Lands I'll Never See

OK—this is NOT what I’m going to talk about. I mean, why go on and on about the diocese of Arecibo, which has just been told by judge Ángel Pagán Ocasio that it has fifteen days to hand over the documents about its seven pederast priests and (minimally) twenty victims.

‘It’s old, Marc’ I tell myself. For the last thirty years (or thirty decades?) it’s been the same story. And even though the dioceses of San Juan, Mayagüez, and Caguas have handed over the documents, the bishop of Arecibo is standing firm. He’s not gonna hand them over. The Catholic Church, you see, first has to abuse these kids, and then it turns around and “protects” their privacy.

“I really think men should be barred from running religions,” I told Pablo. It was hardly a felicitous choice, since Pablo is a minister. But he’s gay, so he got it….

I told him because I had told myself—this ranting has got to stop. First you became obsessed with Joyce DiDonato, now it’s the Catholic Church. And besides, the Catholic Church is as open as a Kansas prairie compared to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. If memory serves, the video I watched last weekend claims that the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization has a database of 23, 720 reports of sexual abuse of minors, And, like you-know-what, their policy is to report to the Vati…sorry, that’s their headquarters in Brooklyn. Then, the pastor-or-elder-or-whatever is told to handle it internally. But guess what? Church policy requires that for anything to be settled, there must be two—hey, Marc, where’s that famous flare for punctuation?—TWO witnesses.

See what I mean about men in religion?

I knew they were crazy—how crazy I didn’t know. Want an example? Well, Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the denomination, had the really bad habit of announcing the end of the world (added value, Readers: think twice about this when establishing your religion…). He did it several times, and farmers did crazy things like not planting their fields—since why bother? Oh, and some people sold their homes.

So it was all a bit embarrassing when the deadlines passed, but not a problem, because Russell—who must have been quick of feet—came up with an explanation. Jesus had come back—but invisibly! And you know what? It may have been true, because, look—it’s just little me, sitting in a café in Old San Juan. And there are 7.9 million people out there—including two in the plaza right now standing next to a cardboard placard saying “What does the Bible REALLY say?”—who completely believe in the visible return of our savior. So the odds are that Jesus really did come back…

What else do these guys believe?

Well, it may be that my brain was fogged after reading the word—and dimly remembering its meaning—eschatology. (And why am I reminded of Dorothy Parker, just now, who, when asked to use horticulture in a sentence, came up with “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think?”) At any rate, I read the paragraph below three times, and then went off to eat a snicker doodle, just to get the blood sugar up a bit. And guess what? I still don’t get it. For anyone out there who really needs to know, here it is:

A central teaching of Jehovah's Witnesses is that the current world era, or "system of things", entered the "last days" in 1914 and faces imminent destruction through intervention by God and Jesus Christ, leading to deliverance for those who worship God acceptably.[191] They consider all other present-day religions to be false, identifying them with "Babylon the Great", or the "harlot", of Revelation 17,[192] and believe that they will soon be destroyed by the United Nations, which they believe is represented in scripture by the scarlet-colored wild beast of Revelation chapter 17. This development will mark the beginning of the "great tribulation".[193] Satan will subsequently attack Jehovah's Witnesses, an action that will prompt God to begin the war of Armageddon, during which all forms of government and all people not counted as Christ's "sheep", or true followers, will be destroyed. After Armageddon, God will extend his heavenly kingdom to include earth, which will be transformed into a paradise similar to the Garden of Eden.[194] After Armageddon, most of those who had died before God's intervention will gradually be resurrected during "judgment day" lasting for one thousand years. This judgment will be based on their actions after resurrection rather than past deeds. At the end of the thousand years, a final test will take place when Satan is released to mislead perfect mankind. Those who fail will be destroyed, along with Satan and his demons. The end result will be a fully tested, glorified human race. Christ will then hand all authority back to God. 

All I can think is that God—oooops, that’s Jehovah, sorry about that—put these people on earth to make the Mormons look mainstream….

OK—I’ll tell you what you already may know: the JWs prohibit blood transfusions, saluting the flag, joining the armed forces, celebrating birthdays and holidays. In addition, the religion is strongly patriarchal and conservative. Men lead and women are submissive, though men, according to Wikipedia, are encouraged to listen to their wives’ and children’s thoughts—thanks guys!

What if someone goes off the track?

Well, that can be a problem—since, in the first place, contact with any other religion is strongly discouraged. But if it’s really bad, the sinner is disfellowshipped (ah, computer, at last we agree!) and then shunned. So that means your family can talk to you, and any business obligations (especially those with a contract involved) can be done—but that’s it. Oh, and elders can invite you to repent and thus be reinstated (something I was hoping would be called refellowshipped, but no luck).

