Ibrahim Mogra, was connected to the MCB, it was definitely time to look into that. Oh, and the MCB describes itself thus, on its website:

The Muslim Council of Britain is one of the UK's largest and most diverse Muslim umbrella organisation with over 500 affiliated national, regional and local organisations, mosques, charities and schools.   

There is, of course, nothing about the Nigerian group Boko Haram, which abducted close to three hundred schoolgirls over a month ago. But I did find this ringing denunciation, which all of you out there should take to heart:

The Muslim Council of Britain condemns in the strongest terms the act of violating a place of worship by the recently formed extreme far right, anti-Muslim group, Britain First. The most recent incident occurred at midday yesterday, where the emboldened action by three middle aged men and woman entered one of the largest Islamic institutions in the country, wearing their shoes and trampling on prayer surfaces to carry out their misguided propaganda. This has left many members of the community angered and disappointed with the inability of the government and the authorities to curtail this type of thuggish behaviour.

Guys? You really shouldn’t make it so easy….

OK—it’s clear, I realized, that these girls are never going to see their families again, and why not? Because the Muslim world either doesn’t want to or is too craven to speak up.

OK—so what about men? What would happen if all of the world’s men—except for the 1.2-billion-divided-by-two Muslims—stood up and said that real men didn’t do this to their daughters, their wives, or their mothers.

Well, when the going gets tough, Marc makes a tee shirt, so here it is:

Pretty cool, hunh? Wow, that would put the fear of Allah into those bastards!

So I was scratching a hole quite deeply into my head thinking about all this, when Mr. Fernández called, proposing a trip to the beach. And I realized: a trip to the beach would do more for me than I could do for the 300 schoolgirls, or even the 1.2 billion Muslims. So off we went.

And I’ve woken up, today, to the startling news that our local power company didn’t have the money, last Friday, to buy fuel to make electricity? Why? Because the Justice Department raided the purchasing department on Friday, seizing records and looking for irregularities. And then the banks got nervous and revoked the line of credit. So that meant that they had to scamper around and transfer 60 million bucks to pay off the debt. Oh, and here’s more interesting news:

“Claro que no les podemos pagar a los suplidores, si entre el gobierno y las corporaciones públicas nos debe casi $300 millones”, manifestó el ambientalista. “La misma gente que anda criticando la Autoridad es la que la ha llevado a la quiebra”.

(“Of course we can’t pay our suppliers, when the government and the public corporations owe us almost $300 million,” stated the environmentalist. “The same people who are running around criticizing the Authority are those who have brought it to bankruptcy.”)

‘It’s too much,’ I think. ‘I absolutely cannot be responsible for 1.2 billion people who are driving all the rest of us crazy because they believe something dreamed up in a cave in Saudi Arabia, and I can’t be responsible for the power company, which didn’t have the money to buy fuel, despite the fact that the electric bill comes in at 400$ a month, and anyway, it’s the start of the week, and if I’m feeling this way today, how am I going to be on Friday?’

So I turn the page and get this:

Yup, Puerto Rico strikes again! Because one of our zany habits, much beloved by some, sniffed at by the humorless, is to have wakes—called in Spanish velorios—with the dead displayed in various and characteristic positions. And this charming lady—who had wanted to be waked wearing skates, but settled for her wedding dress instead—is doña Georgina Chevroni Lloren; the funeral was yesterday,

It all started with El Para’o, or the standing one, who had bragged to his enemies that they would never see him lying down. So what did he do—OK, what did he instruct be done—after he got eleven bullets shot into him? Take a look!

This image, by the way, I lifted from an article called “Dead Men Standing….”

That’s when it hit me, since we had joked about all this in those days when I was pretending to teach English at Wal-Mart.

“Yes, I intend to be waked in this very room,” I would assure the students, “in fact, in this very chair!”

“You do, Marc?” The students would lean in and peer into my eyes.

“Absolutely, I intend to die with my boots still firmly planted in the fertile fields of Wal-Mart! Others may retire, but mine is a passion, not merely a career. I may very well die in this room, but if not, I’ll certainly be waked in this room! And one day, however many decades it will be, you’ll walk in and see me….”

Here I would raise my hand with my index finger pointed to the board, and then…

…freeze!

Ahh, readers, life had other plans—it so often does. So what to do?

I run over to the other shop, where Lady is busy blow-drying a casita, and sit patiently, thinking, as I wait—shouldn’t I be doing something serious? Doesn’t the Great American Novel still wait to be born? Would Hemingway or Tolstoy have wasted his time this way?

At last the house is dry, packed, and given to the tourists—it’s time to show Lady the print edition of El Nuevo Día.

“Just in the event, “ I start, and Lady gets it immediately. She begins slapping my knees with the paper, and then puts it over her head as she roars with laughter.

“It’s the kind of thing that could only happen in Puerto Rico,” I tell Lady, who has just told me that Georgina has gone viral; she’s sitting all over the web.

