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. 

Song of the Phone Continued

Ok—so I bought an apartment faster than I bought the phone. That is, if I did buy the phone, since there was some discussion of whether I should rent the phone, and then return it after whatever time it was, but the problem was that the phone had to be returned in pristine condition. So I think I bought the phone, which is now telling me that I missed a call from Beatriz, which is not true. I was busy trying to figure out how to answer the call, and getting contradicting information from the young, all of whom had been sending text messages from the womb.

“Swipe the screen,” said one.

“Press the phone icon,” said another.

I was off in the poetry shop beseeching help from Elizabeth, who has small hands and also fingernails. What did I have? A fork, with which I was trying to pry the cover of the charger jack.

“You are now going to have to open this for the rest of your life,” I told her, since the likelihood that my hands will get smaller is equal to the likelihood that the cover will get bigger.

“No problem,” said Elizabeth, who pointed out that I really should do something about the date, since the phone thinks it’s 3:15 AM on Wednesday, December 3, when in fact it’s 2:15 PM on Tuesday, December 2.

“It’s probably 3:15 AM on Wednesday in Korea,” I told her, since the phone that I ended up with is a Samsung, “and it’s always useful to know the time in Korea.”

Elizabeth agreed, in the mild way that people agree with people-who-probably-aren’t-dangerous-but-still-you-never-know…

So why did I end up with a Samsung Galaxy instead of the iPhone that I thought I was going to get?

I have no idea.

Let’s be clear—my job yesterday in Radio Shack was to nod my head and agree, since Hector, the nerd / employee, was entirely in control of the process. So we looked at the dinky little phones that were available for an upgrade, and Hector then steered me to the larger phones. Right—so that seemed like what I should do, and somehow the Galaxy was suggested and then assented to. So what about Internet?

I had decided—I didn’t want Internet, but Hector? Well, he was having none of that, since it was crazy to him to buy a Galaxy S5 and not have Internet. So guess who now has Internet?

Somewhere in the process, I became utterly obsessed with the question: would I have to transfer all my numbers manually, or could Hector transfer the numbers from my old phone to the new?

Hector just sighed….

“I’m gonna come back with a million questions,” I told Hector, and that’s true, since if you go to the Galaxy 5s website? Here’s what you see! 

      

 

That, of course, leaves me with YouTube, but you know what? I just can’t—not today, since I am sitting behind two tables of probable Koreans, all of whom are busy chatting with their girlfriends via Skype while texting their mother back in Seoul. They have, in fact, been here for a couple of hours, and the number of words exchanged between them? I have more fingers on my hand.

Oh, and when they do interact? It’s exclusively to show their friends something appearing on their screen.

Oh, and guess what? I tried to establish an email account, only to get the notification from Gmail that “someone recently used your password to try to sign in to your Google account.” So now I have to figure out—was that someone me? And should I reset my email?

“You’re going to have to be careful now,” said Lady, “since nobody wanted your old phone, except maybe for historical purposes. But now, people could steal your new phone….”

Why do I hope they will?

Whither Must I Wander?

“What kind of phone do you have,” asked my brother John, after I had protested that I absolutely hated my phone, as does everyone else.

“A red phone,” I replied.

“My God,” he gasped. “Marc, how could you? Everybody knows that red phones are the worst!”

He was treating me with all the seriousness I deserve, since he knows perfectly well: I am the one person in the western world—OK, excepting Haiti—who cannot text. And what else can’t I do? Well, call Lady, for one thing, since her phone number has a six in it. And what happens when I press six on the dial pad? I get five.

So it’s cyber Monday, and now I have to buy some damn phone, and I hate phones because all I want them to do is call the people I want to call. Instead, the phone wants me to take pictures—I have a camera, thank you—and store music and receive emails. In short, if I get an iPhone, which everyone is telling me to do, I will be hyper-connected. And you know what? That is absolutely what I don’t want.