So the woman in the video of last weekend endured physical and sexual abuse, as did her children, and what was the advice? Go home, be more submissive, and pray harder.

It was, in short, a sort of Sophie’s choice: she could give up everything and save her kids, or she could throw her kids to the wolves, or rather, the wolf. Guess what she chose?

I told myself—I have to step back. This is my sanity, here. No more rants, Marc!

So consider the case of Wells Cunningham, whom YouTube—adept at tracking my history—suggested I watch. Well, I knew the Handel-Halvorsen duo, but what was the story with the man, Halvorsen himself? Is it right to have spent so much time with the JWs, and to know nothing about Johan Halvorsen, 1864 to 1935? Well, here he is, since cute guys have a special place in this blog:

Halvorsen was a Norwegian violinist, conductor and composer of—among other things—incidental music for plays. Oh, and he married Grieg’s—yes, that Grieg—niece. And he’s known for just a few pieces, of which the passacaglia below is one. And another one? The Entry March of the Boyars, which you can find on YouTube, and to which you can listen to the first minute and then safely go off to do something else. Don’t worry, you won’t have missed anything….

And Wells Cunningham, the cellist? Wait—not only is he an amazing cellist, but he also plays the violin—as he does in the clip below—the piano and the guitar. And damn, who is he, and where did he get that amazing technique? With a nod to Malcolm Gladwell, this guy got to 10,000 hours and then decided to do it all over again.

Well, he’s a graduate of the University of Miami and Eastman School of Music, and the principal cellist of the New World Symphony—or perhaps used to be. And he’s done work with popular artists like Jennifer López and Marc Anthony.   

So I listened to the Handel-Halvorsen, and then I listened to Cunningham play the 24^th caprice of Paganini, and was impressed enough to send myself the clip. It arrived in my inbox with the notation: this message has no content.

Absolutely true, I thought, the Paganini certainly doesn’t have any content, so why bother? So I turned to the second symphony of Halvorsen—which actually wasn’t too bad.

There are lands I’ll never get to, and that’s all right, I decided. I’ll never have Cunningham’s technique, for example. I’ll never have faith, or—perhaps—follow a spiritual path. But a nice, Nordic symphony?

Ah, I can go there!

Caldero Sails to his Nomination!

Well, well—lots to worry about today.

There’s our poor governor, who just can’t get it right. Readers will remember that our designated police chief had a curious habit, come springtime or tax time, of forgetting that he was married. So there were, well, irregularities or perhaps omissions or maybe you might be bold enough to say errors. But these Tuller—just remembered the guy’s name, sorry—resolved like a man to fix. So he did, to the tune of $30,000, and where did that get him? Was anybody satisfied? Any pats on the back? Calls at midnight to hold an emergency meeting to approve him?

Right—so then the governor was stuck looking about for a replacement. But not a problem, because down in the central part of the island there was a guy who had worked long years in the force, and he was man enough to step up to the plate. True, José Caldero, the gentleman in question, had retired from the force in the last administration, and was working as an asesor en seguridad pública para el Municipio de Caguas, in the words of a local paper.

Is it me—the cynical son of two newspaper people—or is there something just a bit vague about this title, which in English reads something like a public security advisor for the town of Caguas? That, coupled with fact that the last administration—the one in which Caldero resigned—favored statehood, whereas Caguas favors our current muddled mess, instantly suggests that Caldero left or was squeezed out from one position and sank gratefully onto a nice, plummy position. You know, one of those positions that are created so quickly that the first order of business of the person filling the position is to write the job description.

And in fact, there were hints in the press that…well, wait. Here’s what The New Day published last Sunday:

Por entender que introducirá la política en la Policía, el presidente de la Asociación de Miembros de la Policía, José Taboada de Jesús, rechazó este domingo la designación del coronel José Caldero López como superintendente del cuerpo de seguridad pública.

(Believing that it would introduce politics into the Police Department, the president of  the Association of Police Members, José Taboada de Jesús, came out Sunday against the designation of Coronel José Caldero López as superintendent of the body of public safety)

Unfurl your brows, Concerned Readers—the designee has cleared this up:

"Yo no soy político. Yo soy policía. Trabajé en el plan y la plataforma de seguridad (para el PPD), pero los que me conocen saben que el coronel Caldero no es político, que siempre ha sido policía". 

(Loose translation: “I’m not politician. I’m a cop. I worked on the security platform for the party in power, but everybody who knows José Caldero knows that I’m not a politician, that I have always been a cop…”.)

OK—got that cleared up!

