My Breakfast with Tony

It was a good thing, I decided, that the Internet decided to take the day off and go to the beach, because it allowed me to skip reading about today’s corruption and read about corruption in the past.

“It’s going to be one LONG book,” I had told my friend Tony—more formally known as Antonio Quiñones Calderón,—when he first told me about his project, a book entitled “Corrupción e impunidad en Puerto Rico”—and yes, it means exactly what you think. In fact, it came in at fewer than 600 pages, which surprised me, until I realized that the bulk of the book—very logically—concerns the 20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st. In fact, the book is divided by decades, and 1900 starts on page 61.

Why decades, I wondered, instead of administrations? And obviously, others must have posed the question to Tony as well. His answer, sensibly, is that corruption isn’t limited to one party or another.

This, of course, on an island where partisan politics reigns, tends to be sniffed at. “Those damned populares are just better at it,” once cried Mr. Fernández, when I reminded him of the flagrant corruption in the Rosselló government. Nor was it any use to suggest that incompetence was hardly an excuse for dishonesty.

So having had breakfast with Tony, and having gotten a copy of the book—thanks, Tony!—I went to the café, where the Internet had decided to go off somewhere, and without leaving a note. So I sat down, and began reading—and fascinating reading it is.

One of the most troubling things about living in a society riddled with corruption is that, over the long run, you go numb to it all. Was that the theme of William Bennett’s book, The Death of Outrage? If so, it’s true. So it was instructive to read, in the first chapter, three months of reports of corruption, starting with one of my favorites, albeit forgotten. (See?) And that was the arrest, on 7 October 2010, of 61 state police, 16 municipal police—133 law and order guys in all—offering their services to protect drug dealers at their work. In fact, there were 125 audio recordings and videotapes of some 89 officers providing protection with their weapons in the sale of cocaine in the amounts of five kilograms or more. No wonder that Eric Holder came out and said that it was the biggest police corruption case in FBI history….

‘Aha’ I thought, ‘so that’s the answer to the question.’ And the question was?

“Where is your nearest punto de drogas (drug hot spot),” I would ask the students, and it was a rare student indeed who couldn’t tell me—though they all denied vehemently having even thought about using drugs, not even marijuana in college.

“So why do you guys know, and not the cops?”

¿Cómo se dice “shrugs” en español?

In short, the cops not only knew but were providing protection to the drug dealers.

As Tony points out, corruption isn’t unique to Puerto Rico. Still, it’s a bit off-putting to read, towards the end of the first chapter, that Puerto Rico, with its 130 convictions of corruption in 2011, had the highest rate of corruption of any federal district. California, he writes, with its four districts and ten times the population of Puerto Rico, had “just” 52 convictions.

Nor is it a recent problem—the first recorded case was in 1720, though why do I think that there had to be others preceding it? Historically, one of the most famous cases—though by no means the worst—was the practice in the 1940’s and 50’s, a week or two before the elections, of high leaders in the political parties walking through the mountain towns, distributing shoes. Well, jaundiced tongues—a medical impossibility, but you know what I mean—said it was a clear attempt at vote buying, but any reasonable person could see: how could any soul walk barefoot over the rocky roads to the polls to cast their vote? The practice ensured a fair election!

Then there was the practice of routinely walking up and down the aisles of the government offices and stopping by each desk, in order to collect money for the political party in power. After all, the reasoning went, you had your job due to the party, so shouldn’t you give back?

Presumably, none of these practices are occurring now—although I did hear reports in the 90’s that the Office of the First Lady was doing essentially the same thing—but it may be that the corruption has both gotten far more underground and pernicious. In the year 2009, as Tony wrote, the cost to the taxpayer in Puerto Rico was 860 million dollars. The average in the 90’s? 417 million dollars.

It goes on and on. Today’s print edition of El Nuevo Día, for example, has an article on Crece 21, a program paid for by federal monies from No Child Left Behind that was supposed to provide training and certification in specialized areas like math, science, and English to 5,000 teachers around the island. The Feds paid the Department of Education; the Department in turn contracted the University of Puerto Rico to provide the instruction and administer the tests. According to the university, they put in 44 million dollars; the total amount of the funding was 49 million dollars.

