A Letter From the Tropics

While in the tropics I remembered a favorite letter Albert Jay Nock wrote that was published in the Atlantic Magazine in 1936, titled "A Letter From the Tropics".  In the letter he makes many observations about the local governments of selected topical islands and mostly Venezuela.

He wrote, "The ways of the Venezuelan bureaucracy are a sublime and impressive marvel, and well worth an American's study, as showing what we are rapidly coming to in our own land. So many nagging laws, decrees, regulations, and restrictions come forth from day to day that the administrators are in the same plight as our jobholders and corporation lawyers, knowing neither what they mean nor what to do about them.".

My journey 81 years later in the tropics was a bit different.  I found the islands very accepting of newcomers and laws very loose.  Barriers to entry seemed a mere formality of checking ID's to confirm your citizenship.  I observed the suns deadly rays but the cool trade winds of the West Indies very pleasant and relaxing.  Some of the islands have thrown off their colonial masters and declared independence. In the case of Puerto Rico I was reminded by the taxi driver while touring old San Juan that Puerto Ricans love the American money but wish to leave their government back on the mainland. When I pushed the taxi driver about the fact that a recent poll showed great support for adding them to the Union, he scoffed and promptly added that the 400,000 Puerto Rican's who did vote were all carpet baggers from New York who come down in the winter.  Later that evening I confirmed the sentiments of the driver to be more or less the attitude of his island as a whole.  Besides, a country that celebrates cock fighting as a major sport and still has open carry of firearms would probably not accept statehood and most likely end up in revolution and independence anyway.  I am wondering if those two reasons alone are exactly why the administrators of this territory know how to trip up the statehood processes?

Contrary to the islands, entering and leaving the U.S. was very intrusive and degrading- and I mean this very literally.  The islands had opened their arms to us whereas our own so-called "country" kept us in single file lines through metal detectors while men with blue gloves looked though our luggage and our "papers".  It seemed I was the only soul in the boarding and debarking process that felt humiliated.

Finally as a last note, I found the history of the tropics to be more or less the same. The quick synopsis of each as a whole is that there were a primitive and native people, Europeans came and killed or made use of these native people as slaves, fortify the colony, set up a state and exploit whatever natural resource they could and made it part of its colony, and lastly, independence was made though some sort of fairly recent treaty or small coup d'état of an empire no longer powerful enough to provide military force.

I should also mention my favorite conquistador Ponce de León.  I visited his tomb that is located in the San Juan Cathedral.  The inscription on the tomb translated from Latin says " Under this tomb rest the bones of Leon who by conquering made great his name.".  Ol' Ponce is famous for his search for the fountain of youth -a claim that appears to be more myth than fact.  I like to think Ponce de León's search was a serious political task.  Why is it so hard to imagine someone who basically landed on an island and declared himself governor  as someone who also was not also capable of looking for a fountain of youth?  I see no mutual exclusive behavior of declaring oneself governor of a primitive island of Puerto Rico while also looking for a mythical island giving eternal youth to those who drink and bathe from its waters.  I see no difference in the unicorns modern politicians seek and those that Ponce de León sought.  It would be as if I had landed on the moon and declared myself emperor of the universe while also trying to find the mysterious "man" on the moon. However, I think I could not muster up the courage to keep the straight face needed for such pursuits. This is why I believe de León was serious about his pursuit just as I believe Trump is serious in his pursuit of a wall between Mexico or was Obama's pursuit of "affordable" healthcare.  It seems that unicorns are an age old problem.  It should be brought to the readers attention that due to the failure of de León not finding his fountain of youth, Puerto Ricans today live the shortest compared to all other U.S. Hispanics according to the CDC.