Then yesterday, a legislator came up with a charge: Caldero had had a role in rearming Pablo Casellas, the son of Salvador Casellas, a federal judge. Pablo went on to—allegedly—stage a carjacking and then use the “stolen” weapon to kill his wife. Here’s what the legislator said:

Detalló que el 6 de febrero de 2007, el entonces superintendente auxiliar en Servicios al Ciudadano, José Marrero Ruiz, envió una carta a Casellas indicándole la orden de remoción de su licencia de armas (no. 7557) y el permiso de tiro al blanco (no. 14499). En dicha carta se le presentó a Casellas, de acuerdo con la legisladora, la opción de solicitar una vista administrativa si se encontraba inconforme con la decisión.

Charbonier indicó que “extrañamente, al día siguiente, Herman J. Wirshing, jefe de alguaciles federales y amigo cercano a la familia Casellas, así como del propio Caldero, le suscribe una comunicación, a puño y letra, al ahora nominado expresándole su disponibilidad para eliminar la orden de revocación”.

(She pointed out the on 6 Feb 07, the then auxiliary superintendent of Citizen Services, José Marrero Ruiz, sent a letter to Casellas indicating the cancellation of his license to bear arms (no. 7557) and permission to shoot at targets (no. 14499). In this letter, and according to the legislator, Casellas was presented with the option to request an administrative hearing if he disagreed with the decision.

Charbonier indicated that “strangely, the next day, Herman J. Wirshing, chief of the federal marshals and a close friend of the Casellas family, as well as of Caldero, wrote a communication, in his own hand, to the current nominee expressing his willingness to eliminate the order of suspension.”)

I know—this situation is raising your blood pressure, but relax, because guess what? Caldero has an explanation for this, too.

“Lo que existe es un documento que me envió a mí Herman Wirshing y yo se lo referí... Yo no tenía potestad sobre eso”, indicó. 

(“What exists is a letter which Wirshing sent to me and I just sent it on. I didn’t have any power over that,” he indicated.)

And today? All going well for Caldero?

Absolutely. All is completely under control and proceeding normally, though the New Day has pointed out that there is an unsettled lawsuit in place against Caldero. And in the suit, brought undoubtedly out of vengeance and a thirst to smear the name of an honest man in the mud, a couple of police officers allege that Caldero, with other high-ranking officials, created a hostile environment and improperly transferred them, after they had blown the whistle on some corrupt cops.

And corrupt they were—to the point of…OK, last quote:

El exteniente fue acusado el 18 de diciembre de 2008 por la Fiscalía federal por escoltar y prestar vigilancia a cargamentos de droga mientras ejercía como jefe de la División de Arrestos Especiales y posteriormente fue condenado a 14 años de prisión.   

(The ex-lieutenant was accused 18 Dec 08 by the Federal District Attorney of escorting and guarding cargos of drugs while he worked as chief of the Division of Special Arrests and was then convicted to 14 years of prison.)

Caldero’s defense? That the officers who sued him had failed lie detector tests, and he had had to transfer them….

There is something odd about this appointment, though, however much all else is going swimmingly. Because three chiefs ago, Hector Pesquera was making $283, 100.

Then, James Tuller was making $195,000….

And our new top cop? Well, according to the governor, he’ll get $106, 000

Are we—by any chance—getting what we’ll be paying for?

Shadow Land

It’s gotta be said—the combination of being a blogger and cruising the Internet for stories is a perfect recipe for a mouthwatering dish of paranoia.

The question of the day, therefore, is whether Dr. Thomas L. Philpott, of the University of Texas at Austin, really killed himself.

Well, the university is on record; here’s what they say:

Thomas Lee Philpott–associate professor of history, fiery Catholic moralist and polemical leftist, and charismatic and much-honored teacher–ended his life on October 9, 1991, in Austin, Texas, after a yearlong illness. He was 49.

OK—so why think that Philpott was murdered? Well, justly-named Paranoia Magazine has this to say about Philpott, who took part in a 1981 documentary called Boys for Sale. Here’s an excerpt from the magazine:

Boys for Sale depicts the pervasive practice of sex with boys in Houston, Texas—yet another dark tale of government and local authorities failing to live up to their electorates’ expectation that they will protect our most vulnerable citizens. Frank Morrow hosts a show in which Dr. Tom Philpott, history professor at the University of Texas, details the issues concerning the prostitution of boys and the power structure behind it that helps to promote and profit from the business.

Boys for Sale is mirrored in the later documentary The Conspiracy of Silence (1995), which concentrates on Omaha in the same years. Sadly, on October 9, 1991—soon after his interview was aired—49-year-old Dr. Philpott was “suicided” and investigations into what was happening in Houston came to a halt—much like what happened to “Baer boys” just before the Franklin Credit Union investigations began, though I don’t think that Dr. Philpott decided to wrap plastic around his face like the boys around here had done to them. 