What I want is a butler, somebody who will make calls for me, and state gravely: “Mr. Newhouse desires to communicate with you….” Better, he’ll just give them a message, and then I’ll go back to listening to the Porpora cello concerto, which may not be all that great, but it’s better than learning about the iPhone, and by the way, do you know that somebody actually wrote this?

  

Wait a minute—and this is supposed to make my life better? And this being the day to buy electronics, why am I being asked to shell out over five hundred dollars for a contract-free phone? And what would I do with a contract-free phone? Could I call anybody with it? Or would I have to find my own contract? Or would I simply just have it, so I could join the rest of the world?

So now I have a red phone that dials five when I press six, and I’ve spent an hour on the Internet trying to figure out: which phone is best for an aging writer of little brain and less technological savvy? Oh, and then consider this, from Apple’s webpage:

Touch ID fingerprint identity sensor.

Put your finger on the Home button, and just like that your iPhone unlocks. Your fingerprint can also approve purchases from iTunes or the App Store.

Yeah? Just like that? Listen, Apple, did I ever say it was OK to have my fingerprint? And what else will you guys be doing with it? What happens when the National Security Administration decides to do a mass collection of fingerprints?

Oh, and by the way, are there fingerprint hackers? Seems like there should be, since my fingerprint would have to be digitalized—seems like a pun, I know—and so somebody in China or Russia could be ordering online with my fingerprint.

There was a day, dear Reader, and not too distantly, when phones just did one thing—call people or businesses. And your only decision was whether to get a white one or a black one. All right, there was this….

    

 Ah, the princess phone! I still see one every three months, since my shrink has one, and since having graduated from Harvard—in addition to being a shrink—my shrink’s self-esteem is unblemished by any taunts about the masculinity of any man with a princess phone. Nor am I one to taunt, because I had one too.

What I should do, of course, is completely educate myself so that I know exactly what I’m doing telephonically and can make superb, supreme decisions, perhaps involving ordering directly from the Apple plant in  China, or maybe having a disaffected worker smuggle one out. There’s got to be at least one disaffected worker, and shouldn’t a serious blogger be able to find one?

Yes.

No—but I did come across this:

The poor working conditions in these Chinese factories are the subject of a new documentary, "Who Pays the Price? The Human Cost of Cheap Electronics." The film follows the lives — and deaths — of workers, many of whom are teenagers, who fall gravely ill from contact with carcinogenic chemicals like benzene.

Or you might consider this:

The research, carried out by two NGOs, has revealed disturbing allegations of excessive working hours and draconian workplace rules at two major plants in southern China. It has also uncovered an "anti-suicide" pledge that workers at the two plants have been urged to sign, after a series of employee deaths last year.

Right, so now I am considering buying a smart phone that will make me feel stupid—I can just imagine it flashing a warning, ”Do you seriously want to destroy your entire contact list? Are you frigging crazy?”—and will make me feel guilty, knowing that somebody around the world suffered for me, and now can’t even off himself, since that would be a serious breach of contract.

Oh, and even if the guy who made my phone tried to kill himself, as a spate of people did a couple years ago? Well, no worries, because the factory owners got that one sorted out. Here’s what they did:

Yup—suicide nets!

What should I do? Go low-tech and get a TracPhone, or try to go high-tech, and get an iPhone? Well, I can tell you what I will do, since there is a Radio Shack on the corner of my block, and they were the guys who allowed me to buy a phone which now dials five when six is pressed. So they know that I am as fluent in technology as I am in Mandarin, and they will show me what undoubtedly is the best phone—for them, in terms of markup—and I will nod and try not to ask dumb question, such as, “where is the ‘on’ button?”

And everybody else will be downloading apps to clean their oven overnight with their cell phones—“activate this app, place your cell phone in the oven, and presto!”—and I? What will I be doing?