Of course people are fighting about what happened. The Department of Education points out that only 350 teachers ever got recertified, and that they won’t pay another nickel. The university says that they only got paid 26 million dollars, and that the program didn’t require that 5,000 teachers passed the test, but only that 5,000 teachers “updated their knowledge and were specialists,” according to Yanaira Vázquez Cruz, the director of the program. Oh, and the teachers complained that they didn’t get materials, among which were computers that they could keep if they were certified.

“Some of those teachers really made me angry,” said Lady, the owner of the café, when I told her about all this. “You know, I was in the public schools when I was doing Poetry Out Loud, so I saw how they worked. And one teacher—of 11^th grade, no less—was spelling “that” as “taht.” Not once, but in every sentence. So I corrected him, and he got angry and started shouting that it was HIS classroom, and how dare I correct him in front of the students….”

I’ve only read a few chapters of Tony’s book, but I wonder if he ever comes to the conclusion that I—sadly—have come to. And that is?

The intention on Crece 21 was never to certify 5000 teachers, or expand the knowledge of 5,000 teachers, or even to do anything at all to improve the education of the kids on the island. What was the point of the program?

It was about taking the money that was there. There were funds available, there had to be a program, one was created, Washington sent the money down. What happened to it after that?

We’ll never know. The documents don’t exist; the documents are incomplete; the documents contradict each other. Most likely it will be a combination of all three. Oh, and the feds will have to send someone down, someone who speaks Spanish, someone who can wade through the mess of mildewed documents, flared tempers, pointed fingers.

A friend once told me that the worst thing about totalitarian governments was not the repression, not the suppression of free speech and essential liberties, not the sound of footsteps on the pavement outside and the dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the night. No, on a day-to-day level, the worst thing was inefficiency.

I hate corruption on moral grounds. But on an island where an English teacher cannot spell the word “that,” I hate corruption on other grounds as well.

We don’t have this money to waste….

Introduction to my Next Book

It started when I came home from England, where I was cold, and got back to Puerto Rico, where it was hot. And then, they decided on a particularly extreme form of torture: repaving the street. This involved ripping up the asphalt, igniting generators, shouting, dropping chunks of pavement into trucks, more shouting, more generators, more asphalt…you get the picture.

What was the result? Well, we now have a bricked road, vaguely reminiscent of the famous blue adoquines that pave the rest of the old city. When the street was finished, I breathed a sigh of relief, and concluded that the affair was over, that there were no new ways to confound my life.

Ah, innocence!

I hadn’t noticed, you see, that while the street was done, the corner was not—so that meant that that had to be ripped up, that the asphalt had to be dropped, the generators ignited, the greetings shouted. Oh, and there’s a problem—funny how often there is, somebody should really look into it—because while we are nearing completion of the corner to my right, the corner to my left? It still has that dreadful asphalt.

We do many things well in Puerto Rico, but silence? We shatter it, we slaughter it, we massacre it. An example: Puerto Rican children are routinely taken to Old San Juan, to see the adoquines, to look at the colonial architecture, and to scream slogans, such as “Yo soy boricua, ¡pa’ que tú lo sepas!” (Roughly, “I’m Puerto Rican, so that you know it!?”)

This is done at the urging of their teachers.

OK—it was hot, it was loud, and how could I write? I was driven to find an alternative, a place where they would feed me, know my name, and let me watch the characters come and go. There is, for example, Elizabeth, who is mopping the floor of the gift shop she minds on the other side of the café, and whose two children drift in from school around three PM and sleep on the couches or play video games. Then there’s Naïa, who…well, why not check in with her?

“Naïa, are your dragons behaving themselves?”

“Yes,” she replies, from around the corner, where she is sitting making a virtual zoo, which, at the moment, is animal-less.

“All except Screaming Death….”

“So what did he do,” I ask.

“Almost ate a baby dragon…”

She then goes on to show me the dragon that is currently accompanying her, as she munches on pretzel sticks. Called “Toothless,” after a character in How toTrain Your Dragon—“it’s a really good movie,” reports Naïa,—it in fact does have teeth. But the coolest thing is that it also opens its mouth and ejects smoke. 

People can’t do it—at least in the café—but the dragon can. Is that fair? I point this out to Naïa, who gives me a disgusted look.

Well, not really—we move past disgust and into is-he-being-stupid-again, the answer to which is so often “yes.” She returns to the infinitely more interesting world of the virtual zoo.

There’s a woman—probably homeless—who is snoozing in a chair in the gift shop’s open-mic area next door. Why do I think she’s homeless? Well, do you walk around with a backpack stuffed with clothes?

