The revolution in the "shithole"

This is the first long weekend of a new year; Monday is Martin Luther King Day.  Therefore, I will continue to focus on the slavery history of the United States in Jill Lepore's book.

I have written--many times--even in this blog, that I have no idea how African-Americans live without always being angry at the white folk who proudly claim their slave-owning history.  Or, when they openly talk about white supremacy.

Lepore gives me plenty to get angry about--despite that I am not an African-American, and was raised with Brahmin privilege in the old country.  I have no firsthand experience of being the underclass ever, and I am pissed off!

Consider this, for instance: The American Revolution of 1776 echoed across the waters with the French Revolution in 1789.  Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Right?

It was the same France that had colonized Haiti, which was then known as Saint-Domnigue. It was "the largest colony in the Caribbean, and the richest."  Whites on the island were outnumbered by slaves, whose population was eleven times the population of whites.

A "democratic" revolution in the nearby United States, and another in the colonial power.  So, of course, Haiti's brown people rose up in 1791.

The leaders of the American revolution did not support the revolution in Haiti.  Instead, they attacked it.  Not just with words: "Between 1791 and 1793, the United States sold arms and ammunition and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid to French planters on the island."  Yep, the young republic set a precedent way back then by sending money and materials to a war, not to help the downtrodden but to support the white and the wealthy!

American newspapers did not cheer the Haitian Revolution, but instead reported it "as a kind of madness, a killing frenzy."

America reinforced itself not as a land of liberty, but as a land of slavery.  How awful!

When George Washington called it quits and headed back home, some of their slaves fled.  Washington "sent a slave catcher" after one of them, who offered to return only if she would be granted freedom.  "Washington refused, on the ground that it would set a "dangerous precedent.""  When Washington died, blacks outnumbered whites in that room, Lepore writes.

Nearly 230 years after that revolution, the sitting President of the United States casually and callously referred to Haiti as a "shithole".

"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

Making my peace

Syria
Haiti
Afghanistan
Nigeria
...
The list is endless.  A list of countries with humanitarian crises.

Yet, the reality show candidate from the "family values" party has managed to make the year-plus long campaign all about him and his penis.  Nero playing the fiddle is, by comparison, a much more empathetic act!

A couple of days ago, the New York Times had these photographs of refugees..  Fleeing from a number of countries in Africa because of the chaotic conditions there.  So chaotic that they were willing to risk it all, by attempting to cross deep waters while crammed into boats.  Crammed enough that some died merely from the conditions in the boat.  In one boat that had about 150 people, rescuers found 29 bodies--10 men and 19 women.

Yet, we continue to be focused on the candidate and his penis.

Have we no sense of shame and decency?  Have we become so devoid of empathy, and so captivated by one man's penis show?

In an interview with National Public Radio, the photographer who took those photos had this to say:

the number may never go down if we as a Western society, we don't do something to stop all this conflict and war in their countries. We have the responsibility of what's happening there because maybe we don't help or we - you know, there is something that we could do better to help this situation.

What is that "better" that we can do?  I know one thing we could have done better--we could have made sure that we brought forward a candidate who would not put on a penis show.  That itself could have helped us think about, and discuss, some of the global priorities.  We could have attempted to understand how the candidates differ in their understanding of the issues and the policy ideas they have.  Instead, we have had nothing but a pornographic political theatre.

I have to make my own peace in all these.  I made a donation to my favorite humanitarian group--Doctors Without Borders.  In the grand scheme of things, my donation will not make a damn difference.  But, a man has got to do what a man has got to do.

And, even though a stranger mocks me in her email--in response to my latest newspaper column--all I can do is wish for world peace, fully recognizing my insignificant place in this political landscape.

Haiti: the only good news is about frogs?

It is a year since the devastating earthquake.  Last night PBS' Frontline was about Haiti.  Dutifully I turned in, and shut it off when I could not handle the horrible stories of rape.  For now, denial is working for me.

National Geographic Reports:

Scientists searching for long-lost frogs in Haiti’s forests came face to face with the critically endangered La Hotte glanded frog, which sees the world through unusual, sapphire-colored eyes.

The frog is among half a dozen newly rediscovered Haitian species, which had not been seen for nearly two decades and occur nowhere else in the world, found by researchers from Conservation International (CI) and IUCN’s Amphibian Specialist Group

“All we hear from Haiti is bad news and we wanted to highlight something unique that Haiti has and really should be proud of,” said Conservation International’s Robin Moore, an amphibian conservation specialist and co-leader of the expedition.