Well, I had watched The Conspiracy of Silence, and the tale it told was not hard to swallow but hard to gulp. In essence, it alleges that rich and powerful people in Omaha, Nebraska, sexually abused boys from the legendary Boys Town (located nearby) and that the investigation had been covered up. Oh, and that the trail went all the way up to the White House. (At the time, George H. W. Bush was in office, if I recall correctly.)

In both Boys for Sale and The Conspiracy of Silence, similar charges are made. The perpetrators are powerful, straight men who form alliances to trade boys, and to crush anyone rash enough to investigate and ask questions. Philpott claims that he got a shotgun blasted though his car windshield, as well as through the living room window. The professor also claims, at one point, that Robin Lloyd, another person who had stuck his nose into a place where it wasn’t much wanted, suffered a highly suspicious accident.

OK—so is any of this true?

According to one study—no. Here are the findings from a 2008 study on prostitution of minors in New York City issued by the Department of Justice:

• Nearly half the kids—about 45 percent—were boys.
• Only 10 percent were involved with a "market facilitator" (e.g., a pimp).
• About 45 percent got into the "business" through friends.
• More than 90 percent were U.S.-born (56 percent were New York City natives).
• On average, they started hooking at age 15.
• Most serviced men—preferably white and wealthy.
• Most deals were struck on the street.
• Almost 70 percent of the kids said they'd sought assistance at a youth-service agency at least once.
• Nearly all the youths—95 percent—said they exchanged sex for money because it was the surest way to support themselves.

OK—if all of that is true, then we may have to rethink the notion of human trafficking that most of us have in our minds: a runaway girl falls into the hands of a pimp, who beats her and abuses her and forces her to bring home her “quota.”

Now then—how many kids are out there? Well, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there were about 800,000 kids reported missing in 1999. As well, the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) noted a 1,000% increase in complaints of child sex trafficking from 2004 to 2008.

I don’t know about you, but something about all these numbers is seriously screwy. 800,000 reports of missing kids? That’s an enormous amount of kids. And a 1,000% increase in child sex trafficking in just four years?

We got a problem, guys. And it seems clear—however “sexy” the image of a teenage girl being lured and controlled by her pimp could be to any of you, the reality is most likely different. Oh, and as for a vast hidden network of pedophiles? Nah—don’t think so.

But we have a large number of kids on the street—kids that nobody will or even can hire. And they’re all hungry, they all need shelter. We’ve gotta find a way to get help to these kids. And then, maybe it’s time to rethink the idea of arresting johns and putting their names…

…on the front page of the local newspaper!

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Montalvo?

“It’s like walking into a sit-com,” said Gaby, who both works and frequents The Poet’s Passage, where I write. “All the familiar characters are there. Marc is writing, Johann is reading or napping, Carlos is being a pirate. It’s wonderfully normal and predictable.”

That could be true. For example, a gentleman in white tights, white face, and a red nose has just greeted me—silently—by offering his hand and then posing in still life for several seconds. So if you’re a clown, or a writer, or a pirate—well, where else do you go?

Which may have been why it wasn’t surprising, somehow, when Lady, the owner of the café, told me the news, “Montalvo’s in jail.”

“What,” I said, “what did he do?”

“He stole a parrot!”

“Yeah, from the parrot guy, who works down by the cruise ships, when they come in. You know, he has five or six parrots, and he charges twenty bucks for a picture of the parrots resting on your arms and shoulders. Good business….”

“Montalvo stole one of that guy’s parrots?!”

“Yeah, and then he went running into La Perla, where he lives, and the cops were chasing after him, and now he’s in prison in Bayamón….” 

“Wow—didn’t think the police went into La Perla…”

“Well, they usually don’t,” said Lady, “but they did for Montalvo!”

My friend Sonia once described La Perla as a modern medieval city; medieval because it sprang up without planning between the walls of Old San Juan and the sea. It’s a hodgepodge of streets, alleys, walkways and once ramshackle wood houses that sheltered the poor but honest people who worked in Old San Juan. Now? Well, it’s rumored to be a haven for drug dealers. The only time the police go into La Perla, in general, is when they can do it essentially as the Army went into Iraq: shock and awe.

“So what are we going to do about Montalvo,” I asked Lady.

“His mother called me—and she doesn’t want me to bail him out. He’s 21 years old, and she wants him to learn his lesson. So she told me—no bail.”

Montalvo, you see, has worked for the café seven times, and has also been fired from the café seven times. At the time of his arrest, he was in the fired phase, and thus had no money.

“So why did he steal the parrot,” I asked.

“It was his mother’s birthday, and he didn’t have anything to give her!”

“So he stole the parrot!”

“Well, for his mother….” said Lady defensively, and then she started to laugh.

