Waiting at the Metro Station

Not caring for the light

Mornings in Miami always have some kind of luminosity that somehow escapes us all.
This cropped but otherwise non-retouched pix of commuters waiting to transfer onto a bus at the Douglas Road Metro Rail station probably shows that.
The light above passes unnoticed to most.
All kind of people ride the system.
Some, for apparently no reason at all, use their smartphones to videotape other riders milling around the plaza. You see that and wonder what their motives are. The one thing you don't want to do is get paranoid and  think that they may be following you.
You are after all not that important to have somebody follow you around, you tell yourself.
Still, "God, protect me from zealots and crazy ones," is the one thought that suddenly pops in your mind.
As you can see in the picture, there is inevitably somebody making a a phone call, sometimes advising their contact that they are already waiting for the bus to arrive and that they will be there — wherever that there may be — shortly.
Others just listen to music with their earphones.
The light stays above them.

The Good News on Ebola

Good news on the latest ebola virus outbreak.
You read me well. There is good news — I kid you not.
This is not a gimmick, an ill-thought-out stratagem of mine to have you click on my post and read it. As Spanish healthcare worker Teresa Romero has entered a 48-hour decisive period [at the end of which we may find what will happen to her] and as more attention is given to the presence of ebola in the United States, with details of the second confirmed case of transmission of the virus outside of Africa, there is, after all, good news.
It’s not necessarily breaking news.
I also believe that the significance of the developments I am listing here [I am kinda summarizing to account for brevity so it may very well be that there is other good news around the murderous virus] may have been lost in the din generated by the more pressing news.
Good News #1: People afflicted with ebola can be cured.
In fact, as you’ll read in the link provided, there are even more cases of survival to ebola than those of American Christian missionaries Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, both subject of the hyperlinked exclusive NCB News story.
In an update to this post, the latest reports indicate that the Dallas nurse who caught the ebola virus while treating the Liberian tourist who died of the disease has received a plasma transfusion donated by Brantly.

People around the world prayed for him, says Kent Brantly

Good News #2: The public reaction to the news about ebola outside of Africa — that includes the reaction in Spain, where Romero’s case was the first known to the world — has been, so far, more expectant than alarmist.
In the United States, the recent event in Dallas generated widespread fear and concern that may have at times bordered on panic and, perhaps, hysteria. That’s Brantly’s evaluation, as you can read in this report about a forum in which he participated at his alma mater, Abilene Christian University.

Virus free: Nancy Writebol and husband, David [Photo SIM USA]

The concern remains high, more so especially after Nina Pham, the 26-year-old nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, became over the weekend the first known case of contagion or transmission of ebola in American soil.
Similar to the Romero case, the young nurse’s story in Dallas has generated controversy after health authorities suggested that a “breach in protocol” — code for “her mistake” — may have resulted in her becoming afflicted with the virus.
Whether either healthcare worker was in fact responsible for the mishap, or there is some other type of failure that nobody knows about — are protective garments in use in fact effective and efficient to prevent the contagion? — is yet to be established.
The point that should not be lost is this: As reiterated many times by health authorities, only by direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people can the ebola virus be transmitted.
 Which brings me to…
Good News #3: If the present public reaction continues, we may be able to avoid a repetition of the AIDS-hysteria of the early 1980s.
Remember Ryan White? A hemophiliac, as you’ll read in the Wikipedia link, he contracted the HIV after getting contaminated blood during a transfusion.
If you don’t remember Ryan’s story or even knew about it, click on the link and get updated.
Even better: Click here to read the letter that British rocker Elton John wrote Ryan in 2010, on the 20th anniversary of Ryan’s death.
“Ryan, I wish you could know how much the world has changed since 1990, and how much you changed it,” says John to his friend in the letter.
The musician is of course talking about the contemporary public reaction to AIDS but in a way, I think, he could be talking about how the news on ebola is being dealt with in the present.

Who The Enemy Is

Antonio de Benavides was not a Field Marshall. Neither was he a Crusader of the Order of St. James nor an inspector general, secretly sent to Puebla — in what was at the time New Spain, present-day Mexico — in the Spring of 1683.
Mexican historian Lilian Illades Aguiar tells us that, as “general inspector” [visitador general] for Puebla’s judicial system, De Benavides claimed to had been “entrusted to undertake certain extremely secret inquiries to directly notify the king of his findings.”
Hence nicknamed “El Tapado” [The Undercover One], De Benavides was known also as Marquis de San Vicente and apparently well received by the local aristocracy, as the story goes in Illades Aguiar’s “La nobleza criolla angelopolitana durante el gobierno de los Austria” — one of the chapters in “América bajo los Austrias: economía, cultura y sociedad.”