Why does god hate Haiti?

Religious believers tend to assume that all atheists are alike.  I suppose only atheists know that we are all very different in our socioeconomic and political outlooks.  For instance, the most visible face among atheists, Christopher Hitchens, might not have a whole army of atheists ready to take up the arms along his side, whether in Iraq or in Iran.  Equally interesting an intellectual is Heather Mac Donald who is at an interesting intersection of atheist outlook and libertarian-Republican politics.  She writes, in the context of Haiti and the latest of its problems, cholera:

Haitian-Americans in a Catholic parish in Queens, NY, have been ecstatically praying since an earthquake wiped out an estimated quarter-million of their island countrymen 10 months ago, following which Hurricane Tomas unleashed cholera in the survivors’ tent camps:

Certain women in [the] parish say so many Hail Mary’s on their own that [the pastor] no longer assigns them the prayers as penance for sins . . . In October, people packed into SS. Joachim and Anne, chanting and dancing and holding sick relatives’ pictures heavenward for healing.

Good luck with that.
(The New York Times displays the usual nauseating agnosticism towards the religious delusions of the left’s favored victim groups:

On a Saturday night in the basement of [the] mostly Haitian church in Queens, in a bare white room vibrating with hymns and exclamations, a young woman may find herself channeling the Holy Spirit to reveal news from Haiti.

Oh, really?  Yet let a Tea Partyer question the efficacy of deficit spending, and the Times will be certain at the very least to offer a contrary view.)
On this Thanksgiving Day, I am grateful for the human ingenuity that tries to foil such tragic Acts of God as the Haitian earthquake through heroic feats of engineering, and when such preventive efforts fail, that tries to save as many surviving victims through medical science.   I am grateful that human reason has conquered so much of the squalor and suffering that nature unleashes upon the world.  I hope that Haiti’s suffering comes to an end through tolerance, honesty, enterprise, and discipline.   
Happy Thanksgiving to all.

 Yes, here is to hoping that Haiti's sufferings will soon end

Remember Haiti?

In a world where attention spans that seem to get shortening everyday, and where crises abound, there is good chance that we have forgotten the horrible devastation to life and property after the earthquake back on January 12th.
The Guardian, from where I grabbed the photo, reports that:
In devastated Haiti, much of the promised aid has failed to materialise and many of the homeless are still sleeping rough.
The Wall Street Journal adds to this depressing state of relief efforts:

With European economies in trouble and the U.S. recovery weak, there are growing doubts over the generous financial commitments promised in a first rush of international sympathy.
"I have the sense that the government and the international community have lost the sense of urgency that we had at the beginning," says Edmundo Mulet, head of the United Nations peacekeeping mission here.

The way that WSJ report ends is even more tragic:

The World Bank estimates the quake caused $7.3 billion in damage, about 130% of GDP. The bank estimates Haiti will need a decade and more than $11 billion to rebuild. Within days after the earthquake, the United Nations raised some $960 million, of which it has spent about $357 million on relief operations.
There is no tally of private-sector donations, but they likely add up to at least $2 billion: The International Red Cross alone has raised $900 million it says it will spend on Haiti.
At a U.N.-sponsored conference in New York in March, donors pledged an additional $10 billion for reconstruction, with $5.3 billion aimed at the first two years of the process. But pledges have been slow in arriving.
"The money is not there," says Mr. Voltaire, the government's liaison to the U.N. "The Haitian people think the government is stealing the money, and the international community doesn't want to say there is no money, and the government, which doesn't communicate, doesn't want to say there is no money."

 If the WSJ report is this depressing, then I can only bet the situation is way worse than we can ever imagine :(

Earthquake in Chile, and Pat Robertson says ...

A deadly 8.8 magnitude earthquake.

The Haiti quake was a 7.0.  The differential, we ought to remember, is measured on a logarithmic scale.  A differential of 1 means that

each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in measured amplitude; as an estimate of energy, each whole number step in the magnitude scale corresponds to the release of about 31 times more energy than the amount associated with the preceding whole number value.

In other words, this Chilean earthquake was way, way, bigger than the Haiti quake.  But, the poverty in Haiti versus the relatively rich conditions in Chile correspondingly mean that a smaller shake in a poor country kills more people than a larger quake in a richer country. 