There’s Jorge, the manager of the café, of whom I keep waiting to see: will he ever lose his cool? In the year plus that I’ve been here, he never has. I did get the report, though, that he’s capable of it, since the café, during the mayhem that is the San Sebastián Street Festival, was the object of a dog-knapping. Yup, somebody stole the toy Chihuahua, Lorca, and it was only via the intervention of a customer who spotted Lorca, grabbed him, and brought him back, that we have Lorca today.

“And can you believe the dog-knappers had the gall to insist that Lorca was their dog! That’s when Jorge flew into a fit, and cursed the people in both English and Spanish. He nearly got into a fist fight….”

So reported Lady, the prevailing muse of the place. She comes in and the kissing begins, since she knows everyone and if she doesn’t she soon will, so why not start out on the right foot and give a stranger a kiss? Because of this, she enjoys robust good health, having fortified her immune system by night and day mingling with the microbial world. So she never gets sick, and everybody is her friend.

“I don’t have a college degree, but I have the Poet’s Passage,” she reports. In her early forties, she’s a poet, though she’s decided that seven is enough: she’s not doing any more. She married a Frenchman, who came over to do a project for his MBA program, and who stayed to fall in love, marry, and paint. That, for a Frenchman, seems more fitting than an MBA program.

“In the early days, we were so poor that we were eating—sharing, actually—a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs,” she once told me. Surprising, Naïa was born with no genetic abnormalities, unless preferring dragons to Barbie counts as one.

“And when we were looking to buy the building, I gathered all the facts and went down to the bank. And there were all these men in suits, and there was me—a poet, answering all their questions. There’s money in poetry….”

Well, the bank went bust a couple years ago (not quite that dramatically—at the insistence of the FDIC, it was “bought” by another bank, but the whole thing fooled nobody). But the Poet’s Passage? Still here!

“Sunshine, what would happen if I stole a cookie?” I ask. Yes, his name is Sunshine—why shouldn’t it be? Do we all have to be Toms and Bills?—and yes, he agreed to look the other way.

It was better as a kid, or maybe it was better when it was more illicit….

“Are you going to play today?” asks Omar. Probably I will, since at about five every day, I start thinking about scotch, which I’m trying not to do. So playing Bach Suites on the cello is a nice alternative. What I need to do now is start playing later and later. I might have a chance at sobriety at last. People come by and throw money in my cello case, and I donate it to four charities in the Third World.

And in the year or so that I’ve worked here, well…what have I created? A blog with 585 posts and over 43,000 page-views.

That’s a year’s work? Shouldn’t I have written the great American novel, or a scholarly treatise on the enriching effect of the Caribbean literary tradition on mainstream American literature? What’s a blog?

The electronic version of a newspaper, and where’s yesterday’s newspaper? Very likely in a corner, under your new puppy….

So I looked back. Was there anything there? Could I put the best of what I had written into a book? Something I could hold, and maybe—wow!—sell. The New York Times, of course, would rave—a major literary voice has been found!—and I would have stalkers, all of whom, of course, I would ignore.

(Time out for an interruption. Sunshine has just informed me that El Barco de Vapor—the Steam Boat—is giving 12,000 bucks to anyone who wins the first prize in the children’s book competition. I instantly remember Naïa.

“Hey, can I use your dragon to power a steam boat?”

“Marc, it’s a toy dragon….”

Ohhhh….)

Now where was I?

Oh yes, a book, which will give me something to do (besides honest work). But is there anything there?

You decide….

Falling for JiJi

Confession: I have spent a large part of the day trying to make the penguin JiJi go across my computer screen.

I justify this by telling you a secret: unlike a newspaper, which can pile up the bad news until Mt. Everest looks like a sugar cube, a blog cannot. So this evening—no rants about the Catholic Church (give it UP, Marc); no more tales of the byzantine, tropical political schemes (PLEEEEEZE!); no more jeremiads of any kind. Today is a good news day!

And the good news is that some guy in Southern California has got it figured out: most education is based on words, on language. But most students? Well, a significant portion of kids are learning English as a foreign language. Then there are those who simply learn visually, not verbally. As well, there are kids with various learning difficulties, one of which is dyslexia.

That was the case with Matthew Peterson, who suffers from dyslexia, as did, apparently, Einstein. And it was Einstein who said that words played no part in his math or scientific thinking.

