Who's Picking Up The Tab? Who Else?

Well, it must be true, because I read about it in The New York Times: The whole damned island is depressed.

Or not, since the financial crisis elicits varying responses of anger, rants, and problem-solving. Oh, and also a good deal of finger-pointing, as evidenced by this:

Yes—we spend 39 million a year to drive our governors around, and provide police protection, which is certainly needed, since the last governor laid off 20,000 people, and do you think he’d survive a bus ride through Cataño? Not likely. OK—then there’s this:

Well, the governor is sure that we’ll all be willing to make sacrifices, just as he and Wilma have, but allegedly his Ferragamo shoes cost nearly 700 bucks, when you add in our 11.5% sales tax.

Do I need to add more? A more serious blogger would look up the picture someone took of Melba Acosta drinking wine and eating lobster, although as I recall it, the wine was obvious but the lobster couldn’t be verified. At least I didn’t see it.

 

Found it! I'm serious after all!

What was the point? The point was that the financial crisis is not my problem, dammit, it’s the politicians who stole the money and gave suspicious contracts to their cronies borrowed and borrowed and now? Fuck ‘em!

Then we have the outsiders peering in, often with little or no knowledge of the island or the culture. So Don Young of Alaska thinks Puerto Rico is at the boiling point, ready for revolution; Paul Krugman, however, tells us that Puerto Rico is no Greece. Great to know!

Politics—of course!—gets into it. The folk favoring independence will tell you: The Jones Act that mandates that we use American shipping costs us a lot of money (does it? Who knows?) Statehooders: If we weren’t a colony and were a state, we could refinance our debt through bankruptcy, just as all the other states can. And lastly, the deluded group that holds that we are a separate country joined in a bilateral union with the United States? Well, along with Wilma and the governor, we’re all (meaning everybody but Wilma and the governor and the ruling classes) yes, we are all (please revisit last parentheses) going to have to make sacrifices. Oh, and the governor just stumbled upon those Ferragamo shoes at the Salvation Army—one of those lucky days!

It’s all nonsense, of course, since there are a lot of guys out there in the business district of San Juan who are wearing shoes every bit as expensive as the governor. And the 39 million for police protection for former governors? Look, in the face of 73 billion, it’s nothing.

What is something, and what no one is talking about, is that our government has 230,000 employees, as compared to the 110,000 public employees of the state of Wisconsin, and do I really have to trawl through the Internet to tell you that Wisconsin has almost twice as many people and a lot more land and also something called snow, a lot of which fell for six months between October and (probably) May, and which is hugely expensive to remove?

And you know, we’re all complicit in this, because although of course your mother or sister or brother-in-law or maybe the whole damn family are ferociously working public servants, veritably pounding the streets outside, pestering the passers by with offers to help the citizenry! Of course, of course, we all know that! It’s all the other lazy, shiftless, indolent-with-attitude shirkers that are clogging up the government. Still, it has to be said, there are a lot of everybody else’s brothers and sisters and whole damn families.

And those politicians? All of those thieving bastards that got us into this mess? Guess what—they’re there because we voted for them, and if we had been reading the newspaper, all those years, we could have seen very clearly what was coming, since it was the headline year after year about the government deficit, and the borrowing, and the issuing of more and more bonds.

But no, we don’t read the newspapers because it’s too depressing and the politicians are all crooks and they just steal the money and there’s nothing we can do about it. So now, all of a sudden, it’s the hedge-funds—read vultures—who are circling above and extorting exorbitant interest for that drop of water on the dying man’s tongue! Hah! Bastards!

God knows, it’s hard to defend a hedge fund, but if you need a loan until payday, where do you go? First to the bank, and then after they begin to look funny and then reject you, you go to the little payday loan store and then, if even that doesn’t work, you go down to the corner to the loan shark, and guess what? At this point, your rate is not the 3% that Banco Popular was charging you. And that’s where we are, folks!

So now we’re in trouble—enough trouble to get the government to commission the Krueger Report, which meant that three economists came down and told us what we’ve heard repeatedly and never acted upon. The tax base is eroding, we are uncompetitive in terms of labor costs, there’s no plan to develop the economy, and we can’t pay the debt or go back and get some more. Oh, and nobody is working or if they are, it’s in the informal economy—and who cooked up that term, by the way? Whatever happened to “black market?”—and a huge number of us are receiving benefits of some sort.

