… writes an amusing and enlightening opinion piece in the Washington Post, about the Cartagena scandal. Roberto used to be a merchant seaman:
When I worked on ships, seamen were a superstitious lot. When there was a bad storm, while the ship pitched and rolled, the crew, unable to eat or sleep, would gather in the messroom and grumble. Anyone who remembers Coleridge’s ancient mariner knows that seamen don’t blame the wind and tides for bad weather and rough seas. Rather, they blame a fellow member of the crew — someone who has, say, killed an albatross. During storms, they’d mumble darkly that a crew member had “Jonah’d” the ship — done something wicked, while ashore, that caused the seas to rise up and take revenge.
Inevitably, someone would point out that the likely cause of the foul weather was that one of our crew had committed the worst sin of all: not paying a whore. All would nod gravely. In my day, seamen were convinced that this was such a serious infraction it could threaten a ship’s survival. More than once I saw fellow crew members, who’d come back to the ship so drunk they couldn’t remember where they’d been, make superhuman efforts to send money to a woman ashore in a desperate attempt to avoid the curse of the unpaid prostitute.
April 30th, 2012 at 7:02PM
Dear Margaret: Thanks for posting my WaPo piece. With the Casblanca quote I’d hoped to preempt self-righteous comments, but there were hundreds anyway. One woman called me a sex addict. Betty, my wife of 41 years, smirked at that. UD is a terrific blog. All the best, Roberto
April 30th, 2012 at 9:10PM
Roberto: Wonderful to hear from you – I loved the WaPo piece! And yes, I saw some of the idiotic comments on it. But it got plenty of excellent comments too.
The piece struck just the right tone – humane, informative, and very funny. You did what all fine writers do – you just let the facts and stories speak for themselves.
The phrase “the curse of the unpaid prostitute” has been happily ringing in my ears…
Margaret