I’d love to tell you that I’ll jump fearlessly from the Nineteenth Century to at least the twenty-second, but why do I feel I don’t have a chance? Of course, I really should do what the sister of a friend does: she has no phone, but not a problem because she’s very chatty, and talks to everybody, and since people like to help, and people like her, well, no problem! So when she needs to call people? Well, she asks to borrow her new friend’s phone for a minute.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

See?

     

Beyond Ferguson

It was predictable when the governor of the state declared a state of emergency when, in fact, there was utterly no emergency. What was there? The pending certainty that once again, the cops would get away with murder.

Let’s play fair: every time a cop intervenes in a situation, there is a risk of injury or death. Decisions are made in split seconds that have lifelong consequences. What am I saying? Maybe Darren Wilson had a reasonable belief that Michael Brown was armed and dangerous. Maybe he acted correctly.

(Do I really think so? Of course not. I’m also in a café, not a cop car. I’m reading things, not having them happen around me, as I’m supposed to take charge of a situation without having all the facts.)

So give Wilson a break. But there’s a problem: what do we do with the statistics like these?

Anyone looking at this chart would come to only one conclusion: the police in the United States of America are waging a war on black people. Oh, and by the way, what does our prison rate look like over time? Have a peek:

In short, around 1980 we went nuts and decided to impose draconian sentences on everything, even offenses that were nonviolent. So now, we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world at 743 persons per 100,000. Compare that to Norway, with 71 inmates per 100,000. Can anyone really believe that the United States is ten times more criminal than Norway?

“Those white motherfuckahs will never catch this Niggah; not up here in these hills,” said Montalvo, as he drove about 60 degrees up a hill in the mountains, two weeks ago. “They’d never get a police car up here…”

He had taken us to the river, since I was stressed out and needing a break. So Montalvo? Well, he promised that standing under a waterfall was God’s way of “bitch-slapping the sins out of me.” And who could resist that?

Along the way, he was smoking something hand-rolled, and do I have to tell you? Of course I assumed it was dope, though he told me later that it was passion fruit seeds, instead. Was it? Whatever it was, it didn’t affect his driving down some of the steepest, curviest roads on the island.

But if he tests positive? Well, it will then be 744 not 743 inmates per 100,000 people. And how much will we all pay to incarcerate a black kid who formed a mystical union with a blue macaw?

I could do the numbers, which would probably indicate that we could provide Montalvo with an aviary full of blue macaws, save money, and not jeopardize in the least public safety. But those aren’t the real numbers: what would it do to Montalvo, what sort of man would come out of seven years in prison? Would there be a poet left there?

And what would it do to me?

“Man, I can see it all over your face,” he told me.

“What you’re not hearing is me talking to my father,” I told him.

Because Montalvo had climbed two or three up a rock face in the river, and I was seriously wondering if he would jump down, and what I’d do about that, since I knew perfectly well that there were large rocks six inches below the surface so of course Montalvo was going to sever his spinal column and spend the rest of his days in “I Love You Lord Home Center” Yes, click on the link: it really exists.

Well, I had been arguing with my father, who was telling me from very-much-above (I sure hope) “tell that crazy kid not to jump!” After all, the only reason I have my feet is because every single last time I mowed the lawn, my father had insisted that I wear leather shoes, and had told me never to pull the mower towards me, but rather push the mower away from me. See? That’s why I’m not hopping around on stumps right now.

And it would have been a shame to lose Montalvo to a spinal column injury, since he had very patiently taken Raf by the hand and shoulder, to guide over the rocky river bed. It was touching: a younger man helping his father, unprompted and spontaneously.

It would also be a shame to lose Montalvo to the criminal justice system, since my scotch is OK but his dope is not. I wanted to tell him, my son who had taken his other father by the hand and shepherded him up the river, that the cops could be trusted, that he didn’t need to head for the hills and hope that they wouldn’t send the helicopters instead. I wanted to tell that but…

…I couldn’t.