They walk among us, folks, since the guy who sold me the Perrier I’m now drinking told me, in passing, that he has both the state health card and the Department of Family card—the “informal economy” equivalent of “food stamps.” Another employee is working full-time but getting title 8 housing, because she’s supposedly unemployed. And a customer came in recently and complained that his cell phone got lost, and then when he went to replace it at whatever government agency replaces cell phones, well, guess what? Somebody made a mistake and he was listed on the wrong list, or the government changed providers, and so he has go to Sprint or somewhere, all because of the government inefficiency, and isn’t that outrageous? No, but what is outrageous….

But what I really wanted to tell you is the story of a guy who is painting my apartment and doing a wonderful job of it, though the work is coming along slowly, since he has a full time job, he’s in the Army Reserves and so that’s his part time, and he is still broke because he’s paying child support.

The point is, this guy used to have a construction company, with his father-in-law or ex-father-in-law. So the economy went bust and his company went bust, and then he couldn’t pay his child support, so he went to court, and then he went, in handcuffs and shackles, to a solitary cell, awaiting transfer to jail.

“I just sat there and shook. I mean, I saw my whole life go down the toilet. Look, when I had money, I paid! And so how is putting me in jail for six months gonna help? First, I’m gonna lose my job. Then, the army is gonna give me a dishonorable discharge, ‘cause they’re looking for any excuse to get rid of people and reduce the benefits they gotta pay. And when I realized that absolutely everything was gone, I broke down and sobbed.”

Guys? This is an army guy, this is a guy who does construction and likes chicks—fatally so. This is not a guy who breaks down and sobs.

He got two breaks: His ex-wife relented and talked to the judge, and I gave him some money for child support. So he’s free, except not, because after he finished the morning work of painting my apartment, he took public transportation to Bayamón, then walked 45 minutes under the blazing sun to his hospital job, and then worked his 8-hour shift, walked that 45 minutes back to the public transportation, went through three municipalities and stumbled on home. Dear Reader—did you get tired just reading that sentence?

Unsurprisingly, this guy gets sick a lot, especially now, when the sky has turned an eerie milky blue, since huge amounts of Sahara sand have drifted over the Atlantic and are now above us, slowly drizzling down and blotching our cars and acting like asbestos in our lungs. So not a problem, if you’re in air-conditioning all day and night, but that hour and a half that he’s walking daily on the streets of Bayamón? He’s got a sandbox in his lungs.

This financial crisis, as invisible as the Saharan sand, as felt and weakening and sickening, as insidious, as gradually and inevitably lethal? Yes, we are all complicit, but some more so than others, and if today the guy who has three jobs has failed to show up to finish the painting? I know perfectly well: He’s exhausted, he sleeping, and all he can handle today is one job, not two.

So the question is not the Ferragamo shoes or the lobster or the policemen driving our corrupt governors back and forth from the country clubs. Yes—we’re all complicit, but some more than others. And yes, we’ll certainly join you and Wilma, Guv, in making those sacrifices! But while do I feel that the burden of those sacrifices will not be felt by the people who are living and eating off the government? And why do I feel that you and Wilma won’t feel too much of a sting, either? Why is it, in fact, that I know perfectly well whose shoulders this is going to fall on, and you do too, and you’ve even seen him, or you could have, since he’s quite visible and quite exposed, as you drive past him, Guv and Wilma, in your air-conditioned SUV with the tinted windows and the police escort. Yes, he’s perfectly visible, that guy who’s going to made the sacrifices, that guy out there….

…walking the streets of Bayamón!             

  

Lady Prevails!

You know all about it—the 73 billion bucks that the 16 or so public agencies plus the general government in Puerto Rico owe. And you know that the governor came out last Sunday in The New York Times saying that the debt was “non-payable.” So we are in full crisis, or near full crisis, since we did manage to pay 1.9 billion bucks that we owed. And you even have read the Krueger report, which details all the various paths that led inexorably to the edge of this cliff.

But while the island has been in crisis, the café where I write has been in crisis, too.

