By Debralee Santos
The conversation these days requires bottom-line denigration, to rise above the churn and swill.
Ricardo Rosselló is the first governor to step down since Puerto Ricans began electing their chief executives in 1947.
As revealed by the Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism, the leaked chat messages between Rosselló and his inner circle number close to 900 pages.
Complete with memes, the group snickers through the daily business of governance – but mostly politics – of Puerto Rico.
The matters they mind range from the mundane, as they arrange details on photo ops, to the macabre, as when joking about feeding the corpses of Hurricane María victims to crows.
There are thousands of words exchanged by the group, who, freed from the yoke of appearances, revel thoroughly in schoolboy smack talk laden with homophobic, misogynistic, and vile comments. “HP” (shorthand for son of a bitch) is bandied about as frequently as “pendejo.”
Everything is a con, a ruse – and everyone, especially the people of Puerto Rico, are the marks.
It’s governance by WWE – a spectacle staged of earnest men at work while backstage, the guffaws and backslaps reign.
You might be excused for thinking that their conspiracy of governance owes more to the cynicism of Vince McMahon and his interdependent ecosystem of naïfs, heroes and villains than to any Machiavellian plot.
For every line read, you think, there’s an emoji for that.
It is no surprise that the greatest derision among these twelve unholy apostles is reserved for the women in their midst – or in their sights.
These include former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, dubbed a “puta,” and San Juan Mayor Yulín Cruz, whom one member of the chat jokes about shooting – a proposed act of state valor for which he is lauded, including by Rosselló directly.
Read more: Long live the shrew. | Manhattan Times
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