John Milton [left] in the Ford Madox Brown painting

However, Illades Aguiar says, “he was neither a noble nor a royal envoy or anything of the sort; he was a bon-vivant, perhaps a spy or a pirate,” who was promptly apprehended and imprisoned when his ruse was discovered by Puebla’s deputy mayor, don Tomás de Arana González.
One may conclude that De Benavides’ impersonation was bold and daring but the con of the colonial era is not the reason why he has become famous beyond his own merits.
Some 300 years after the scandal rocked the nobility in New Spain, the Mexican poet and writer Octavio Paz highlighted the case in “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o Las Trampas de la Fe.” The book — the Nobel Prize winner tells us in the Preface to the 1988 Harvard University Press edition — took him more than 30 years to complete.
“Among the poems dedicated [by Sor Juana] to the Viceroy and Vicereine [of New Spain] are several containing petitions. In one she asks Tomás de la Cerda to spare the life of one Antonio de Benavides, who had impersonated a Field Marshal, the Marquis de San Vicente,” says Paz.
We’ll come back later to “El Tapado” and Sor Juana’s intercession. Promise.
About 30 years before this was happening in New Spain, in 1655 to be precise, another poem — a sonnet — had been written. The link will give you full details on the massacre of the Waldensians, a Protestant denomination persecuted by Roman Catholic forces in Northern Italy, and also summarizes what moved the English poet John Milton — he of Paradise Lost — to denounce the slaughter.
You can click here for a thorough analysis of Milton’s sonnet, with added data on the socio-political, economic, and religious background that will give you the needed information to better understand the poem.

Sonnet 18: On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

The paper’s author, John Minot, concludes by saying that, “Milton had strong religious beliefs and political opinions, but he was too thoughtful to be a zealot; his sonnet reflects the contrast between the human desire for problems to solve themselves and the responsibilities we know we truly bear.”
As we know more than well, the “early sectarian cleansing shocking to readers of any age” — as Minot refers to the killing of the Waldensians — is not the only one to have occurred in history.
We also know, more than well, that is the type of behavior undertaken and being advocated and publicized nowadays.
There are many ways to react to massacres in the name of God.
Some keep silent, as is the case of those who are prompt to even kill whenever they feel that their religion has been offended, to refer to just one of the many segments of the global society in play.
And there may even be those who try to rationalize [“That’s about the same as ‘rational lies’ ”, I heard somebody say once] the murderous behavior of the radicals by saying, in a kinda conspiratorial whispering that will make it clear that they definitely don’t share that belief but …, “Look at what happened during the Crusades!”
Not all of us can write in the vigorous way Milton did 350 years ago, to deplore gruesome and barbarous killings such as the ones of late in the Middle East.
But who the enemy is we know.
And we can share and proclaim the truth that, back in 1684, sustained Sor Juana’s appeal for a ruler to spare a life.
“Nobody knows,” says Illades Aguiar, “what prompted the Tenth Muse to implore” the Viceroy to spare El Tapado from the gallows, “but she did it in a subtle, intelligent, and beautiful way.”
In the masterful translation for Las Trampas de la Fe, we read what Sor Juana advised the ruler:

                                                   Any man can take a life
                                                   but only God can breathe life in;
                                                   thus only thru the gift of life
                                                   may you hope to resemble Him. 


As much as we know who the enemy is we also know who the enemy is not following.

Fingers Did More Than Just Touching

It’s called International Right to Know Day and compared to other global initiatives of this type is probably one of the lesser known. So much so that wikipedia has only a stub in English and there are only three other listed languages in which the information can be retrieved: Arabic, Russian, and Ukrainian. Those, as you may find should you venture and click onto the hyperlinks, are also stubs.
A more detailed record about the project can be found at the initiative’s own website. I found out about the IRTKD more or less by accident. Sometime last week while surfing online for news about my native country, I came across this story published in Spanish by El Faro, the online Salvadoran newspaper.
The article referenced the upcoming publication of The Yellow Book, a detailed report on the Libro Amarillo, the over 260-pages document from the Salvadoran military intelligence files about some 2 000 people cataloged as “delinquent/terrorists” during the bloody 1980-1992 armed conflict.

From "delinquent/terrorist" to top Army commander

Framed in the yellow highlight on the Unfinished Sentences report that summarizes the work is Salvador Sánchez Cerén, nowadays President of El Salvador and top commander of the Armed Forces that back then included him in the Libro Amarillo.
“On September 28th, in recognition of International Right to Know Day, the Yellow Book was published in its entirety through a collaboration between the National Security Archive, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group,” says Unfinished Sentences on its website.
You’ll find there a link to a youtube video about the report, as well as a link to Unfinished Sentences own facebook page.
If you visit the site and depending on how knowledgeable you are about Salvadoran affairs, it’s quite likely that some of the information will probably be known to you. It may all be a discovery, perhaps.
Whatever your knowledge may be, something I am sure won’t escape your attention: the irony of using “yellow book” as the title of something that was meant to be a tool for violence.
Closely associated for years with the call to action message of "Reach Out and Touch Someone" — meaning to try to stay in touch with friends and family via the telephone — the slogan "Let Your Fingers Do The TouchingWalking” was for many years synonymous with the nowadays almost vanished phone company Yellow Book.
Instead of walking or driving, you could get in touch with merchants via the telephone.
With this particular yellow book, fingers did more than just touching.

From the youtube video: Looking for names 

Brazil 2014: The Decay of Commentary at ESPN

A renowned conservative columnist came recently to the defense of the Jerry Springer and Maury Povich shows audiences, decrying the “moral decay” that the increasing popularity of football has inflicted upon the United States.
To be fair, in decrying the allegedly negative influence of soccer on U.S. morals the columnist did not refer specifically to either audience [the pix here is taken from this blog], though a few days after her first column she did reiterate that football lacks the required toughness to make it a sport.

