20 July 2010

Bad Views, Bad News

The Central American & Caribbean Games are being held right now, with host city Mayagüez doing the honors...and all  Puerto Rico doing the dishonors. Take the opening ceremony...please. Take it anywhere. Take it back, take it to hell, just take the damn thing, because as an emblem of Puerto Rico, it was absolutely hideous.

The run-up to the Games have been plagued by mismanagement, graft, incompetence and the usual barrel-loads of greedy stupidity that mark Puerto Rican sociopolitics at its worst. The Games were deemed "iffy" because facilities were incomplete or in disarray. Just a 3-minute walk from Chez Jenius are the new tennis courts, made on coarse clay/gravel ground with the cement being laid down in a week. The courts were finished in early June, just in time for the pre-final inspection. Since then,  a casual glance will show that some of the courts have settled, creating dips or hollows that the players will find anything but enchanting. And reports are that most of the facilities are equally sub-par.

But those are not seen by the world at large. What is seen is the Opening Ceremony, where a careful display of competence will at least provide a handsome public mask to cover up the pockmarked hag underneath. Only We acted like competence on public display was unworthy of Our attention and put on a show so abysmally awful, so uncoordinated, so bereft of professionalism and integrity, We would have been better off canceling the damn thing and putting on a rerun of "Green Acres." At least there the pig had talent.

And on the subject of being on camera and stinking up the joint, how about Our so-called police force using undercover agents to record video of marchers and protesters under the supercilious mouth-fart notion of "protecting the police force's and protesters' rights."

Really. If you believe that, I have an Opening Ceremony tape I want to sell you...

If the police want to record their own video of public events, then they have to do it--they have to do it--openly, not with undercover agents. In the same way that law enforcement procedures require a legal basis for recording private (and ostensibly illegal) events, so must law enforcement have a reason to record public events, and the reason has to be communicated to the public. Having hidden cameras secretly recording public events is not the act of a government worth supporting, and if We reacted to this underhanded and cowardly act in the way We should, the police force would have a new chief and We'd have a new governor by the time the Closing Ceremony took place.

Which I hope, for Our sake, is handled with a level of competence above that of addled monkeys...

The Jenius Has Spoken.

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