You’d never thought I’d say this, but I love Don Winner’s Panama Guide. In a country of low moral fiber like ours where juega vivo is the highest virtue, the Panama Guide is the kind of news source one expects. Its utter corruption perfectly fits local folklore and Don Winner has in just a few years set a rich tradition of stealing other people’s work, promoting scams, being paid by one real estate developer to attack another, randomly accuse innocent people of committing murder or drug trafficking (without a shred of evidence of course), and simply being sleazy in general. All that while maintaining a 100% failure rate in making accurate analysis of Panamanian events (he said Navarro would be the next president, for example).
Don Winner in full combat gear
To make things even better, Don Winner is a terrible writer who typically needs 10,000 words for something he could have said in just 25. Then he sells that as “premium content” which again goes to show what a true genius the man is. Of course if you can’t write you never suffer from such things as a “writers block” or other creative blackouts – people like Winner live in the knowledge that, like diarrhea, the words will just keep coming. Muckraking journalism? Don Winner and his Panama Guide are the muck!
Don Winner likes me too. Or better said, he’s a big fan. In fact, that became a bit of a problem for him when his continued attempts at getting close to me and my family forced me to obtain restraining orders against him and his sidekick Clyde Jenkins. Fortunately, Winner learned from that experience and now he just writes about me.
I myself have been quiet over the last months. Creative block and bored. The elections came out as I had predicted well over a year ago. We’re waiting for Martinelli to take office. I’ve kept my usual distance from most of the American expatriate crowd and its endless bickering and backstabbing on Yahoo boards and expat parties while dedicating my time to other, more interesting things.
And so I was talking with some friends and acquaintances last weekend about the ever-widening Panama porn scandal and how much fun it is now that everybody is suing everybody else and demanding apologies.
“The best part is that you’re not in it in any way”, said my friends.
“Don’t worry”, I replied. “Don Winner will find a way to drag me into this freak show and blame me for everything. He can’t help it. He needs to write about me”.
And as if acting on cue, he just did exactly that. He recently launched that paid premium content section on his website and, ummmm, it seems the premium content is me! Ornstein all you can eat for just $20 a year! Don Winner needs about 10,000 words of premium content to express his disappointment that I, Okke Ornstein, was never really interested in the whole porn affair. Quotes endlessly from my emails. Well, Don, I am so sorry but this is just not my thing, you know?
In case you missed it: we’re currently having this Panaporno scandal in our country. You see, there is this Dutchman here in Panama, Fabian Buys, and he distributes internet porn, and he’s quite the man and now the Canadian police is after him for child pornography or so it is said. Then there are all kind of weird connections, for example consular personnel organizing porn summits. And there is this woman Mona, who writes both porn and articles for Don Winner’s Panama Guide, which often reads like the same thing anyway: “(…) you can expect to jerk from left to right, feel your stomach drop, tense your muscles and squeal with excitement and/or fear (…)”. That was her on Panama Guide, writing about….. a cab ride. And then Don Winner hangs out with Buys at poker tournaments in casinos where Mona’s boyfriend pimps Colombian chicks or whatever.
The thing is: I don’t really care what all these people do, but Don Winner is all over it and that’s what makes his Panama Guide so great. I start vomiting after just a day in this type of environment, but Winner wallows in it, inhales it as deep as he can. It’s dark and lonely work, like oral sex, but Winner knows that someone has to do it and it might as well be him. A real Panamanian hero. At one point, somewhere last year, some guy “William Smartlee”, an ex-employee of Buys, approached me by email, urging me to write about Buys and child porn and what not, but he couldn’t give me anything solid to base a story on and he finally gave up when I just ignored him. Don Winner, on the other hand, has just today published about three or four articles already about this Smartlee character!
Smartlee is in fact Steven Rich, we learn, indeed a former Buys employee who was fired after he had been caught stealing, to be immediately hired by former Marc Harris employee Jon Hanna – a customer of Don Winner - as his “marketing director” where his claim to fame became organizing business networking ventures masquerading as expat parties. Now again, I don’t really care. I’m from the most liberal country in the world and if this crowd wants to hold expat porn parties in Panama who am I to object, right?
Just one thing I don’t like. Don Winner writes: “And while the story fell into the “so what” category for me, the Siglo, Okke Ornstein and Eric Jackson, David Young felt compelled to write it, without checking out the source.”
This could of course be one of his classic grammatical misconstructions, but the sentence reads as if I wrote something. And Don, come on, you know that is not true as I’ve left this porncake entirely for you, Eric Jackson and the old farts at the Panama Star to feast upon.
UPDATE: Okay, so Steve Rich apparently left the country and rumor has it so did Fabian Buys. That leaves us the minor players, of which Eric Jackson was dumped from The Panama Star so that’s one old fart less at the Geriatrics Daily. And then we have of course Don Winner who has re-edited and put new and improved spins on his shit in order to avoid looking like the total idiot that he is. Oh, and Mona Moore/Sutherland was angry with me and her pimpin’ boyfriend was even angrier but they’re pussies so they never called me or even wrote me.
In short: This saga has been such an uplifting experience for all of us!
Tags: david young, don winner, eric jackson, fabian buys, jon hanna, mona moore, mona sutherland, Panama, panama guide, porn, posi, steven rich
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