“You think it’s true that García Márquez said ‘they didn’t believe me when I wrote about Macondo, so they really wouldn’t believe me if I wrote about Puerto Rico?’” I ask Lady. I’ve looked it up a thousand times….

Lady pauses, and then comes up the answer…

“…well, it’s either true or it should be true….”

Good enough for me!  

Macondo Redux

Well, a simple reading of the New Day, the preeminent newspaper of Puerto Rico, tells the story.

We’re screwed.

This morning at 12:30 three hundred federal agents of the Bureau of Prisons entered the federal prison here—the first operation of its kind. They literally went cell by cell, confiscating everything from drugs to cell phones to homemade weapons.

The prison, according to the New Day, has been without contact from the outside world since the murder of Osvaldo Albarati—no calls out, not by cellular phones, and not by landlines. Visits have also been suspended.

It all started a week or so ago when Albarati, a prison official, got killed driving home from work one night. It was a clear execution—21 bullets shot into his car, the paid assassins speeding away. And nobody had much doubt who had paid for the killing—two inmates who were directing the drug cartels from behind bars. For this they needed cell phones, which the prison official had found and confiscated. So the inmates got together and paid to send a message to any other honest guy in the prison system who might think about doing his job.

Things are a little different, here in Puerto Rico.

“The inmates are in control of the prison,” a friend who is a doctor and who was hired to give medical services in the prison system told me. “They even control who can be held in the prison. That’s because each prison has a gang associated with it, a gang that operates inside and outside the prison. And a member of an opposite gang will be killed in days. So the prisoners vet the incoming convict, and the prison administration listens. They have to.”

It appears that this mentality is lost on the Feds, though, and the prisoners, as reported by the New Day, were a little stunned by the severity and thoroughness of the search.

The situation of the prisoners running the prison all started in the late seventies, when a guy named Carlos Torres-Irriarte—OK, call him by his nickname, La Sombra—decided to form a little group to protest abusive prison officials and abusive gang activity. And La Sombra must have been a charismatic man, because very soon the Ñetas had gained control of the biggest prison on the island, Oso Blanco, or polar bear.

Well, you don’t go places without stepping on a few toes, which in this case was—of course—the rival gang. So that gang—called  “Group 27,” or “The Insects”—decided to kill Irriarte, which they did, with the help of a prison guard.

Or was it just the rival gang? Irriarte, it seems, had come down hard on one thing—no drugs. And soon after his death, the Ñetas had cornered the market on drugs.

They also had a little score to settle with their rivals, so they tunneled for days to reach the leader of the Insects, a guy nicknamed Manota. Then, according to street legend, various body parts were sent to family members, gang leaders, and interested others.

Here’s Wikipedia on what happened next:

The news soared and the media depicted the story as a hostile takeover. Used to their advantage, they used the media coverage as a means to send out messages to other members in different prisons across the island. Their message was clear: They wanted justice and they meant business. They warned the administration and let them know that if their needs weren't met about improving the living situations within the facilities, there would be bloodshed and an all out war. By the middle of 1984, their numbers multiplied excessively. They took over 7 major prison facilities across the island and ruled them with an iron fist.

Well, well—what else is going on in Puerto Rico? Well, the New Day has been looking at the tax returns of our senators and legislators, and comparing them to the financial statements they are required to file. And guess what? The legislators are far more able to make laws than follow them—some serious discrepancies came up. How is it that a senator making over 80,000 dollars a year—the third highest salary on any legislature in the states—only got around to paying 12 dollars in taxes? The matter is under investigation.

And it’s a shame that the legislators aren’t paying their taxes, because we are, frankly, broke. So broke that we can’t pay the 100 million owed to government employees for unused sick leave—and that isn’t making the police and the teachers (the two largest groups affected) happy. Yes, it’s true that the government workers have some nice perks—not the least of which is the thirty days of vacation, the eighteen days of sick leave, and the twenty holidays. Uncharitable minds—perhaps warped by having worked in private enterprise—call this excessive.

So the governor has declared…well, what has he declared? It’s a little uncertain—if he can find the money, he’ll pay; if not, well, he’s not gonna issue checks with insufficient funds. So people will have to wait.

Oh, except for the judicial and the—you were waiting for this, right?—legislative branches.

They’ll get paid.

In Germany, the situation is serious but never critical; in Austria, the situation is critical but never serious.

And Puerto Rico weighs in on the side of Austria. The island is busying itself with chismes de la farándula or jetset gossip. Will our local bombshell Maripily—rumored to have more on the outside than in the penthouse—be on People’s Most Beautiful list? And what about the Lady of Fire, Olga Tañón? Will her newest song take off?

I leave you with this story—perhaps true—of García Marquez, who was once asked why he didn’t write about Puerto Rico.

“They didn’t believe me when I created Macondo,” he said, “just imagine what they’d say if I wrote about Puerto Rico!”