Fighting against moral decay

“The only risk of death in a soccer game,” says she, “is when some Third World peasant goes on a murderous rampage after a bad call.”
An assertion that will undoubtedly bring peace of mind to the families of hundreds of victims of murderous rampages all over the United States: "Don't you worry none, granny! It ain't like they were watching a soccer game, they were killed yonder at [please make a selection]:
a) the movie theater
b) the outdoor music festival
c) the High School nearby!"
However unscientific or, well, stupid her “finding” about Third World murderous peasants may be, we can all rest assured that there have been tragedies during football games — not all, however, as a result of bad calls.
Because human nature is the same wherever you are, the tragedies have happened in cities such as Lima, Peru, 50 years ago last May, or in other backward Third World places such as Brussels, Belgium, or Bradford, England — these last two mind you within a span of only 18 days in May 1985.
As for blown calls, they happen in any sport and any place in the world including, yes, horror of horrors, the United States.
At least until the ESPN broadcasts of the 2014 FIFA World Cup from Brazil, there used to be a difference about how sports narrators and commentators in the U.S. tackled bad calls.
While referee mistakes have been always reported and subject to analysis [be it instant or post-facto analysis] seldom have they been portrayed in such a way as to practically blame the officials for whatever happened on the field of play.
Sadly for sports fans and athletes in most Latin American countries — could very well be the case in other regions —, blaming the official is kind of the expected behavior from sports narrators and analysts: you may forgive their lack of technical knowledge or their inability to correctly call the game, but woe to them if no mention is made of misdeeds by referees or linemen.
Advances in technology such as instant replay and practically a myriad of alternate shots of the action have only accentuated that negative quality in sports narration and commentary in Latin America.
That was not the accepted practice in the United States, where players, coaches and managers, as well as administrative staff of professional clubs can be fined for criticizing referees.
The one strong reason why blaming the referee was not the accepted practice by U.S. narrators and commentators was this simple fact: while one may have the leisure of coldly analyzing a replay, the referee has but just one split second to decide.
At the speed with which the action develops nowadays, it may sometimes feel like a nanosecond.
In turn, that makes it unfair to go hellbent on the official’s decision, so as to supposedly magnify your reportorial acumen.
That, in my opinion, has changed for the worse in the ESPN narration and commentary during the Brazil 2014 World Cup games.
Soon after the conclusion of the Mexico-Netherlands game, an irate ESPN narrator went as far as to argue that the penalty call against the Mexican national team was wrong, because the rules estipulate that there has to be the intention of bringing a player down so that a foul will be called. [I have used bold type to avoid the quotation marks, since I don’t have the exact quote with me.]
Because the rule is even harsher [“a direct free kick will be awarded if a player … trips or attempts to trip an opponent”] the distortion by the narrator cannot be more blatant.
You have to notice also that in prefacing the listing of the first seven of ten offences which will result in a penalty kick, the rules also say that the sanction will be imposed if they are committed “in a manner considered by the referee to be careless, reckless or using excessive force.”
In the — again — split second the action developed, the referee had to decide whether an "offence" [to use the British spelling adopted by FIFA] was committed, taking into account all the above mentioned criteria.
The matter goes beyond a simple disagreement with an official's decision or an inadvertent or willful distortion of the rules just to make a point that will reinforce your position.
Not a few days after the controversial penalty call, another of the ESPN commentators went so far as to say, while broadcasting a different game, that the injury suffered by Brazilian star striker Neymar while playing Colombia was due to the lax enforcement of the rules by the referee in turn. [It may have been a willful foul by the Colombian defender but all replays shown by ESPN appear to show that his intent was not, certainly, to disable the Barcelona player.]
The commentator then added, using the tone of voice that will make the audience think that he was being clever and had the right amount of cheek, that he had been remiss in just saying "the referee" and not mentioning him by name, which he then proceeded to do.
Quite clever, indeed.

Brazil 2014: An Expensive and Fruitless Exorcism

Taunting the exorcist

As exorcisms go, this has been one of the most expensive in history, at the tune of well over 11 billion dollars no less. That cost is now only a very minute part of the bad news.
For well over 64 years now, Brazil has been burdened with the Maracanazo, the 2-1 defeat inflicted by Uruguay in the finals of the 1950 FIFA World Cup.  
The neighboring country, one must remember, was the one responsible for a 6-0 drubbing of Brazil some 30 years before —until then the most lopsided loss ever by a Brazilian national team.
To add, if you wish, insult to injury, because of the format adopted for the 1950 World Cup all the home team needed was a tie to crown themselves world champs.
Just about any account you read of that fatidic date will mention suicides happening in Brazil in the wake of the upset.
This is not, mind you, just Brazilian history or football lore.
Fast forward to 2014.
With Brazil nowadays not only a regional but also a global economic power and having won the trophy on five different occasions, the 2014 World Cup was obviously meant to be the chance to exorcise the demons of 1950.
That it would also highlight Brazil’s status as the preeminent football power in the world with an unprecedented sixth World Cup would only be the icing in the cake.
Germany’s 7-1 thrashing of the Brazilian team at Belo Horizonte on Tuesday did more than just make the expensive exorcism go to waste.
Instead of vanishing, the Maracanazo has now been augmented by the Mineiraoazo.
Whether another 64 or more years will be needed to erase the memories of both failures is something that time will tell.
Because they involve a confrontation that can only admit a winner, sports competitions inevitably invoke comparisons with war and armed conflict.
However judgmental one would wish to be one thing should be quite clear: Only Brazilians know how bad this feels to them.
At the individual level, perhaps, one might want to compare it to the presumptive suitor who’s not only told “Thanks, but no thanks” but also asked, “What if people see us together?”
Multiply that by 200 million and then you might have a rough idea of what Brazilians might be feeling now.