“I have to raise $60,000 by the end of the month, Marc,” said Lady, who was faced with the twin challenge of just getting to the bathroom, since about half of her shin had been removed in a recent surgery. So she was crippled on various fronts.

Well, there were various attempts at help, though there was also a certain lack of coordination. In fact, for insouciant going-your-own-way, poets could teach even cats a trick or two.

There was Geronimo, who declared that he would cook a delicious dinner, all with the finest ingredients that he had himself collected from remote and mountainous locations on the island.

“He made lasagna out of nettles, Marc,” reported Sunshine the next day. “I mean, I saw him making the stuff, and he couldn’t even touch the things. So he was using this!” Sunshine then held up the large tongs that bakeries use to get the doughnuts out of the cases.

“And he expected anyone to eat this stuff? I mean look at this.”

So he showed me a completely untouched tray of lasagna, each piece of which was adorned with, yes, a nettle.

“So did anyone come?”

“That’s what I asked Lady…”

“And?”

“Seis de mis proprios gatos….”

Right—six of her own cats, which is twice the usual number for describing an event failure, but still not very good.

“Then Geronimo turned around and told Lady that she owed him $170, since he had spent that on ingredients! Can you believe that?”

“Well, those nettles don’t come cheap….”

It had been rather unpromising from the beginning, since Geronimo had conceived the affair based on the purchase of tickets, the minimum price being $60 per person. The only trouble was that even the person nominally in charge of the event—as well, putatively, of Geronimo—couldn’t understand the concept. So that boiled over into hurt feelings and recriminations and then, when another friend (who had not incidentally contributed 1000 bucks to help) had stepped in to mediate, Geronimo had ordered her out of the kitchen. Well, well—we all know that chefs can be fussy.

The next step was to set up a crowd funding site, and so Lady’s sister-in-law—her Latin blood at full boil—stepped up and created a site on GoFundMe.com. She described with the pen of Dickens the dastardly actions of the legal foe that had brought Lady and the Passage to the brink, nor did she spare the adjectives, of which “petty, vindictive, mean-spirited” were the more palatable. Ah, it was vigorous indeed but…

“Lady, you have GOT to take that thing off the Internet, and you’d better hope your step-father or whoever he is hasn’t seen it. Oh, and especially the judge!”

“BUT IT’S TRUE!” cried Lady, who was anyway not at her best, since now it wasn’t going to the bathroom, but rather going down the 25 steps out of her apartment that had been the challenge.

“So write it to me and text me…”

Right—do that, and then to the work of….well, what? Shouldn’t there be signs? How are people going to know that there’s a crisis? I decided to try to make a flyer, since my version of Word has templates for such things, but guess what? The photo—which anyway was upside down and refused to get right side up, and who knew that a photo could get so drunk?—was either swallowing the headline—Save The Poet’s Passage—or the headline was swallowing the photo. The point was, they were't not cooperating, which meant that the good Taí, always my cavalry coming over whatever technological hill I’m in front, had to step in. This she did, efficiently, and even refused payment! Thanks, Taí.

So now it’s time to herd up the many people who love the Poet’s Passage, who kiss Lady every time they see her, and ask her for twenty or thirty bucks half the time they see her. If Lady could find the word “no” in her capacious and poetic vocabulary, she’d have the 60 grand.

“I’ll join you, just as soon as I finish this poem,” says Carly, a poet and ex-worker, who was exed after some financial unpleasantness.

“MOTHERFUH! I can’t believe that Niggah ain’t out here with us, pounding these damn streets under this fuckin’ sun!”

So said Montalvo, whom I had enlisted, along with Norma. So it’s just the three of us out there, since Carly is grappling with the double weight of double paternity, which means that he is absorbing the poetic and air-conditioned atmosphere of the Passage, while his girlfriend calmly observes the twins shitting on the all-white sofa.

“Well, I’ve certainly found out who the sharks are,” said Lady, since she had been fielding various proposals to buy the building at ridiculous sums, or buy the café for the purpose of turning it into a cat café—brilliant, but impossible according to the Health Department—or other schemes, all very much not to the benefit of Lady.