These are all reminders that we live on a relatively young planet, where there is a whole lot going on underneath the surface.  I will wait for experts to weigh in; but, my thought on reading this MSNBC news item "Is nature out of control?," is that it is pretty darn stupid to think that nature was ever orderly and well behaved!

Pat Robertson?  Well, a blogger has "divined" Robertson's mind and has issued a statement on the holy man's behalf :):

True story, in 1973 Chile elected a Communist to lead their government. The earthquake was punishment for that. God hates Communism. Also he is punishing Chile for electing a woman president, for not making their citizens speak English, and for having a country named after a food. And the queers too. The queers in Chile brought this on their country. Every time a hot young full breasted woman kissed another hot young full breasted woman right on the lips while their tongues snaked around each other and their heaving bosoms heaved while their soft hands caressed each other...hang on...what was I saying? Hmmmmm. Oh yes, this was all brought on by men having butt sex with other men.

American anthropologists discover inhabitants on an island near the US

The Onion reports that:

Less than two weeks after converging upon the site of a devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake, American anthropologists have confirmed the discovery of a small, poverty-stricken island nation, known to its inhabitants as "Haiti."
Located just 700 miles off the southeastern coast of Florida, the previously unaccounted-for country is believed to be home to an estimated 10 million people.
Even more astounding, reports now indicate that these people have likely inhabited the impoverished, destitute region—unnoticed by the rest of the world—for more than 300 years.

It is awful that the poor billions of the world register a blip on our radars only if a country attacks us, or if a tragedy strikes them. Otherwise, it is always "who cares" because "it is always about us"
The Onion has been doing its part to satirize this for a long time.  One of their clips I have used a couple of times in the past is the following one:

And, in a TED talk, Alisa Miller--the head of Public Radio International--described how much we in the US only care about ourselves ....

The awful problems in Haiti

Tyler Cowen on the Haiti situation (ht).  First, a reminder to donate to the Haiti relief efforts.

1. Since many financial institutions are closed, transport is difficult, and people don't all have their papers (fear of theft also may be an issue), it is almost impossible to receive remittances, which account for more than one-quarter of the country's gdp.
2. The current makeshift shelters are not robust to rain and storms and the rainy season is starting in May.  Rain also brings a greater risk of various diseases.
3. The price of food keeps on rising.  It was already the case -- before the earthquake -- that poor people commonly ate mud cakes as a source of nutrition.  54 percent of Haitians live on less than one dollar a day.
4. The party with the ability to make things happen -- the U.S. military -- isn't formally in charge and is sensitive to bad publicity.
5. In the Darfur crisis, eighty percent of the fatalities came from disease and disease has yet to begin in the Haitian situation.
6. There are already 150,000 accounted-for dead and many more uncounted.
7. It's by no means clear that the aftershocks are over and there is even some chance of a bigger quake to come.  This also discourages aid efforts and the construction of more permanent shelter.
8. Outside of some parts of Port-Au-Prince and immediate environs, external aid is barely underway yet damage is extensive.
9. It is not clear that the upcoming planting season -- which starts in March -- will proceed in an orderly fashion.  One-third of the country's population is living at loose ends and most of the country's infrastructure is destroyed.  For the planting season many Haitian farmers need seeds, fertilisers, livestock feed and animal vaccines.  That planting season accounts for sixty percent of Haiti's agricultural output.
10. Before a limb can be amputated, some doctors have to first go to the market and buy a saw.
Those aren't the only problems.

Haiti: At a loss for adjectives

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/01/haiti_six_days_later.html

Letter of the day: Satan to Pat Robertson :)

Dear Pat Robertson, I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll. You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract. Best, Satan

Source, and ht

Neither god nor satan caused Haiti's earthquake

I will leave it to two commentators: Christopher Hitchens, and Anne Applebaum.

Hitchens first:

On Nov. 1, 1755—the feast of All Saint's Day—a terrifying combination of earthquake and tsunami shattered the Portuguese capital city of Lisbon. Numerous major churches were destroyed and many devout worshippers along with them. This cataclysmic event was a spur to two great enterprises: the European Enlightenment and the development of seismology. Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were only some of those who reasoned that no thinkable deity could have desired or ordained the obliteration of Catholic Lisbon, while other thinkers—Immanuel Kant among them—began to inquire into the possible natural causes of such events.