“I just have this picture of Montalvo running like crazy with the parrot on his shoulder, and the cops with their billy-clubs chasing after him, like the Keystone Cops….”

OK—so his mother didn’t want him out on bail. The plan then became to visit on Saturday, possibly with a cake with a metal file in it.

That was until yesterday.

“Eight whole fucking days, and not one fucking person called to find out how I was! I was in there over a fucking week, and who calls? So today, I call all the missed calls, and guess what? They all wanted something—not one of them was calling about me! So fuck all of them!”

He’s angry, and also buzz-cut—prison apparently takes after the army that way. We talk him down.

“Well, I was high, up to my tits,” he said. “And the thing was, the parrot came to me! I mean, the guy was texting or screwing around with his phone—he wasn’t even paying attention to his birds! And then the parrot jumped on my lap! So there I am, patting this bird and really getting into him and he’s looking at me with these intense eyes, and the next thing I know, I’m walking—fucking WALKING, not running—away with the bird. I mean, I even stopped and took selfies of me and the bird! I mean, look.”

He handed over the phone….

“It’s sort of a twist on the Monty Python routine,” I said.  “’I ain’t stealing the parrot, it was restin’ on my shoulder….’”

We passed the phone around.

“The bird looks great,” I said, “but Jesus, Montalvo, you look stoned!”

“…to my tits,” he repeated.

“And what kind of bird was it,” I said. “Gorgeous color….”

“That’s the thing,” said Montalvo, “of all the fucking birds, I had to go steal the most expensive one: a Blue Macaw. I mean, there are like 3,000 of them in the entire world, and there’s a list of everyone who owns one. So what the hell was I going to do with a Blue Macaw in La Perla? I didn’t have a cage, I didn’t have anything to feed it, I didn’t have any money to buy it food….”

“Champagne taste,” I told him.

“So how much was the bird worth,” I asked.

“That’s the thing—I had to go steal a 25,000 dollar bird!”

“What!”

“Yeah, 25,000 fucking dollars.

“Yeah, the cops were telling me ‘if you had stolen one of the $500 dollar birds, your bail would have been a lot less’ and they were right,’ he said. And went on to say, “you know, I’m really glad they arrested me, because if not, the dealers in La Perla would have killed me and fed me to the sharks….”

Justice outside the walls of the city is a little different.

“Do you have any experience representing parrot rustlers,” I asked Kayla. Because, guess what? It’s four PM, and Montalvo has his preliminary hearing in court at 8:30 the next morning. And Montalvo, with the twelve dollars in his pocket?

Right—it’s now Adventures in Paternity, or Fatherhood 101, or maybe a sort of alternative to the old TV show, “This Is Your Life”—all the people who weren’t in your life. Because I’m now feeling quite father-like.

“He’s a basically good kid,” I told Kayla, who’s a lawyer. “So I haven’t told him what my father told my brother….”

“What was that,” she said.

“Montalvo, you are going to HAVE to be honest, because you are too goddamned STUPID to be a criminal!”

“Did he wince,” said Kayla.

“Well, he looked down at the floor,” I told her. “So I guess that’s a wince.”

Guess what? Lawyers drink coffee, which is really good news, since Lady looked up and realized with a start: that wasn’t a customer, that was the cavalry coming over the hill.

The moment comes.

“How are we doing this,” I ask her. The lawyer has been getting Montalvo’s side of the story. But there’s a problem—he’s not a criminal lawyer, and he’s not sure that he’s up to the job. So he wants to consult his partner—who is a criminal lawyer.

“Half and half,” said Lady. “That’s how we always do it, right?”

Who knows how much it’ll be, but what are we going to do? The judge told him, the day she set bail, that if convicted, Montalvo could face eight years in jail.

“I’m gonna go out and find that parrot guy,” said Lady. “What if he dropped the charges? We’ll tell him that Montalvo’s the future national poet of Puerto Rico, he’s 21, he was stoned.”

“Up to my tits,” said Montalvo, who apparently likes the phrase.

“I’d go with an animal activist defense,” said Jessica, who had drifted by, kissed Montalvo, rubbed his buzz cut. “The bird was clearly abused and was attracted to Montalvo’s energy.”

“He was probably attracted to Montalvo’s dope fumes,” I said, “since we now know that Montalvo…”

“Up to…”

I cut him off.

“Do you have a tie?” I asked Montalvo. It’s now several hours later, and it occurred to me—what was he going to wear to court? So there Montalvo was, in my apartment, rummaging for shoes to wear.

“Too bad the shoes aren’t black,” I told him. “Otherwise, with the white shirt, black pants, and a tie, you make a perfect Mormon missionary!”

So we tied his tie for him, loosened it, and sent him on his way. I tell Raf that Montalvo is one stupid kid, but what could I do?