Think back to your school—what was happening in the classroom? Well, the teacher was up front, talking and writing on the chalkboard. He or she was teaching, but were the kids learning?

No—according to the video below. Seventy percent of American kids are below grade level in math. So why not throw everything upside-down? Why not get rid of words? Why not advance a little technologically beyond chalk? Why not have the kids play games, instead of giving them homework? And why not have the games be interactive, so that kids get feedback and learn?

“I don’t teach, I observe learning,” I used to say to my students. Or how about this: “I don’t teach, I create the environment to learn.” And that’s why, in those days when I was working at Wal-Mart, I spent a lot of time learning PowerPoint. Because even something as rudimentary as PowerPoint can be powerful.

“Oh, baby, you are zeee BEST,” said a sultry little animation that I borrowed from the Internet; that was when the student got the right answer. The wrong answer? A bomb went off, or a 16-ton weight got dropped on a kitten, or the computer made a disgusted sound.

The games were nowhere as cool as JiJi, I have to say—but they were cool enough, and the students liked them. But the 600,000 kids in 35 states who are involved with JiJi? The numbers are impressive—in some cases the improvement is double or even triple the rate for the control group.

I’d believe it, because there’s something wonderfully addictive about JiJi. Unfortunately, the company won’t sell the games to individuals, but only to schools, since they believe that the presence of a teacher is important.

Damn—I’m already totally in love with JiJi!

Hmm, if I ran up to the local public school and bought the damn thing, do you think they’d let me play?   

Hold Your Breath—for about a Year

Great news, Dear Readers! I’m giving you total permission to start chain smoking! Oh, and you can drink all you want, starting with a pitcher of martinis before breakfast. Red meat, all you can eat! Put a lot of salt on, and then have an extra piece of cheesecake. Oh, you can also skip going to the gym, bothering to drop in at the office, and contributing to that 401K plan….

Why the good life, all of a sudden?

Well, consider the state of affairs at Fukushima reactor four. The reactor, you remember, was down for maintenance when the earthquake / tsunami struck, which meant that the radioactive rods were not in the core of the reactor, but in a cooling pool.

Einstein said it best: nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water. So here’s my physics-for-poets of how this process works.

Small pellets of radioactive fuel are placed in rods, which are encased in zirconium alloy. Important—that zirconium alloy is highly explosive, and can ignite on contact with air. Anyway, during the reaction process, enormous heat is generated, which goes to heat the water, which produces steam, which drives turbines, which in turn produce electricity. The problem?

Well, the fuel in the rods is only 95% consumed, so those rods—logically called “spent rods”—need to be cooled. For how long? Five years, minimum. So the spent rods are put in cooling pools, which circulate cool water constantly.

Now, where did the rocket scientists decide to put the cooling pools for the Fukushima plants? Five or six storeys up, on the roofs! Oh, and there’s no containment up there, as there is in the reactor. So if something blows the roof off, the cooling pool is exposed.

You know what happened—initially, the plants were cooling down after the earthquake. The tsunami hit, and guess where the generators were? Yup, right there in the basement.

Guys?

But before you start raising you eyes in disgust at the Japanese, I should point out that we have 23 of the buggers in the US. Oh, and they were designed by General Electric.

Nor is that all—the generators flooded, the power was off, but it wasn’t “just” spent rods up there, because the operators of the plant had emptied the core, and had put 202 unspent, reactor-ready rods up in the cooling pond on the top floor. And they are side by side with the 1331 spent rods. (Note—in fact, the sharp-eyed Miss Taí pointed out that it’s really 202 unspent and 1331 spent rod assemblies. Why? Because up to 80 rods are packaged together in one unit. So the actual number of rods is something over 120,000….)

Now then, here’s what the building looks like:

Two things—minimally—happened: the earthquake damaged the structure, and the there was an explosion / fire at the plant. Think it can’t get worse? Think again, because the operators of the plant made the decisions to pour seawater into the cooling tanks. And that seawater is corrosive.

Fasten your seat belts—we’ve barely begun….

Because the water from the cooling pool, you see, is leaking, and that leaking is making the ground very soggy. So what do we have? A sinking building with 1500-plus spent and unspent rod assembies of radioactive fuel in a leaky pool 100 feet in the air in a building that might collapse.

Oh, did I mention that the pool may have had debris from the explosion, and that that debris may have damaged the integrity of the pool?

