A Tribute to Puerto Rico

What I should do, the responsible thing to do, is to give you the official Iguana opinion on the terrorist attack of the French newspaper, Charlie Hedbo. And in fact, I wrote something last week, along the lines that however much there are peace-loving Muslims, there is just a little bit of complicity in the Muslim world toward its terrorist elements. Remember those girls kidnapped by the Boko Haram? Well, they’re still wherever they are—presumably enjoying the benefits and blisses of marriage—and the Boko Haram went on another rampage, this time destroying an entire village and killing two thousand people. So 12 people die in Paris, and 2000 die in a now destroyed town in Nigeria. Right—now we know our priorities. But my point was this:

The government has made no official comment on the alleged massacres. President Goodluck Jonathan skimmed security issues when he relaunched his re-election bid in front of thousands of cheering supporters in the economic capital, Lagos, on Thursday.

OK—so why should I care about 2000 people killed and who knows how many displaced if the president of the damned country doesn’t? In Paris, the president of the nation was right out there, but Goodluck? Well, no Luck.

Well, it troubles me—you legion of readers out there who are left in the dark, not knowing whether you should be Vous êtes Charlie Hedbo ou non. I admit it: I’ve let you down.

Closer to home, though more distant in time, did you know that the third building of the World Trade Center is the focus of an extensive conspiracy theory, and that there are 2200 engineers and architects—so says one guy—who think that the reason for the collapse was a controlled demolition? The building—building number 7—wasn’t hit by high-jacked planes, but when the second tower collapsed, it hit building 7, starting office fires. The BBC, as you can see in the video below, says the demolition theory is a crock of you-know-what, but is that enough to dissuade a true conspiracist? Of course not, so in the spirit of fairness for which this blog is massively famed, here’s one the comments:

911 was planned by our own government and corporations, to make lots of money from starting two unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dickhead Cheney's former company Halliburtion made 39 billion dollars from the Iraq War, which Cheney got his cut. Building 7 fell straight down in 6.5 seconds, nearly freefall speed from office fires. There were 47 steel vertical beams running the height of Building 7, and all 47 of them had to fail simultaneously to make the building come down the way it did. Equally, the WTC towers exploded down to the ground. How do 110 solid concrete floors blast out completely, in the form of dust already in mid--air from mere "collapse"? Watch videos and see the hundreds of tiny explosions going off in the smoke clouds after the buildings started falling. On 9/11/01 the laws of physics took a vacation!  

Right—so now I have to worry: Should I tell all you out there that you can’t trust the American government? That there are men and (a very few) women so jaded that they would send thousands of people to their deaths, all for a few nice wars? Well, it’s a sticky moral dilemma: If you’re lucky enough to believe in the essential decency of mankind, should I, a mere blogger, rape your innocence?

So I was busy watching the video, when Lady came in, with the news that she had decided: The Poet’s Passage was closing for the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian, since after partying hard in the Calle San Sebastian, there tended to be a second festival on Calle Cruz, where the Poet’s Passage is located. And since the poets had fled, the café had become The Drunks Pissing Everywhere Passage. And it was a sort of reworking of the slave triangle: All of the adolescents from the suburbs—rich and poor—crammed into the city, spent all their money on beer on Calle San Sebastian, and pissed it away—don’t have to tell you that’s literally—in the Poet’s Passage. Wisely, Lady decided to break the chain, or the triangle, or whatever.

So then Nydia—Raf’s sister—comes into the café with the news: She’s fleeing the city, since somebody had decreed that the vuvuzelas would be banned his year at the festival. And what is a vuvuzela? Well, they were originally used to summon distant villages in Africa to attend tribal events. But now, they’ve been used in soccer games. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

The vuvuzela has been the subject of controversy when used by spectators at football matches. Its high sound pressure levels at close range can lead to permanent hearing loss for unprotected ears after exposure,^[6] with a sound level of 120 dB(A) (the threshold of pain) at 1 metre (3.3 ft) from the device opening.

OK—this festival is a stampede-waiting-to-happen, since at it’s worst, walking is unnecessary: You lift your feet and the crowd carries you along. So imagine the effect of having not one vuvuzela but five or ten, all within one meter of you? So the officials had decreed: No vuvuzelas! But the police?

“They all hate the mayor, so every time they saw somebody with that trumpet from hell, they gave them the thumbs up. So I’m going to the country, where I can meditate….”

And so we are both refuges, this weekend, and then we go on to talk about how hard life in San Juan is, for the residents. But somehow, the genius of the place takes over, since instead of grumbling like gringos, we’re now laughing about the idiotic things that flow so naturally here. Consider Yolandita—officially Yolandita Monge, but everyone knows her on a first-name basis—who buried her philandering husband, and then made a huge scene at the funeral, which everybody was watching and making jokes about. Jokes so offensive that Yolandita would sing no more, no more, in her native land, but would travel afar, where she could be given the respect which should be accorded her, as an artista. Hah! Take that!

But there was a problem, since she had buried her husband, and the press was camped out, to see if she would appear, dressed in her widow weeds, to throw herself wailing on his grave. (A likely possibility, since she had to be restrained from flinging herself into the casket….) So now Yolandita wants to exhume her late husband, and cremate him, so that she can carry him around with her, as she sings everywhere else but you-know-where.

Simple, right?

Well, not quite, since hubby’s best friend came forward and objected, saying he had forbidden cremation on that terrible day when he—Yolandita being prostrated with grief and sedatives—had had to go make the arrangements. And why had he forbiddn cremation?

Hubby had pleaded with him never to allow it, since hubby was terrified of cremation.

This makes perfect sense, though minds of a more wintry clime might ask—how can a dead man…

But we can be sure all of this is legit, since the best friend of hubby? He’s…

…a medical doctor!

So we’re laughing like fools, since who could not want to live in a place where absurdity sits at the head of the table? And then I told her about the fire at the Bacardi rum factory, where a tourist riding the little trolley films what is a completely normal day. So there they are, getting the story of the famous Mexican architect, who fashioned the pavilion in the form of the company’s emblem or mascot or what-ever-it-is: A bat! And did you know that there is a special rum produced for (inaudible) Bacardi, the fifth-generation descendant of the original settler from Cuba? Yes, it’s a normal, normal day, and a normal, normal scene that the tourist is filming, only excepting the…

…huge, billowing cloud of smoke from the fire raging at one of the buildings on the grounds!

Well, it was good to know that the driver of the trolley was practicing safety first—keeping his eyes on the road!—though as you can see, the video comes to a complete halt, presumably when the news that the Bacardi Museum was on the right was preempted by a bit more urgent, like, “OH FUCK!”

So we’re laughing at this, and then I told Nydia what her mother had told me: You’ll never leave Puerto Rico, you’ll just stay and keep laughing at it!

But she said it kindly.

Just to make sure, I told her: I pay tribute to Puerto Rico through laughter.