Me and the Speaker

I met Dean Rusk in November 1978.
At the time, Rusk was just a few months shy of becoming a septuagenarian and about ten years removed from the heights of power in U.S. politics [as you will read here, Rusk shares with William Seward the distinction of being the second-longest serving Secretary of  State, with Cordell Hull getting top honors in that regard.]
It was not a chance meeting.
And while I did get to shake hands with the old diplomat, it wasn’t either a one-on-one, the “How-are-you-doing-Mr.-Espinoza?-Very-pleased-to-meet-you-Mr.-Secretary” type of encounter.
For many years after his retirement from government service, Rusk had been a professor of international law at the University of Georgia, in Athens.
On that occasion I met Rusk he was the featured celebrity, not quite a speaker, at a gathering for foreign students in Toccoa Falls, in the north-eastern Georgia mountains.
Family in tow, I was there — at the invitation of the Dean of International Students of Georgia State University in Atlanta — to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, as were many others as well, both from GSU and other colleges and universities in the area.
Ever the diplomat, Rusk exhibited for his audience the charm you expect from a skilled politician.
“Of course you can have our picture taken!,” he told one of his greeters ahead of me.
Quoting somebody as famous as he already was, he further advised the greeter: “I may even let you wag your finger in front of my face, should you at any time in life want to brag about scolding me!”
He was of course being facetious. While not exceedingly tall and already kind of stooped because of his age, he was definitely taller than his interlocutor.
The difference in height would have rendered the claim null.
At the time of this gathering, the turmoil in Iran was full blown and the fall of the shah less than three months ahead in the future. Nobody knew it then but many suspected, as the proverbial phrase goes, that it was just a matter of time for that to happen.
A good number of the guests in this three-day gathering were Iranian exchange students and as it turns out, the person asking Rusk to pose with him had been one of the most vocal critics of the United States role in Iran [basically, why the continued support for the shah?] when the former Secretary had talked about American foreign policy.
It is not a question, Rusk said in reply to the complaints, of whether the shah should abandon power or not but more a matter of who’d replace him and what that means for the U.S. and the world [I wasn't precisely taking notes so not quoting here verbatim.]
Many will remember Rusk as the U.S. government official [one of many, that is] reviled because of his role during the Vietnam war. His obituary will remind you of the price he paid for that.

Thomas Foley: an unusually civil politician

My meeting Dean Rusk came to mind over the last 24 hours, as the news came from Washington, D.C., of the death of Democrat Tom Foley, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives whose life [minus the involvement in a conflict such as the one in Vietnam] closely resembles that of Rusk.
Rusk was not a politician [in the elected-official sense of the word] and Foley was not a diplomat [in the working-at-Foggy-Bottom fashion]. Save for that, they were each both diplomat and politician. They were both lawyers by profession, and not necessarily wealthy. And each accounts for many firsts in terms of personal achievements.
There are plenty of articles online to read about Mr. Foley, including this where president Obama mourns his passing as the loss of a “legend of the United States Congress,” where among his many successes as a leader figure his work to help then-president Bill Clinton get Congressional ratification of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, despite the opposition of a majority of his fellow Democrats.
About five years after my meeting Dean Rusk, I met Tom Foley at his offices in Capitol Hill.
A few days after Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada, I was part of a group of Washington, D.C.-based foreign correspondents invited to travel to the island in the aftermath of Operation Urgent Fury and Foley, then House Democratic Whip, briefed the group on where the Democrats [Congress, in general] stood on the matter.
Later, the legislator would lead a Congressional delegation sent to assess the situation in the Caribbean island which concluded that the military invasion was “justified,” though the conclusion should not be taken as a signal that, “we [in Congress] believe the United States should go around the world in a military action to invade countries because of their possible foreign policy.”
Meeting politicians [even after receiving an invitation] does not always translate into becoming an acquaintance. I won’t tell you that the meeting in late October 1983 made me recognizable to a man of his importance, even if I would frequently coincide at press events he also attended.
But over my years of work in Washington I was fortunate to be around enough so that on occasions, like at the time I was chatting with Mr. Foley in that picture taken at some reception at the National Press Club, you could sense the fact that this was, as the headline in one of the hyperlinks proclaims, “an unusually civil politician.”

My Heroes Have [Not] Always Been Cowboys - iii

Heard the story several times since my high school years.
Once, a few years past, from a comedian in one of those late-night TV shows.
The latest just a few days ago, as part of the answer in this year’s Jeopardy Teen Tournament.
As most of you are probably aware [Roman Catholics know this very well] the Vatican has a patron saint for just about anything you can think of.
This webpage tells us about Lawrence, one of seven deacons charged with helping the poor and the needy in Rome, sometime around A.D. 258.