So it all worked out, though a day before Lady had to go into court and tell the judge if she had the sixty grand, she was still over ten thousand short. But no problem, since 10 grand materialized in an “off-line donation,” and somebody just donated 15 bucks 26 minutes ago, even though the goal has been reached (we’re at $60, 720) and the crisis is officially over.

So we’ve moved on, or rather not, since the point of it all was that nobody wanted to move on—not Elizabeth’s two children who have valiantly responding to the crisis by alternately playing video games or snoozing, and not Carly nor his girl friend nor their progeny, doing what progeny do in the first year of life, and not the tall grey-haired gringo in the corner, who knows—slightly—how Lady got the sixty grand she needed to keep us all in place.

What don’t I know?

Where in the hell Puerto Rico is gonna get 73 billion!        

On Marriage and Dominicans, etc...

Yes, yesterday was a good day, since I spent the earliest decade of my life being sick, the second and third decades being criminal, and the last decade being married in some places and single in others. None of that matters, in quotidian life, but it might have been an issue if one or the other of us had been hit by a bus. Potentially, I could have been seeing my husband’s family stream into the ICU, while the nurses and doctors barred me.

So yes, it was a good day, and I went to the march and waved the flag, since that was what I had done off and on for decades. But it was miniscule to what so many other people had done, and minor compared to what I had done, which was come out to everyone including the guy who parks cars on the street (OK—I didn’t actually come out, but he saw me with the flag, gave me a special look, and don’t you think that counts?)

Between being in tears for most of the day, I read all the Facebook posts from all my religious former-students-now-FB-friends, who were writing things like this:

En mi opinión la reciente decisión del Tribunal Supremo de los Estados Unidos de legalizar el matrimonio entre personas de mismo sexo es un paso más de esta nación hacia un abismo de autodestrucción, no solo en lo que respecta a lo moral y espiritual sino también como potencia mundial.

My apologies to anyone who needs translation, but in fact, does anyone need translation? Because for the last month or so, we’ve been hearing that the sky was falling, or maybe that the jaws of Hell were opening up—right, that may be a mixed metaphor, but don’t worry, because the whole subject is so emotionally charged that nobody will notice—and the United States was going to be cast into the flames and the stench of sulfur and the cries of the anguished souls who have languished there….

So I waved the flag and walked hand-in-hand into Old San Juan, and had the happy discovery that people were on the streets, snapping photos and, in almost every case, applauding and cheering. It hasn’t always been that way: ON my first pride march in Puerto Rico, someone threw a bottle at me from a hotel window. Luckily, it was one of my life’s many disconnects.

Well, wouldn't you celebrate, too, if you had just torpedoed Western Civilization?

Then it was time to do that scandalous thing we gays do—we ate dinner. OK, he cooked, I did the dishes, and we had a bottle of champagne, since we learned a long time ago: In a world where not much can be expected, you have to create your family and celebrate your own milestones. And today? Well, I woke up and didn’t need to get out of bed to know that the world was still with us, since the same construction work that has been going on all week was still very audibly going on today.

So the world hasn’t fallen apart in any significant sense for anyone except that yes it has, if you are Dominican of Haitian descent, since what some are calling the biggest Humanitarian crisis in recent times is about to take place. Or rather, is taking place, but at night and in the early morning, since Dominican authorities are taking somewhat less bureaucratic routes, and travelling down the well-established paths of intimidation and brutalization. There is, for example, the Dominican guy who had the army guy pound on his door, order him to leave the house and, if he didn’t, he would return with gasoline and matches. Oh, and it’s a wood house (all right, more like a shack…).

Well, it was a situation we all had seen coming, since in 2010, the government announced that anyone born in the Dominican Republic was not automatically a Dominican, as had been the case. Then, the Supreme Court went further and announced that anyone without at least one Dominican parent was illegal. Oh, and that went back to 1927.

The court got around that by declaring that the Haitians had not been living in the Dominican Republic for all those years, cutting the sugar cane and harvesting the plantains and building and then cleaning the houses and doing all the things that immigrants do. No, they had been passing through, those guys who arrived in the 1960’s, and now have grandchildren, who—like so many immigrants—don’t speak Creole, don’t know anyone in Haiti, and consider themselves, very justifiably, Dominican.