And I probably forgot as well to tell you that there are 80 damaged fuel rods up there? Here’s what one source had to say:

In an 11-page information sheet released in August, TEPCO said one of the assemblies was even damaged as long ago as 1982, when it was bent out of shape during a transfer. … The damaged racks were first reported by a Fukushima area newspaper on Wednesday, as TEPCO is preparing to decommission the plant and remove the spent fuel assemblies from Reactor No. 4. 

I should note, by the way, that the “August” referred to is August of 2013, two years after the disaster took place.

Or rather, started. Because let me tell you—it’s by no means over yet. Yes, they have installed a crane, and work started in November of last year to remove the fuel rods from the pool. As of 30 March of this year, 983 rods were still in the cooling pool—the process is expected to last all year.

Now then—time for today’s vocabulary enrichment—“criticality.” And here, I bring you one source on the issue.

Arnie Gunderson, a veteran US nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, told Reuters that “they are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” especially given their close proximity to each other, which risks breakage and the release of radiation.

Gundersen told Reuters of an incredibly dangerous “criticality” that would result if a chain reaction takes place at any point, if the rods break or even so much as collide with each other in the wrong way. The resulting radiation is too great for the cooling pool to absorb – it simply has not been designed to do so.

“The problem with a fuel pool criticality is that you can’t stop it. There are no control rods to control it,”Gundsersen said. “The spent fuel pool cooling system is designed only to remove decay heat, not heat from an ongoing nuclear reaction.”

Simply put, for the next year, we are all going to have to hope that nothing, absolutely NOTHING happens out of the ordinary—not one fuel rod dropped, not one rod corroded significantly, not one rod stuck in the pool, not one rod bumping into each other.

Oh, and keep your fingers crossed, Readers, that there isn’t another earthquake of 7 or above on the Richter scale since that…?

I know you’re asking—so what happens if one rod breaks, releasing radiation? Well, take a look at this headline:

Fuel Removal From Fukushima’s Reactor 4 Threatens ‘Apocalyptic’ Scenario. Radiation Fuel Rods Matches Fallout of 14,000 Hiroshima Bombs

Potentially, there could be a huge cloud of radiation drifting over the Pacific Ocean, and reaching the West Coast in a week.

Now you see why I was up at four in the morning?

Japan—and the World—Melts Down

Who knows if they’re telling the truth?

Katsutaka Idogawa, the mayor of a town close to the disabled nuclear reactor Fukushima says the Japanese government is lying, and that children are at particular risk; here’s what one source had to say:

“They believe what the government says, while in reality radiation is still there. This is killing children. They die of heart conditions, asthma, leukemia, thyroiditis… Lots of kids are extremely exhausted after school; others are simply unable to attend PE classes. But the authorities still hide the truth from us, and I don’t know why. Don’t they have children of their own? It hurts so much to know they can’t protect our children.

“They say Fukushima Prefecture is safe, and that’s why nobody’s working to evacuate children, move them elsewhere. We’re not even allowed to discuss this.”  

In fact, Idogawa was concerned about the safety of the plant even before the tsunami hit:

“I asked them about potential accidents at a nuclear power plant, pretending I didn’t know anything about it, and it turned out they were unable to answer many of my questions,” he said. “Frankly, that’s when it first crossed my mind that their management didn’t have a contingency plan. It was then that I realized the facility could be dangerous.”

And if Idogawa doesn’t trust the government, well, doesn’t he have good reason to? Because according to the video below, it’s now known that there was 100% core meltdown of three reactors. Oh, and the radiation released was equivalent to that of Chernobyl. But what was the official announcement, hours after the tsunami? That everything was fine, that all the reactors had been shut down, no problem, no worries!

Idogawa trusted his gut, not his government, and so the next day he gave the order: get the hell out. But did anybody in the government tell him to do that? Nope!

In fact, the government was lying to the people, even as the company that ran the plant was lying to the government. Here’s a quote from The New York Times:

In the darkest moments of last year’s nuclear accident, Japanese leaders did not know the actual extent of damage at the plant and secretly considered the possibility of evacuating Tokyo, even as they tried to play down the risks in public, an independent investigation into the accident disclosed on Monday.