To make the Word known to all

As you’ll read there in more detail, Lawrence was martyred following his refusal to turn over to the Roman civilian ruler the fortune he was supposed to be hiding.
He was, the webpage says, condemned “to a slow, cruel death. The saint was tied on top of an iron grill over a slow fire that roasted his flesh little by little, but Lawrence was burning with so much love of God that he almost did not feel the flames. In fact, God gave him so much strength and joy that he even joked. ‘Turn me over,’ he said to the judge. ‘I'm done on this side!’ And just before he died, he said, ‘It's cooked enough now.’ "
Apparently, such stoicism was enough to make him the patron saint for cooks, a fact that the comedian referenced above considered quite jocular [Lawrence is also invoked as patron by archivists, librarians and tanners].
Practically the same information can be found in Wikipedia, where his patronage of “cooks and chefs” is also listed — though archivists, librarians and tanners are omitted — and a cautionary note has been added.
Historians, says the cyberpedia, note that the manner of Lawrence's martyrdom contrasts with the decapitation by which deacons were supposed to be executed.
It also adds this other historian’s theory about how such tradition was created: “He postulates that it was the result of a mistaken transcription, the accidental omission of the letter ‘p’ – ‘by which the customary and solemn formula for announcing the death of a martyr – passus est [‘he suffered,’ that is, was martyred] – was made to read assus est [he was roasted].”
[Incidentally, given that we are talking about patron saints, this would probably be a good time to remember what happened around St. Chad , also a Roman Catholic saint that news stories back in 2000 touted as “patron saint of elections”. There is no such thing, says the webpage: “Due to the somewhat confused nature of Chad's appointment and the continued references to 'chads' — small pieces of ballot papers punched out by voters using voting machines — in the 2000 US Presidential Election it has been jocularly suggested that Chad is the patron saint of botched elections. In fact there is no official patron saint of elections, though Thomas More is the one of politicians.”]
I haven’t mentioned Lawrence of Rome [OK, OK, Saint Lawrence if you insist!] because of any particular interest in making fun of the tradition about the way he was executed. Neither do I consider him hero, even if [without the sainthood bit, since that’s not how my belief goes] I have no problem in believing him a martyr.
You have to admit though that one could do either, depending on whether you are a cynic or count yourself among the Roman Catholic faithful.
Not a cowboy but a hero. That’s how I wanted to title this introductory post about William Tyndale, whose biography will also inform you about how he became a martyr.

Your [Literary] Christmas Gift Arrived

Your Christmas present is here.
Truth is it arrived just about a year ago.
 It is one of the most complete works about the history and current status of literary creation in El Salvador and as far as I know, “Literatura: Análisis de situación de la expresión artística en El Salvador” [Literatura: A situational analysis of artistic expression in El Salvador] — authored by Tania Pleitez Vela under the auspices of Fundación AccesArte —  is only available in Spanish.

The literary fabric diagnosed

Since it’s downloadable at no charge at several URLs, like the one hyperlinked above as well as this other one, it would probably be advisable to get it now. And I mean, right away, before somebody starts thinking about blocking the free access.
A donation or whatever type of support you might want to offer the author [yes, there is a link on her website for that purpose] or the Fundación would be my suggestion about the way to go, case you feel some kind of unease about the freebie. 
The 400-plus pages book has been available in CD [and online] since about September 2012 and summarizes the research conducted by Pleitez Vela in the 24-plus months lapsed before its publication.
The first part of the book, some 95 pages, summarizes what Pleitez Vela calls an “Outline for a Salvadoran literary historiography.” The rest [excluding, of course, those pages for acknowledgments, etc.] deals with the “status” of the subject of literature in El Salvador, a very detailed and thorough analysis of literary creation in El Salvador from 1980 to 2011.
The dates are important to bear in mind: One of the bloodiest internal wars in Latin American history was fought during the first 12 of those 32 years, with the divisions still raw and quite visible up to the present day.
Violence, not political in origin as during the armed conflict but simply criminal in nature, still permeates the whole nation.
The study’s main purpose, says the author, is to diagnose the interaction between the Salvadoran writers and their environment over the last three decades. Its theoretical base is a “deconstruction” so that a diagnosis of what the author calls the “literary fabric” of El Salvador can be performed.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, Pleitez Vela prefaces the study by quoting one of the most trite expressions ever heard in the Central American country:  “Nobody cares about literature in El Salvador.” Stereotypical, of course, and definitely non-scientifically based, as it is also the case with some of the other frequent sayings one hears or sees around the subject.
At the beginning of her Findings [Pg. 319], Pleitez Vela tells also about the graffiti sprayed on the walls of the cultural center in downtown San Salvador: “Cultura para qué, si el pueblo tiene hambre” [Who the hell needs culture, when people go hungry.]
What’s unexpected [at least by the evidence that I have collected so far] is the apparently scarce repercussion of Pleitez Vela’s outstanding work.
It’s very likely that it may have been already debated or analyzed in public forums in El Salvador and quite probable too that, locally, there may have been news stories about the publication.
Online, the evidence of people talking about the work is pretty thin, at least in Spanish.
Other than the author’s own stories and the Fundación’s announcements on the Internet, there appear to be only three main articles about the work.
One of those was a post that Rafael Francisco Góchez published in his blog in October 2012 [full disclosure here: the writer happens to be my nephew and is also one of the writers interviewed and quoted by Pleitez Vela.]
Two other stories, one by my writer friend Miguel Huezo Mixco and the other by his wife, María Tenorio, figure prominently in the results of a Google search. Miguel, however, also happens to be one of the sources for the study — and quoted at length, we might add — and both him and his companion are part of the Fundación’s team working on the project.
Which is not to say [that goes for the three of them] that their posts or op-ed articles in online media or Salvadoran newspapers are lacking in credibility. If anything, their knowledge should give more weight to their opinion. So I believe.

My Heroes Have [Not] Always Been Cowboys - ii

Not a singing cowboy

“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!”
As you probably remember so says Dr. Emmet L. Brown [the character played by Christopher Lloyd] in the closing scene of Part One of the Back to the Future trilogy.
Brown’s replying to the warning from Marty McFly [Michael J. Fox] that there may not be a road long enough ahead of them for the modified DeLorean to reach the required 88-mph speed that will launch them on a fourth-dimensional leap to the year 2015. [Were all this other than a science-fiction movie, their landing should be just a bit over 24 months away.]

