31 Out of 175--Not Bad!

There’s an old saying here: Puerto Rico is an island surrounded by mirrors, and even when we try to look at the rest of the world, all we can see is ourselves.

So that means that the entire island is talking about the article in the local rag, in which it is announced: Puerto Rico entre los Países menos Corruptos del Mundo. And the whole island is sniggering—hey look, we beat out Venezuela and Mexico! Cool!

OK—we’re not quite up there with Denmark (where apparently anything rotten was removed years ago), New Zealand or Finland, but we came in a respectable (well, sort of) 31 out of 175.

Well, if that’s true, the whole island is saying, then the world is in serious trouble, since every day brings a new scandal. In fact, what story seems to have bumped the corruption story off the main screen of the New Day? The news that the FBI has arrested the treasurer of the Highway Authority. Here is is!

 

So now we have another crooked public official, but that’s no news, since last week is was this:

In short, we do corruption as well as the Russians do alcoholism. And because of the intensely partisan mood on the island each party is convinced that the other party could teach a passel of new tricks to the devil himself.

Maybe it’s part of our collective schizophrenia, because what happens when that wonderful, kind guy hops into his car? You know, the one that dropped everything to take your mother to the hospital, even though he’s never met her, and all your siblings—and you—were off the island? Well, that man is now veering through traffic at 80 miles an hour, cutting people, and swearing so hard a drill sergeant would blush. Then he gets out of the car and helps little old ladies across the street.

And so the man who would give you everything turns out to be the man who will take anything, and why? Because we are the most personal people in the world, and friendships? We do them supremely. Systems? Err, not so well.

And does anybody believe in the system? Could anyone, if you read a lead like this from CNN of 2002?

     A former Puerto Rican education secretary,

                 the Chamber of Commerce president and 15 others were charged in an

                 alleged scheme of stealing federal funds, extortion and money laundering,

                 U.S. prosecutors said Wednesday.

Read on, and you’ll find out that the education secretary, Victor Fajardo, had kicked back about four million bucks to the party favoring statehood. And where is Fajardo now? He’s out of prison, and working to repay the money he stole. And guess what? He’s got a job!

Carlo confirmó que Fajardo  trabajará en una empresa privada cuyo nombre no reveló. Agregó que el exsecretario de Educación de la administración de Pedro Rosselló dio clases de español y matemáticas en la prisión federal.  

(Simple version: Fajardo’s lawyer said that Fajardo is working for a private company which—duh!—will be nameless, and that he had taught classes in the slammer…)

Later in the article, it’s stated that Fajardo had as a condition of his parole that he could not prepare proposals for federal money or for the education department. But in another article—which of course I can’t find now—he’s working as an advisor, helping to prepare…proposals.

Is it true? Did I make it up? In a sense it doesn’t matter, since what does matter is that even if he were teaching cleanliness to a whistle, nobody would believe him. So saturated are we with corruption that it has become the white noise of our lives.

“It’s a kleptocracy,” I once heard a man say, and since my computer didn’t know it, you may not either. But that’s what you get when you combine kleptomania with democracy; a government of thieves, and almost all of us are guilty, or complicit. That guy who charged you one dollar for the bottle of water, and the seven-percent sales tax? Well, those seven cents add up at the end of a day or year, and are they in the government’s coffers? Of course not—who’s going to look into the finances of a hot dog vender?

Or a doctor, since the blue moon shines more frequently than you ever get a receipt from a doctor? Oh, and that deductible? Cash only, please!

Well, Bill Bennett wrote about it, about how nobody could work themselves into much of a moral sweat about Bill Clinton getting a blowjob from a girl roughly his daughter’s age. But we’ve gone well past that: to ask where the outrage is is to be aware of outrage, aware that a social code exists and has been broken. For us, here in Puerto Rico?

If we ever had the concept of personal rectitude in public affairs, we lost it years ago.