In fact, the calls to evacuate Tokyo have not stopped: here’s a headline from 14 February 2014:

Japan Physician: Parents should evacuate children from Tokyo; Danger from Fukushima radiation — “The threat has seemed to be spreading” — “I’ve seen a lot of patients badly affected”

Nor was it just physicians speaking out; here’s a recent New York Times article:

In the chaotic, fearful weeks after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, in March 2011, researchers struggled to measure the radioactive fallout unleashed on the public. Michio Aoyama’s initial findings were more startling than most. As a senior scientist at the Japanese government’s Meteorological Research Institute, he said levels of radioactive cesium 137 in the surface water of the Pacific Ocean could be 10,000 times as high as contamination after Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear accident.

Ok—so now what’s happening? Here’s Sunday’s New York Times:

Ever since they were forced to evacuate during the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant three years ago, Kim Eunja and her husband have refused to return to their hilltop home amid the majestic mountains of this rural village for fear of radiation.

But now they say they may have no choice. After a nearly $250 million radiation cleanup here, the central government this month declared Miyakoji the first community within a 12-mile evacuation zone around the plant to be reopened to residents. The decision will bring an end to the monthly stipends from the plant’s operator that have allowed Ms. Kim to relocate to an apartment in a city an hour away.

Think the situation can’t get worse? Well, ponder this New York Times headline:

Unskilled and Destitute Are Hiring Targets for Fukushima Cleanup

Given that large amounts of radioactive water is spilling into the Pacific Ocean, isn’t it time we faced facts? This is not an issue for a local company, not an issue for one country, it’s a world issue.

And somehow, somebody has got to take charge of it, globally….

And if that wasn't depressing enough…

Our Chatty Pope

So the question of the moment is: does this guy know what he’s doing?

The word is that Pope Francis is a dab hand at managing the press, but is he? Or are we simply seeing what we saw with John Paul II—which was the collective decision of the media to adore what was a staunchly conservative, repressive theologian who never admitted that there was a sexual abuse scandal in the church. So he got a free pass, as he has even in death, since he was allowed to pass the miracle test with a 50% score. Under church rules, two miracles are needed to establish sainthood. But either Pope Francis or Benedict waived this rule, and allowed John Paul II to be declared a saint based on only one miracle.

So from the beginning, the press has liked this pope. Confession—I generally regard likable popes as more dangerous than disagreeable popes, so Benedict was my man: a completely prissy, probably-way-closeted pope who drove people out of the church faster than sounding a fire alarm. Perfect!

Second confession: though I think it‘s completely nutty, I appreciate theological conservatism on logical grounds. Consider the policy, as my friend Harry once told me, about getting a sperm sample, when needed for infertility counseling. Normally, guys go into a room, in which usually there are some well-thumbed and hopefully not too sticky men’s magazines. But how can a good Catholic give a sperm sample, since absolutely every sexual act must be undergone—considered using the word “endured”—for the sake of procreation?

Right—there’s a procedure: the man goes to bed with his wife, but using a condom, into which a pin has been pricked. There is thus the theoretical chance of procreation, and you get the sample. See?

I love this sort of lunacy—who wouldn’t? But I find it seriously screwy when a pope drifts back to talk to reporters, on the way home from Rio, and sends people’s eyebrows an inch north and their jaws several inches south. Because the five words that everybody associates with this pope is, “who am I to judge?”

Answer—you’re the pope.

It occurred to me, just now—I know what the problem is. Having worked in Human Resources for Wal-Mart for seven years, the answer came to me with my first sip of double espresso. Here goes:

The pope doesn’t have a job description!  

That’s gotta be the problem, because if he did, there would probably be some sort of nonsense in it, on the lines of:

Consistently and rigorously articulate, uphold and champion key components of the Catholic faith, as defined by scripture, tradition, and the entire canon of the faith.

In short, the pope is supposed to get up in the morning and sit down and make moral judgments. That’s why people are dropping the bills in the collection plates.

OK—so the most recent controversy? The pope apparently made a 10-minute call to an Argentinian, Jaquelina Lisbona, who is legally married to a divorced man, and who has been told that she cannot take communion. Why not? Because she is living in sin with her husband of 20 years, since he has divorced, and his first marriage has not been annulled. So the pope grabbed the phone, called her up, and told her, in essence, to shop around for a more sympathetic priest. And that it would be fine to take communion.

One of the most bizarre things about the Catholic Church is how little its faithful know about it. Nor do I, but this much I know—and to make sure, I googled “state of grace communion.” Try it, and you’ll get your answer.

What’s weird is that this is Catholicism 101—and the pope is saying it doesn’t matter?