Readying to leap back... to the past this time.

Though neither one — McFly or Brown — satisfies the requirements of the traditional or classical version of the hero, I think we all agree that they can be considered good examples of the “modern fictional hero.”
And as far as their own relationship in the fictional world of Hill Valley, it would probably be a safe bet to say that for Marty McFly, the scientist had become somebody to look up to... in other words, a hero-like figure.
That’s descriptive, it does not mean that at any time have I ever regarded them as “heroes” of mine.
Seeing Michael J. Fox all dressed up in “cowboy” attire in the beginning scenes of BTTF III made me immediately remember the family portrait that my parents had taken with me and my two younger brothers back in the mid 50s.
Those of you who have read previous posts will remember that I used the crop for this remembrance of my father — Payito was my hero, I said in that series.
In the BTTF III screenshot McFly is getting ready to leap to 1885, so as to rescue Doc Brown [the 1985 Doc Brown, that is, not the one from 1955 with him at the drive-in movie theater] from a certain death.
I chuckled in seeing McFly's attire because that is exactly how we wanted to dress up. We were responding to what the singing cowboy movies portrayed as reality and donning such colorful getup sent us on our way to fantasy-land — no need for roads, dude!
In time, of course, the majority of us all start doing away with heroes. It doesn’t matter when or how it happens, our admiration vanishes. We no longer wish to be the guy in the white hat or the superhero in the comics.
We begin to discern.
David is no more the heroic slayer of a gigantic warrior with just a sling and a stone for weapons. His words, his faith are still worthy of recognition though he is now a flawed human being, plotting for murder so that his victim’s spouse can become his.
In real, contemporary life, the spiritual advisor lauding marriage from the pulpit does his best to destroy one — it doesn’t have to touch us and one doesn’t have to witness such things in person to know and realize that this is not ancient history, it happens all the time.
Now, let me tell you about a hero.

My Heroes Have [Not] Always Been Cowboys - i

Video: They have not always been my heroes

Despite the title, this is not a post about country music.
There is however a reason why I have chosen to use the song famously interpreted by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, as it will be clear in subsequent deliveries.
Let me begin by telling you about a chat that I had with a friend of mine well over half a century ago.
At the time, both my childhood friend and I had finished 7^th Grade, what’s now called Middle School. Not quite yet teenagers we were both somehow self-aggrandized — thinking of ourselves more as being young men rather than children longing to find out what the end of boyhood would mean to each.
 “So, have you already read the whole Bible?”, my friend inquired. There was a challenge implied in the way he had posed the question, but also a certain amount of cockiness. You [me, that is] kind of sensed that it was not just an idle query. “Because I have. From Genesis to Revelation. Every. Single. Verse.”, my friend added, without waiting for an answer.
That’s indeed quite a feat. For anybody you wanna think of, not just for a 12-year-old. Add his short age to the fact that I knew him to be much more inclined to arithmetic and numbers [in time, he became a civil engineer] than to other academic pursuits and you’ll see how I could not have been anything other than impressed.
“Excellent! Did you read it all at once, non-stop, or did you pause in-between books?”, was my reply.
“Of course not, not read all of it in one sitting! But it didn’t take me more than a few weeks,” my friend added, only to reiterate his original query. “And you? Have you already read the whole Bible? I would find it difficult to understand how you, attending a religious school, have not done the same as me already.”
Classmates for the whole of our elementary school years, we had both returned to the little town of our boyhood to be with family for the vacations.
We had been sent to different cities to undertake our secondary education. While he had been enrolled in a lay school, my parents opted for sending me to a Roman Catholic one — even though neither one was particularly religious and skirting the fact that, through my father’s paternal side, me and my two younger brothers were being raised as Baptists. [I am still a Baptist and, as those who may have read previous posts already know, obviously an Evangelical Christian, struggling more-often-than-not with questions of faith.]
In this retelling and self-evaluation of his reading prowess my friend, a Roman Catholic enrolled in a lay school, was both right and wrong — and yes, I know, you can’t be both, is the normal reaction to such assessment.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with reading the Bible from beginning to end, whether over a period of days, a few weeks or a whole year, or even a lifetime. It just seems to me [it did then and still does now] that to undertake such an effort, to go from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21 as an exercise in reading, just because the verses are there, in a manner of speaking, will not necessarily make you grow in the Word of God.
It may have happened to my friend it may also happen with you. To me, it looks a lot like trekking all the world’s coastlines while wading ankle-deep into the seawater. And once you are done, claiming to know what the oceans are like.
There was, however, one thing where my friend was right — perhaps unknowingly and more than likely mistaken in his reasoning — : the wrong belief that attending a religious school and more specifically, a Roman Catholic one, was synonymous with knowledge of the Bible.

Wishing Well

What a wonderful web we wish!  
We all do, I guess, but in this particular case I am talking about Mark Zuckerberg’s most recent initiative: making Internet access widely available. As in: anywhere, everywhere. To put it simply: make the world wide web watchable in the whole wide world.
Late Tuesday night, facebook and several other partners listed in this article announced the foundation of Internet.org, with the goal of making Internet access available to everybody on the planet.