“Look at it this way,” he said, “at least you never had to change his diaper….”

The View From the Fence

Right—time to get straight down to work and settle once and for all the vexing question of the death penalty.

I’ve never particularly bought into the standard liberal line, you see, nor do I do well with the standard Puerto Rican line. Why? Because if you ask about the death penalty here on the island, you will almost certainly be told: “only God can take a life.”

Guys? Can we just call it a theocracy and stop the pretense of separation of church and state?

I felt, for most of my life, that there were some crimes so unspeakably heinous that a nice, swift execution was the best thing to do. Consider these savory characters, who come to you from Wikipedia’s article on Sister Helen Prejean:

In addition to Sonnier, the account is based on the inmate Robert Lee Willie who, with his friend Joseph Jesse Vaccaro, raped and killed 18-year-old Faith Hathaway on May 28, 1980, eight days later kidnapping a Madisonville couple from alongside the Tchefuncte River in Louisiana and driving them to Alabama. They raped the 16-year-old girl, Debbie Morris (née Cuevas), who would later become the author of her book Forgiving the Dead Man Walking[4] and then stabbed and shot her boyfriend, 20-year-old Mark Brewster, leaving him tied to a tree paralyzed from the waist down.

You’ll have guessed—Sister Helen Prejean is the author of Dead Man Walking, and very likely you’ll have seen the movie. So it won’t be news to you—as it was to me—that Sister Helen wrote Dead Man about her experiences with guys on death row. She champions the abolition of the death penalty as ardently as the pope champions priestly celibacy.

Here’s my problem—I follow all the rules (well, mostly) and as a consequence am expected to fork over 20% or so of my annual salary to the government. That money goes to support guys who haven’t followed the rules, but who have committed crimes that often have devastated the lives of innocent people. These people are rotting in prison, doing nobody any good. Oh, and they don’t even want to be there. 

I know—that’s not the way I’m supposed to think. But that 30 grand we spend annually because “only God can take a life?” I’d really like to put that money to work beefing up education, treating PTSD in our veterans, or supporting opera companies. And those guys on death row? Well, couldn’t they be doing something?

Am I arguing for the return of the chain gang?

Look, it makes more sense than what we’re doing now….

OK—let’s back this car up.

One of the things about a blogger’s life is that you have to go sifting around, looking for things to write about, and then things get tied together in ways that you don’t expect. Because I had been watching—for reasons I no longer remember—a remarkable video of an interview with Stephen Levine, who for many years worked with dying people. And one of the stories he told was of an angry, bitter woman—a woman who had driven everyone away.

It was a problem—the woman was so negative, so hostile, that the nurses had to force themselves to work with her. But it was hardly just the nurses; her own daughters were estranged from her, and wanted nothing to do with her, even though she was dying.

One daughter, however, took on the challenge: could she go and sit down at her mother’s deathbed and, with an open heart, accept her mother as she was.  Could she wish her well? Could she—if not forgive—at least move away from what Levine calls a “business model” of human relationships? You give me love and nurturing and I’ll give you love back. You hurt me and I’m outta here….

So the daughter—a Zen Buddhist, and she’d have to be—sat and let her mother into her heart, without expecting or asking or even wanting her mother to change. Which was fortunate, since on the day of the mother’s death, she looked at her child and said, “I hope you have the most miserable life ever!”

Levine’s point? The daughter had done what she did for herself, not for her mother. The daughter didn’t want to carry the anger, the bitterness around forever. And so she had endured abuse up until the very end—in order to free herself of it.

As you’ll see in the clip below, Dead Man Walking became an opera as well, and I can tell you that because, in my nightly forage for carbohydrates, I found myself eating jellybeans and watching—who else?—Joyce DiDonato.

I might as well confess it—I am electronically stalking DiDonato. How bad has the obsession become? Well, fully as bad as last year’s obsession with Martha Argerich, and to tell you how bad that was, I give you the fact that the computer has not put a red squiggle under Argerich. The computer, you see, not only knows perfectly well who she is, but is totally bored with it.

Oh—another fact. I’m so desperate for any new video of Didonato that I watched an interview of her in French. And when was the last time I spoke French? Well, let’s see, I graduated from High School in ’74….

So there I was, looking at Joyce Didonato and Jake Heggie talking about their upcoming—well, as of two years ago—Carnegie Hall recital. And you know what? I am not going to introduce the computer to Heggie, because I don’t like him.

OK—be fair, I’m envious because, besides being handsome, intelligent, way-talented, and having his opera Dead Man Walking presented over 40 times in five continents—I mean, how much stuff can one have in life—he’s also a friend of Joyce DiDonato.

But here’s where I’m at: if I were the relative, the father of a murdered child, how would I react? Impossible to say—but here’s what I’d hope.