In fact, the international pressure was intense, so then the Dominican Republic instituted a program designed to help those people who could be naturalized be naturalized. Although sometimes that was a trick, since some of these people were illiterate, many were without any papers, and therefore couldn’t ride a bus, since the bus would be stopped and identification demanded. Then, there were the reports that the lines were humongous, the people were waiting for days on end, bribes were being solicited and paid for people to jump in line. Oh, and for those who simply had a birth certificate from the Dominican Republic? Well, they had to provide an unwieldy pile of documents, which may explain that—out of hundreds of thousands of people—only 8,775 people completed the process, and all of that is under review, except for some 300 people who have been granted citizenship.

Well, the world watched all this being played out, and the social networks came through, but did the mass deportations happen? Because it had been reported—the government or the army (if there’s any difference) had rented 12 big busses, and had constructed seven deportation centers, and the situation looked all set for the deportations to begin.

So then the government announced that the deportations would begin after a 45-day period, during which those 8,775-minus-300-out-of-500,000 people’s papers would be examined.

So last week was a tense week, since what would the U.S. Supreme Court do, and what was going on at the border of Dominican Republic and Haiti? Were the deportations going on? And where was the press? Yes, it had been reported, but it was hardly being played in the way that a beheading in France or the Charleston murders were being played. So hundreds of thousands of people were—potentially—going to be upped and put into Haiti, and the president of Haiti has said that he won’t welcome any Dominicans of Haitian descent, and anyway, how much of a welcome is Haiti able to give? They’ve cut down most of the trees to cook the food that now they don’t have, so what’s left? Sharing dirt with their third-cousins from across the border?

So I was Googling, and then hit upon one of my many absurd schemes: I would download Google Earth, and then spy in on the border by satellite from the next island over! See? Technology wins again, just like love!

Except that it didn’t, since I couldn’t figure out how to download the program, nor how to enlist an army of will volunteers, to sit at their computers and monitors various spots along the Dominican / Haitian border.

Fortunately, a more connected generation has started a new twist on journalism, since now, anybody with a smart phone can be a journalist, as Vice News is proving, and if television brought the Vietnam War home more than the New York Times ever could, the Internet and YouTube is just as revolutionary. And so I watched, today, and absorbed the fact that some 14,000 Dominican / Haitians have already crossed the border—some of them, presumably, are Haitian and getting out before “voluntarily” before they’re evicted. So they’re selling off all their stuff and guess what? This is not how you want to plan a move….

Well, it’s an interesting world, since one of my questions has always been, well, isn’t it stretching the imagination that all of those concentration camps were built in Nazi Germany, but the good German people didn’t know anything about it? Now, of course, Vice News would be showing the trains, and anyone with an Internet connection and an interest would be able to see it. It being, of course, whatever atrocity was going on at the moment.

So now I’m married and that was nice but now I have to be worried about what is happening now and may happen in the next month on the next island over. And to all of my students for whom I still have a great affection, and who are reposting the rants of their Evangelical friends, let me ask a question….

…isn’t it time to move on, and worry about something real?

                                     

Dumbing Down for Dummies

Lately I’ve busied myself teaching a very nice Chilean woman the 100 citizenship questions that every foreigner has to study, since during the interview with the INS every candidate is asked ten questions; of these, he or she must answer six correctly. So how do the candidates do? Well, according to the National Review, 91% pass. OK—and what about our high school kids? In the same article, only 4% of kids in Oklahoma and Arizona passed.

Each time I prep someone for citizenship, I come away feeling that I’ve gypped the student, that my own teachers had done so much better for me, that they had brought more depth and subtlety and passion to the subject. Oti, my student, tells me that the Constitution has to be obsolete, since it was written in 1787 (which is, by the way, one of the one hundred questions). I counter by telling her that the framers of the Constitution very deliberately couched their language in general terms, allowing for interpretation as time and technology change.

As an example, I gave her the case of a zookeeper in Milwaukee, who had posted on Facebook that the white clientele of the zoo had lousy manners. Somehow, his supervisor read the post, and fired him. Apparently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the zoo’s favor.