The knowledge economy: not a zero sum

 
As Zuckerberg and partners noted, some 2.7 billion people —most of them in the developed world— already have access to the Internet.    
That means, of course, the ability to share —or decry— the ideas of people like Glenn Beck or Al Sharpton, as well as the freedom to soothe your spirit with readings of the Bible or pursue some other kind of thought.
As explained in the press release, "There are huge barriers in developing countries to connecting and joining the knowledge economy. Internet.org brings together a global partnership that will work to overcome these challenges, including making internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it."    
Whether you call it the web or the Internet [they are different things, though in common usage they have become interchangeable], what Zuckerberg and partners are in fact talking about is what’s called “digital connectivity.”  
Somewhat hyperbolically, in a separate document posted on his facebook wall Zuckerberg asked, “Is connectivity a human right?” [A rhetorical question, in my opinion, whose answer is more likely, no.]  
He answers himself as follows:  
“There is no guarantee that most people will ever have access to the internet. It isn’t going to happen by itself. But I believe connectivity is a human right, and that if we work together we can make it a reality.”
Except for making connectivity a human right, for all the other parts of the quote he’s right.

The cicada ain’t [just] a bug

My contemporaries, am sure, will have made the association right away.  
So will all those familiar with Argentine filmmaking.
Released 50 years ago, the feature film La cigarra no es un bicho was at the time a bold production.  
Is not necessarily a great movie. The film director, Daniel Tinayre, is quoted in this blog ranking it as, “My worst movie, and the most imitated one.”    

Not a bug either

Sex, of course, is the main ingredient.    
This short with the cast and a longer part two available in youtube will give you a chance to appreciate the film. Little can be gained from reading the mistranslated title: The Dragonfly Is Not An Insect or the one given to the U.S. release, The Games Men Play.        
More memorable in terms of Argentine filmmaking — per the above hyperlink and also this other blog — appears to be this: La cigarra no es un bicho is credited as being the first domestic production ever where a “bad word” was said on the big screen by an Argentine actor. The term is “pelotudo”, roughly translated as “a _ _ hole.”
Go figure.    
As It happened around springtime both 34 and 17 years ago, cicadas [or chicharras, as we call them in my native country] are again very much in the news here in the USA.  
Cicadas 2013! Whatever number you pick in one of the hyperlinks below, we are talking about a humongous invasion: they'll either outnumber humans 600 to 1 or total anywhere from 30 billion to a trillion. How about that?        
You may have read newspaper stories like this one in the Washington Post or this online article which also leads you to a National Geographic video about how it all sounds.    
You can also read this story if you want numbers about the invasion or this other one, case you are wondering whether to have one of the critters as a snack.  
The attention is well deserved.  
Those of us more familiar with cicadas as an annual happening couldn’t be more thrilled at the hullaballoo around the humble, often maligned insect.  
For us cicadas are more than just an odd-looking, chirpy, strident bug.  
They are memories of childhood fables read by our mothers or older siblings.    
In English, Aesop’s  fable stars the ant and the grasshopper. In France, says wikipedia, the cicada "became the proverbial example of improvidence ... so much so that  Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911) could paint a picture of a female nude biting one of her nails among the falling leaves and be sure viewers would understand the point by giving it the title  La Cigale".    
Children stories, we all know, don’t actually have to make sense.    
The 17-year cycle now in the news makes it clear why the grasshopper has preempted the cicada in the English fable.  
Kinda hard, don’t you think, to talk about an insect that only comes around every 17 years.  
Cicadas are also love songs, like the mournful huapango belted by Mexican mariachi songstress María de Lourdes in this 1965 movie featuring the better known work of Mexican composer Ray Pérez y Soto — who in the early 60s also composed the Corrido a John F. Kennedy featured in the LP whose cover you can see in this website [my translation for La Cigarra lyrics.]

       
Perez y Soto’s huapango dates from the 1940s and an earlier version was recorded by the Trío Calaveras in the huasteco version of the huapango.
             
It is quite likely that most non-Spanish speaking people in the U.S. and other countries will be more familiar with the widely known hit of Linda Ronstadt from the mid 1980s.      
Humble and often maligned, I said of cicadas before.
But well known.        
They also figure in poems, like in this one from Salvadoran David Escobar Galindo [again, my translation]:

   

EL MADRECACAO                                    THE MADRECACAO

Amaneció vestido de rapsoda         Woke up dressed in rhapsodist garb
—soñando con la Iliada rosada—   — dreaming of the Illiad in pink.
Pero su canto fue tan solo               Its song however was just
un fuego triste de chicharras.           a sorrowful bonfire of cicadas.