I hope—like the daughter of the bitter mother—that I’d forgive, that I’d say no to the hatred and the desire for vengeance. But on a societal level?

Damn, still haven’t figured it out….

An Excellent Guy

On an island where the seriously screwy tends to be treated, well, seriously, even this situation has 3.6 million people scratching their heads.

Simply put, James Tuller, who had been chief of the New York City Police Department Transportation Bureau and who for four months had been acting as the designated chief of the Puerto Rico Police Department turned out…

…to be cheating on his taxes.

Or maybe not—who knows? But Tuller has been married since 1996, and yet for four years he filed as a single person. So that presented a bit of a challenge, since those pesky senators in charge of approving his nomination were insisting on seeing the tax returns. So what did Tuller do?

Well, he had a couple of strategies—the first of which was to stall. And though it’s true that we tend to move a bit more slowly than those goose-stepping Germans, stalling is a tactic that only works so long.

So the next thing to do was to run up to New York and amend his tax returns. But it turned out—curious, this—that there was a little difference between what he had to pay as a single person versus a married person. Oh, and there were penalties, as well. Nevertheless, he forked over $30,000 to the State of New York. (according to one report, he took five days off work to go up to New York to settle these trifles and get the silly paperwork…)

Did that make the senators happy? By no means. Intent on picking every nit, the senators demanded that Tuller pay the IRS as well. Then they’d see about the nomination—no promises.

So that led to the next problem, which was that Tuller didn’t have the dough, despite making close to 200,000 bucks a year. He was willing, though, to agree to a payment plan. But the senators still balked at assuring him of his nomination. So on Monday night, after 121 days on the job, this excellent though somewhat forgetful public servant made the decision: he would retire his name for consideration.

This has left even members of the governor’s own party wondering what in the world went wrong.  Part of it, of course, was that there was a scramble to find a police superintendent in the first place, since Tuller’s predecessor had up and left one day, all but flipping the bird at the governor as he rode to the airport. And it came at a rather poor time, since the senate was not in session, and it was Christmas.

Ah, Christmas—which in Puerto Rico generally begins the day after Thanksgiving Day and continues until at least the end of January—Fiestas de la Calle de San Sebastián—after the octavitas. So really, it’s only been a couple of months since any of us have had time to trouble ourselves about inessentials like appointing a police chief.

Well, it’s all a little troubling, since we also don’t have a secretary of justice, since that guy got into a little trouble when he went to the police station with his friend. His friend, you see, had been drinking at a party—well, that’s what you do at parties, isn’t it? And look, you gotta get home, don’t you? Does everybody have to be so unreasonable?

Right, so everything would have been fine if only the friend hadn’t pulled out his cell phone while driving—a crime in Puerto Rico. And of course, there had to be that nosy cop, who pulled the friend over, and noted the strong smell of alcohol.

So the papers had a field day with the Secretary of Justice, who had done what any friend would do: gone to the aid of his friend to the police headquarters, to ensure that everything was handled correctly. What harm could there be in that?

So it’s all a bit dampening, especially for the governor, who had to come out in today’s print version of El Nuevo Día as saying, “entiendo, por la información pública que ha surgido….” Or, “I understand, from the public information that has surfaced…” The Gov, apparently, is a regular guy like you or me—getting his news by reading the paper on the bus to work. See?

And all this comes at a rather unsettling time, since the United States Department of Justice…wait, let those fire-breathing liberals from the ACLU tell you about it:

A report released by the ACLU in June 2012 concludes that the Puerto Rico Police Department is plagued by a culture of unrestrained abuse and impunity. The PRPD – which, with over 17,000 officers, is the second-largest police department in the U.S – is charged with policing the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

In July 2013, the U.S. Justice Department entered into a legally binding consent decree with the Puerto Rican government that requires sweeping reforms to end the widespread police brutality on the island.

Well, to make sure that the police department complies with the “sweeping reforms,” Tuller appointed a retired US Army colonel, Michelle Hernández de Fraley, to oversee the whole process. And good luck to her, since the US Department of Justice determined that the police practiced discrimination, especially against blacks and Dominicans, were poorly trained, and didn’t investigate cases of domestic abuse. Oh, and that they used excessive force, especially in cases of peaceful protest.

Nor is that the only challenge she might face, if nominated and approved. Because we have more police officers than any place I have ever seen—but the monthly pay for our cops? It’s $2,600, or slightly over 30,000 dollars annually. On the island, that’s not bad—but consider, the other news of this morning: the police hauled in nearly two tons of cocaine in an interception off the north coast of Puerto Rico. In fact, in March alone, the police have pulled in nearly three tons of cocaine.

And what does that mean?