Or maybe it didn’t—I’ve looked it up just now, and can’t find anything about the affair. But that was hardly the point, since Oti and I went on to talk about the merits of the case: Didn’t the zookeeper have the right to free speech? Shouldn’t a person be able to post what he likes on Facebook? Could you argue that a zookeeper with that attitude was unlikely to perform his job adequately, since one part of that is to deal with the public? All of those questions my old civics teacher would have pounced on, and many more.

That said, it also may be true that I don’t do too badly, since reading the 100 questions can be a dismal affair. Does anyone care that the constitution was written in 1787? Of course not—more interesting is the fact that the Colonialists fought a revolution, and then had the thought dawn on them: How in the world were they going to govern themselves?

That’s hardly the worst: One question is why the Pilgrims came to America. Well, good liberal that I am, you know my answer: They were so hideously intolerant in their religion that even the Dutch couldn’t stand them. Wrong—they came seeking religious freedom, at least in the INS’s view.

And so we come to the dismal fact: If anybody is teaching Civics, they’re doing a singularly lousy job of it. But that might not be surprising, since two years ago, I discovered that my niece, a professor of English pedagogy, was set to go off to Vienna, to teach a course on teaching English grammar to ESL teachers.

“I’m sort of worried about that, since the students tend to get so hung up on the pluperfect and continuous tenses, and I don’t know anything about that stuff….”

Yeah? She was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, her specialty was teaching teachers to teach English, and she couldn’t conjugate a verb? Even more troubling, in several conversations with her, I attempted to understand what her thesis was all about: I couldn’t understand it then, nor can I now. The best I can say is that it had something to do with racial stereotyping on children’s reading abilities—but that’s just a guess.

What’s happening in our schools? Well, we seem to be trading learning basic facts and information for dealing in broad concepts and critical thinking—all of which would be fine, if having a basic bed of knowledge weren’t the first step in being able to engage in critical thinking. 

It’s all part of the dumbing down of our schools, and anyone who hasn’t tried to pass the 1912 Eighth Grade Bullitt County (KY) knows: We’ve all been victims. Sure—I aced the Grammar section, but the question, “Through what waters would a vessel pass going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila?” Remember looking at the floor, at your shoes, or indeed anywhere, all to avoid making eye contact with the teacher?

In fact, one symptom of our dumbing down is that we are now preferring video versus print, and so I went to YouTube—of course!—for a very instructive clip on the problem. Teachers, it seems, are no longer correcting spelling errors, since my “because” has equal weight to your “cuz.” Did I believe this? Wasn’t sure, but my interest was piqued by the allegation that schools were bumming out their students by teaching “death education.” Yeah? So I looked that up, and got the following paragraph from a New York University professor:

From twenty years of teaching a college course, I can see the value of a course offered as an elective. As for requiring high school and elementary school students to study death and dying, I am skeptical. Advocates of death education say that the traditional college age is too late for beginning ones education in this area. That is true and I return below to the need to begin death education as early as possible. Before describing how to answer the need, however, are we certain about the need itself.

Why do I feel that no eighth grader who could navigate—or at least identify the waters to be navigated—from Britain to Manila would navigate so ineptly through that paragraph? Consider punctuation—there’s no question mark on the last statement, and no apostrophe on the “one’s.” But even worse is the logic problem posed by the author’s first saying that he is skeptical about requiring high school and elementary students to undergo death education, and then averring that “death education as early as possible” is necessary. But wait—then we are told that we might be uncertain about the need itself! Is it just me that doesn’t get all that?

Nor is it the case that this is some adjunct professor. Rather, it is—probably—by a man named G. Moran, where he would eventually become Director of the Program of Religious Education at NYU.
Rather curiously, believing that the education of our time has been deliberately dumbed down leads you straight into the arms of the conspiracy theorists, since why has this happened, and at whose direction? Of course—it’s the New World Order, otherwise known as the Illuminati, that sinister oligarchy and plutocracy that pulls the strings and moves the world. Obviously, the last thing they want is to have an informed citizenry, so what have they done? Fed us with the drugs of materialism, nationalism, religious fervor, and emotional non-rational discourse. Think George Orwell, only on an order of magnitude many times worse.
Is it true? Probably not. What is true is that if anyone wanted to create a mindless, malleable proletariat, well…

…wouldn’t that be the way to do it?

And now, for someone who hasn't been dumbed down….