First Movie Date

The Ballet Scene

A Mad Obsession

First time I took a girl out to the movies I was about six going on seven.  
The youngest of my siblings had been born in October of that year [two of his children, the youngest one of those two also bearing his name, would later be born on the same month] and me and my sister, the only one we ever had, took off to the recently inaugurated Cine Gavidia to see The Red Shoes.  
Siblings by mother only [Mayita had been a single mother until meeting Payito, my father], Gloria Marina was 10 years older than me so read that part of my taking a girl out to the movies as more of a ruse of hers to distract me and to make me stop fretting about being unable to enjoy Mayita’s attention because she had just delivered a boy.  
Tall for her generation, my sister was then a slender, busty teenager that had just started working as a secretary.   Not only could she type — fast — and take dictation by stenography but she also had the best Palmer calligraphy that I had known at the time.  Her handwriting was even better than Mayita’s, which for me was telling a lot — nope, while mine was never too shabby, I didn’t get either one’s ability.  
We are talking about 1954.  Movie offerings at the time in hot and steamy San Miguel — way way far in Eastern El Salvador — were mostly Mexican fare.  
Since English-speaking movies had to be subtitled — dubbing was not used as much at the time — it was not very often that you got good quality films at the local movie theaters.  Which is part of the reason why a film as old as me was only then showing.  
Yoyita [that’s how I always called her] was not at all concerned about my ability to read subtitles —those who have read my earlier post on this blog will gather that at the age of six I was reading up a storm — but inquired, after the movie, whether the plot had made any sense. She was not surprised at all that, for me, it had. A real feast to the eyes, the ballet scene in The Red Shoes [you can also see here the part two] was mesmerizing to us both.  
I am not gonna pretend to be a genius and will concede to anybody that at that early age there were some things that clearly made no sense for me.  And it’s not like, for everybody, the intricacies of human relationships are easy to decode.  Those complexities in human behavior are precisely the reason why I concluded that some of the answers in The Red Shoes may have also eluded my sister’s understanding.  
While she was a romantic [two of her favourite songs where Doce Cascabeles and Dos Cruces] there is, if you have seen the movie, things that are not fully made clear on why they happen.  
Fast-forward about two-and-half or three more years to another movie outing with my sister.  
At the time she was a secretary at the newspaper where I would later start my professional adventure and in celebration of her job [and probably, if I remember well, as part of her conversation with my mother about her plans to marry a young poet, public accountant and teacher] she had treated the three of us to see Beneath The 12 Mile Reef.    
Released about three years before, the film had been selected as the gala opening for the Cine Regis because it was shot in CinemaScope and the movie theater was the one with the new wide screen where all the beauty of the movie could be appreciated.  

One of my greatest goofs

Two things I remember most about the movie.  
While I was [aged eight or nine] still too young to fully be caught up in what one may call a romantic interest, in “Costa Brava” [one of the three titles that the movie was released under in Spanish] red-haired, 5'1" Terry Moore was too much of a little firecracker of a woman not to make me wonder what sexual attraction can be.    
The second is one of my greatest goofs of all time, which earned me a pat on the head from my sister — plus one of her most hearty chuckles — and hollers from the entire audience.  
About 35 minutes into the movie you’ll see this scene where Gilbert Roland, who plays Robert Wagner’s dad in the film, beats Peter Graves in a fistfight.  At a point in the squabble, Roland’s marine captain’s cover falls off, his sidekick picks it up and hangs the hat on a palm tree.  
Once the fight’s over, Roland, Wagner and their companion leave the place.  
“Hey you, guys, you forgot the hat!” I hollered to the three of them, in Spanish, so entranced was I by the whole thing [no, the movie is not as good as The Red Shoes, but’s good enough to follow.]  
The howls of laughter from the entire audience were enough to make me feel like wishing the earth could swallow me.  
There was of course a point to the forgetfulness. Roland’s character dies later and sure enough his son, Wagner, returns to the secluded place where the hat had been left.  
No amount of smugness was enough for me not to stare angrily at the old man who pointed at me when leaving the theater to say to his wife, “See, that’s the kid who sensed there was something going on with the hat!”    
Over the years, Yoyita and I kept close.    
I rejoiced on the birth of each one of her four children, lamented the death of my oldest niece [of which I only knew weeks after it happened, because by then I had already started — unknowingly, I must say — my long journey to expatriation], shared heartbreaks and worries and concerns over many things, separation with children being one of them, flew back to be with her after her husband’s sudden death of cardiac arrest, and talked whenever possible, but not as often as either one of us wished and needed.

Meeting Miguel Ángel Asturias, around the time he became a Nobel winner

During all those years Yoyita became a teacher, a short story writer, got a B.A. in Literature & Philosophy and earned more than well-deserved merit for her works, as you can read here [search by Gloria Marina Fernández for a synthesis of her endeavours] and even after being afflicted since the early 2000s with terminal renal failure kept on working, her thirst for life stronger than her fear of death and writing the lyrics for this song, composed by her youngest, also a writer, a teacher, a song composer, a musician, a blogger and the one responsible for this hommage to her memory.    
I was there for the long of her life. I wasn’t for the short part.  
I say this not so much with regret but with sorrow.  
At her death, the last day of October, 2012, it had been years since we had last talked.  
This is an overdue note of condolences to her children and grandchildren, yes.    
But my remembrance of her goes without mourning.  
Someone may think you oughta mourn.  
Me, I will always speak of Yoyita in celebration.

Beyoncé & Jay-Z in Havana

A stroll in Old Havana

Just in case you haven’t had your fill with stories about Beyoncé, today’s newspapers have more than enough about the singer's and hubby's, Jay-Z, tourist visit to Havana, Cuba.
CubaHora, the self-proclaimed first ezine in Cuba, has plenty of photos with reader’s comments, in Spanish, about the event.
“Now I understand why they were doing repairs to the Saratoga a few days ago…” says one of those readers, nicknamed lukaz, referring to the hotel where the couple is staying.
You’ll notice, in those CubaHora pix, the U.S. flag waving just to the right of the Cuban flag at the front of the hotel.
Just a few other Cuban media have published the story, says CubaHora, adding a query to its readers: “Do you think it’s OK that we give coverage to this visit?”
You can also read a full report in the Miami Herald, where there is also a series of pix.
AN UPDATE
Below you'll see the screenshot with picture of the Saratoga hotel facade mentioned above.