Predictably, the millions of divorced Catholics went wild—the pope was signaling that the Church was changing! There were winds of modernity galling through the now open doors of the medieval church! Did the pope plan to announce major changes when the meeting of bishops occurred later in the year?

Just as predictably, the conservatives were howling, and here I have to say—who can blame them? Because the church’s teaching on marriage is bedrock.

Of course, it’s also bogus, since a suspiciously high number of marriages are getting annulled, nowadays: a byzantine procedure that requires two tribunals to decide that, no, a marriage never existed at all. Some of it anyone can go along with—if papá is standing over you with a gun, there’s not much consent involved. But life is messier, in general, and the church is increasingly willing to nullify a marriage because, well, your husband turned out to be a drunk. Oh, and guess what? It doesn’t hurt to throw a little money at the problem, and pay for “advocates” who can…well, advocate.

So how many marriages are getting annulled? Here’s Wikipedia:

Diocesan tribunals completed over 49000 cases for nullity of marriage in 2006. Over the past 30 years about 55 to 70% of annulments have occurred in the United States. The growth in annulments—at least in the US—has been substantial. In 1968 338 marriages were annulled. In 2006 27,000 were.[17]    

In fact, both JPII and Benedict repeatedly called for crackdowns on giving annulments, especially at a meeting of the Roman Rota, which typically hears cases for annulment. Here’s what one source said:

In 1991, when Pope John Paul II wanted to defend marriage against what he perceived to be emerging threats, he used his speech to the Rota to lay out a natural-law case for marriage. He acknowledged that marriage is shaped by culture, but contemporary secular culture, he warned, had now become hostile to marriage. Freedom had become "absolutized," and the pontiff wished to make clear where the boundaries lay.

Three years later, in 1994, Pope John Paul II admonished the Rota against the ease with which annulments were being granted. Judges must know the truth, and the truth "is not always easy." Avoid "the temptation to lighten the heavy demands of observing the law in the name of a mistaken idea of compassion and mercy."

Ah, for the good old days!

Right, so what did Francis do? Well apparently he drifted in and gave a seven-paragraph address. Here again is Charles J. Reid on the subject:

What he delivered was a beautiful meditation on Jesus and the qualities of the good judge. The judge, he began, must be fully and maturely human. He or she (and canon law permits women to exercise the judicial office) must never be legalistic, must avoid dry abstractions, and must instead serve the ends of real justice. And justice, he stressed, required full awareness of the needs of the persons before the court. Attend to the person, he emphasized, in his or her "concrete realities."

As Reid writes, the most important message—the take-home, as we used to say at Wal-Mart—was the judges must be pastoral, not judicial. Which leaves me wondering—if the judges are not to be judicial, well, who is? The answer, as I read the article, is nobody: since Jesus had focused his life on the pastoral, everybody within the church is supposed to be pastoral.

Well, the Vatican press office, who must be salivating for the days of Pope Benedict, came out and said that a private call was not a policy shift, not a realignment on doctrine. Which is probably true; there’s an old Roman saying: popes come and go, the curia remains forever.

And this pope needs to be careful, because if he puts out all these hints, and then doesn’t come through? If his bishops hang tough and say, “sorry, but divorced Catholics cannot take communion?” Look at the trouble in the Anglican Church over the ordination of a gay bishop—it would look like Queen Elizabeth’s tea party in comparison to the fight over remarriage of divorced Catholics.

I’m an old atheist, so I tend to scoff at the whole thing. Still, I do sort of wonder…

…should somebody yank the telephone out of the Holy Father’s office?

On Sisters and Ticks

OK, Dear Readers, we have a serious problem, since what happens to a blogger without Internet? The same thing that happens to surgeons without scalpels…

Right, the son of a newspaperman am I, so, was I going to be defeated by what never existed until the last years of my father’s life? Shouldn’t I be able to find something, anything, to write about?

He would have been 105, three days before that day (Wednesday,) and he died nearly twenty years ago, but here’s today’s secret, Dear Readers: it gets better, yes, but never to the point of best. Which means that, yes, I no longer weep when I see a wok (Jack was an excellent Chinese cook), and I’m glad that he got out of the world as he did: fast and painless, with not too much deterioration. Life makes you philosophical, and the icon giving the option to go on indefinitely can’t be found on the desktop. So you might as well go when you still have most of your faculties, and life isn’t too onerous. But that said, his absence turns up, once in a while, and then I miss him.

