On the Edge

I can tell you that Lebanon is about the size of New Jersey, that 70% of the population is Moslem, and 30% are Arab Christians. Oh, and that the civil war lasted one and a half decades.

I can tell you this because a man in his fifties is reading from The World and Its People to a 14 year-old girl, who last year was struggling through state capitals. She’s Naia, the daughter of the café where I write, and she’s being home-schooled, which in this case means reading a lot of stuff in the book, and then getting quizzed on it. And so each morning I watch the pair; they seem to get on well.

In fact, the information that a civil war lasted three decades doesn’t quite begin to tell you the real story. That was best done by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and it went something like this:

There was once a place where people of all kinds lived in peace: Jews, Christian and Moslem. But religion, though important, wasn’t all-important; being Lebanese was at least as important. And so people lived side by side in prosperity and peace, just as they had for generations, just as they always would.

What happened? I can’t remember and that may have been the point. For Taleb, the civil war illustrated how immensely fragile societies are, and how easily they can be torn apart.

I think about this because of two events taking place or that took place recently. The first was the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián, which lasted temporally four days and experientially as long as the civil war in Lebanon.

To say that the affair was boggled is to be polite. First of all, the mayor of the city decided to erect cyclone fences on several of the streets and proposed having checkpoints on the rest. Oh, and everybody—residents included—would have to go through metal detectors, be scanned by wands, and do what-not. To do all this, the mayor contracted a private company, at an undisclosed cost.

This immediately aroused the concern of the ACLU, who argued that the idea, and certainly the practice, violated the fourth amendment. It aroused my concern—I thought we’d have a stampede. So the ACLU met with the mayor and got nowhere. Then they took her to court, and got the court to rule that the barricades and checkpoints were indeed unconstitutional. So we went from having extreme security to having virtually none.

The police, you say?

The police in Puerto Rico are more decorative than functional. In fact, in an absent-minded moment, I once looked at a cop and thought, ‘I can’t believe they give those guys guns….’

So the police stood about and watched as a stream of people sauntered by, the children being urged by their parents to make maximal noise. This they did, the worst of which were the boat horns. Don’t let the size fool you: they can roar at up to 135 decibels.

That was the first problem. The second? The city had negotiated with the taxistas to provide—at a charge of five bucks per person—service from the convention center into the fiesta. There were also buses for free. So the predictable happened: nobody took the taxis and the wait for a bus could take an hour.

What follows isn’t so predictable: the taxistas became incensed, and decided to block off access on the major roads that lead to the old city.

You have to understand, Old San Juan is on a little island connected by a bridge to the mainland. Therefore, having an event of this magnitude is not so much flirting but cock-teasing disaster. My in-laws are well into their eighties, and the family was holding its breath that there would be no emergencies.

And so no one could get in to the fiesta, and there were massive traffic jams. So what did the city do? Call the cops and get the taxis towed?

Nope—they cancelled the bus service!

So the residents—those who hadn’t fled—of Old San Juan endured two days of maximal abuse, supervised by our chatting police, who did their best to ignore the crowd. The madness and the noise went on until at least three in the morning.

The café closed, since why stay open when nobody buys anything and your bathroom gets trashed? Because though the festival has great crafts and attracts decent folk during the day, at night it turns into a bacchanalia. The only thing that sells is beer.

Well, that was the first thing. The second thing? Well, the jury is out for Pablo Casellas, the son of a federal judge. The son is accused of killing his wife, and Daddy ducked under a police tape on the day of the murder.

It’s taken four months to get to this point, the principal problem being to find 12 people who didn’t think Pablo did it. The whole thing smelled from the beginning: an alleged robbery of a special pistol that later was found to have been the same type of gun that caused the victim’s death. Casellas alleged that the assailants jumped over the fence so lightly that they didn’t trample the grass, which was quite tall. Oh, and the bloodstains in Casellas’s car? Then there was the DNA….

It was all pretty clear who did it, but it almost came apart when the pathologist testified that—given her wounds—it had to be someone the victim knew, probably family. The defense seized, and petitioned for a mistrial. The judge said no.

He’ll be convicted, of course, and the verdict will be appealed.

Unlike the people who mobbed my city last weekend, Casellas had it all—money, power, status. And he was arrogant—he thought he could kill in cold blood and get away with it. He thought that everybody would believe his story and go away.

That, more than the pathetic hordes whose only fun is to come to a beautiful place and trash it, worries me. If Casellas really lived in a society where the rich can get away with murder….

…we’re screwed.