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!