Wednesday, for example, he showed up at The Poet’s Passage, the café / craft shop where I work, and where the Internet had decided to take a prolonged cigarette break. I was delivering rice and beans to Naïa, the daughter of the owner, whom I had seen and who was going off to get her child the rice and beans. Since I myself was going for rice and beans, it was no problem to get an extra order.

Naïa, of course, is completely unfazed by Marc arriving with the food instead of her mother. And also completely in character, she has a joke:

“What do you call a mad flea?”

I know it’s going to be bad.

“OK—tell me.”

“A lunatic!”

I’m about to protest that a tick is hardly a flea, but guess what? The damage is done, and Naïa is a girl who has never once ventured down the doll aisle of a toy store. Instead, she heads straight for insects—in which I believe—or dinosaurs—in which I don’t. So that means that not only is she twelve, but she’ll probably win.

“How can you not believe in dinosaurs,” she said, when I presented my belief.

“Never seen one,” I said, and braced myself for the inevitable.

“And have you ever seen a tick, “ I said, hoping to deflect the argument, and she professed that she had—one had been venturing across the inner landscape of Lorca’s ear. (Lorca being the toy Chihuahua…)

So we talked about that, and discussed proper tick-removal schemes: you can’t pull them out if they’re embedded. Then I asked what she had done with the tick.

“Flushed it down the toilet,” she said.

“A singularly uncreative thing to do with a perfectly good tick,” I said.

“Yeah? What would you have done with a tick?”

“In fact, there is a long history of inventive uses of ticks in my family,” I told her, since first it was true, and anyway, there was no Internet.

Eric walks into the café.

“There was my brother Eric, who was engaged to an genteel lady from Pittsburgh: her father was a cardiologist, her mother hung out with the Carnegies and the Mellons. So what happened when Eric found a tick on him, one weekend after having been out in the woods? Well, he went to the jewelry store, got a ring box, deposited the tick on the cotton, and then had them wrap it up. Then he left it on her desk at the Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper where they both worked.”

The marriage ended in divorce.

Naïa, of course, doesn’t see that. Eric definitely picked the wrong girl….

“Then there was my father, who had also been out in the woods, and who had to interview the president of the Bank of Madison.”

Historical note—there was a time, Dear Reader, when banks had perfectly sensible names, before they began to call themselves MadBank, or whatever.

Jack walks into the café.

“Well, the president of the bank was young, and very pompous, and treating Mr. Newhouse with great formality, which generally tended to be wasted on Jack. So the prez left the room, which was a good thing, since Jack had begun to feel that really awful feeling: something strolling across his scalp. So there my father was, holding the tick in his hand. And then he heard footsteps.”

“So what did he do?’ asked Naïa.

“He must had had Mercury blossoming all over his astrological chart,” I told her, “since he knew immediately what to do. He leaned forward and dropped the black tick on a white piece of paper on the president’s desk.”

“Then what happened,” asked Naïa.

“Well, he waited for the situation to evolve. And then he saw the president start, and reach out to grab the paper. But Jack wasn’t having any of that!”

“So what did he do?”

“He leaned forward and said, ‘is that a TICK on your desk?’ So then the president got really nervous and said ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know!’ He should just have laughed, of course, but he got rattled. So Jack leaned farther forward and said, “well, any damn fool can see that that’s a TICK!” And now, Jack couldn’t help it, and began saying things like, ‘do you mean to tell me your bank has TICKS!’ and ‘have you ever had an infestation of TICKS before?!’ So of course the president got completely rattled.”

“So then what happened,” Naïa wants to know.

“Well, Jack finished the interview and went across the street to have a cup of coffee behind the front window of the diner. And guess what happened, twenty minutes later?”

“What?”

“Three trucks from Oliver Exterminating roared up in from of the bank. And the guys came out running, like HazMat guys going after a bomb!”

Naïa is completely unimpressed. Right, I realize it wasn’t much of a story.

Unless, of course, you had known Jack….

Family is funny, I thought. People come in and out, die, turn up unexpectedly, and go away again. And then, sometimes, people just turn up.

“Marc, I don’t know how to say this,” said Lady, Naïa’s mother.

This is rarely a good sentence to hear.

“You’re one of my closest friends,” she says simply.

“You’re my sister,” I say, without thinking. That’s when you know it’s true.

We kiss. Then I head off to the café.

Naïa has to have her rice and beans.