Well, we’re awash in drugs, and with the drugs comes the money, and with the money? Corruption—which is a distinct possibility. How much honesty does a base salary of $30,000 buy you?

The sad news is that the previous chief of police was—by all accounts—a very effective guy who had the support of the force, even as he was changing it. And the one who just left?

By all accounts an excellent guy…

Look, he just cheated on his taxes….

A Farmer Weighs In

Well, he got after me, as he sometimes does. Had I been fair? Had I slammed Monsanto without giving the company a chance to defend itself? What if it were true that this technology not only was improving yields but also was capable of doing a host of other things? If, for example, Monsanto could breed a drought-resistant strain of wheat, how beneficial to humanity would that be?

It was in vain to tell him—my long dead father—that Monsanto was hardly likely to take my call. No, he was as persistent in death as he was in life, and so I did what I had always done: sighed and caved.

Right—so who would take my call? Cousin Marshall, I decided. He’s family and a farmer, so it was the work of a moment to call him.

Well, he confirmed what I suspected: yes, he uses Roundup-Ready seeds from Monsanto, which in this case come from a local seed dealer, Dairyland Seed. And yes, he’s seen an increase in his yields; in addition, he’s using much less pesticide / herbicide. Even better, what he’s using is far less toxic—before, he had been using pesticides / herbicides with a low LD 50 (a measure of toxicity, and the lower the LD 50 the more toxic); with Roundup, he doesn’t have to worry about applying near streams and killing fish.

Well, LD 50 was new to me, so I googled it, and discovered that it stood for the lethal dose (LD) of 50 percent of a given population. Right—so I looked that up and discovered that Roundup has an LD 50 of 5,600mg / kg for rats. In short, if you give 5,600 mg / kg to 100 rats, you will kill 50 of them.

Wow—the stuff you learn as a blogger!

All that led to the question: was Roundup really less toxic? The answer—par for the course—is that I don’t know. I can tell you that I went to Table 6 of the Pesticide Safety Fact Sheet; Roundup’s LD 50 seemed to be in the mid-range—there were others with an LD 50 of over 10,000 mg / kg. But what do I know about farming? There may be other factors to consider….

Marshall’s one problem with Roundup? Well, at one point he was farming with both Roundup-ready and with non-Roundup-ready seeds (in other words—regular seeds), and somehow he forgot which was which. So he applied Roundup to one of his fields, with the result…

You could tell it still hurt, so I didn’t tell him, though I was tempted, “typical Newhouse!”

In short, for Marshall, Monsanto has made his life easier. And guess what? Anything that makes a farmer’s life easier is—usually—something I’m all in favor of. Because a farmer’s life is seriously hard, and never more so than today. And so I assured him that I bore him no grudge for using genetically-modified seeds. After all, I well remember the howls I got from people who learned that I worked for Wal-Mart—who am I to talk?

Marshall was then good enough to write an email, in which he pointed out…wait, let him tell it:

Over 90% of the acreage in the Corn Belt is under cultivation using GMO’s (as I stated earlier).  The problem with that scenario is that it represents millions of square miles of a man-made monoculture.  That is not anything you will find in nature anywhere on this planet and not at any time in the past.  Earth’s systems will fight that and will eventually win the battle.  That is already occurring with weeds developing resistance at various places around the country.  As numbers of species of resistant weeds increase and areas infected with these resistant weeds expand, the efficiency of GMO’s (Roundup in this case) always yields to the environment.

Marshall went on to state, “Each GMO breakthrough is a short term solution designed to last a decade or two if the industry is lucky.”

Well—that’s definitely a cause for concern. In short, we’re skirting with disaster, hoping to outwit Mother Nature. Can we sustain that?

If I were a farmer, I might very well do as Marshall has done: join the crowd and grow GMO seeds. The problem? I’m not a farmer, but an eater. And which foods and products have GMO’s? At the moment, I have to assume that they all do—at least until I go onto a site that has a list of GMO-free foods.

As I said yesterday, we have taken part in an experiment without being told that we were guinea pigs. And what have been the consequences? Since I had written about the possibility of GMO foods being linked to autism, I decided to check it out. Here, from the Washington Times, is a comparison of US’ versus Britain’s—which has banned GMO foods—rates of autism:

As of 2010, their article said, autism prevalence rates for 8-year-old British boys was about four cases per 1,000, and 0.8 per 1,000 for British girls. This was essentially the same as in 2004.

By contrast, autism rates for 8-year-old U.S. boys rose from a range of 8.9. to 15.8 cases per 1,000 in 2004 to an average of 18.4 cases per 1,000 in 2008. For U.S. girls, rates went from 1.5 to 3.7 cases per 1,000 in 2004 to four cases per 1,000 in 2008.

Maybe it’s true what Mom always said: you are what you eat!