Today, we can clearly identify the "fault" that runs under the Atlantic Ocean and still puts Portugal and other countries at risk, and it took only a few more generations before there was a workable theory of continental drift. We live on a cooling planet with a volcanic interior that is insecurely coated with a thin crust of grinding tectonic plates. Earthquakes and tsunamis are to be expected and can even to some degree be anticipated. It's idiotic to ask whose fault it is. The Earth's thin shell was quaking and cracking millions of years before human sinners evolved, and it will still be wrenched and convulsed long after we are gone. These geological dislocations have no human-behavioral cause. The believers should relax; no educated person is going to ask their numerous gods "why" such disasters occur. A fault is not the same as a sin.

Hitchens urges everybody to:

think first as a human being, and to give as much as they can to any relief organization at all, but most especially by contacting the newest secular aid group at Non-Believers Giving Aid.

Applebaum is dejected about the man-made disaster this is:

Though the earthquake was a powerful one, its impact was multiplied many, many times by the weakness of civil society and the absence of rule of law in Haiti. As Roger Noriega has written, "You can literally see [the] dysfunction from space": Satellite photos of Hispaniola, the island split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, show green forests on the Dominican side and bare, deforested hills on the Haitian side. Mudslides and collapsing houses were routine in Haiti, even before this disaster. Laws designed to prevent erosion, and building codes designed to prevent criminally shoddy construction, were ignored. The rickety slums of Port-au-Prince were constructed in ravines and on steep, unstable hills. When they collapsed, they collapsed completely.

So weak were Haiti's public institutions, literally and figuratively, that nothing is left of them, either. Parliament, churches, hospitals, and government offices no longer exist.* The archbishop is dead. The head of the U.N. mission is dead. There is a real possibility that violent gangs will emerge to take their place, to control food supplies, to loot what remains to be looted. There is a real possibility, within the coming days, of epidemics, mass starvation, and civil war.

I don't remember feeling this utter hopelessness about previous natural disasters.

 Too bad that there is very little possibility that Pat Robertson reads such commentaries.

Haiti: Donate now

Haiti, the tragedy

I wish David Brooks had stopped with the first half of his column.  The first half is wonderful, and to the point.  The second half .... 'nuff said.  The best part is this:

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty.

the country of Haiti .... does not exist any more

 Tyler Cowen: (ht)

Haiti is about the size of Maryland and a big chunk of the population lives in or near Port-Au-Prince, maybe a third of the total, depending on what you count as a suburb.  So the collapse of Port-Au-Prince is a big, big deal for the country as a whole.  It's a dominant city for Haiti.  Plus Jacmel seems to be leveled.  From the reports I have seen, my tentative conclusion is that the country as a whole is currently below the subsistence level and will remain so for the foreseeable future.  Hundreds of thousands of people have died, the U.N. Mission has collapsed, the government is not working (was it ever?), and hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people are living in the streets without reliable food or water supplies.  The hospitals and schools have collapsed.  The airport is shut down.  The port is very badly damaged.  The Haitian Penitentiary has collapsed and the inmates -- tough guys most of them -- are running free for the foreseeable future.  There is no viable police force or army.

In other words, it's not just a matter of offering extra food aid for two or three years.

Very rapidly, President Obama needs to come to terms with the idea that the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more. 

In what sense does Haiti still have a government?  How bad will it have to get before the U.N. or U.S. moves in and simply governs the place?  How long will this governance last?  What will happen to Haiti as a route for the drug trade, the dominant development in the country's economy over the last fifteen years?  What does the new structure of interest groups look like, say five years from now?

There is nothing there for me to disagree with.

For now, all I can do is repeat from my earlier blog post:

Want a real simple way to donate?

You can text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to American Red Cross relief for Haiti.

Or, the more conventional route: The American Red Cross is accepting donations through our International Response Fund.

Haiti earthquake: Donating is as easy as texting

Only yesterday it was that in my office I had a long conversation about Haiti with a student .... all because he used to serve in the US Coast Guard, and one of his toughest assignments was to escort back people trying to sneak in to the US, and this included Haitians.  An awfully poor country, he described.  This was during the violent and chaotic times with all the Aristide confusion ....
So, reading about the earthquake today makes that place very much real, with only one degree of separation .... As if they did not have enough problems on their hands ....

Want a real simple way to donate?

You can text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to American Red Cross relief for Haiti.

Or, the more conventional route: The American Red Cross is accepting donations through our International Response Fund.