Mon Dieu

Lax codes, no steel reinforcements, likely plenty of seawater was used in cement mixing, has very seldom experienced any earthquake activity, it rains there everyday... meaning the dirt roads passing as main roads, the floor of the communities is mud, all the time, everyday. The scent of rotten mangoes permeates the atmosphere. In every home and small "whatever is being served regardless of the menu its fried rice" cafe hangs a poster portrait of Baby Doc. Probably illegal, but that doesn't mean much. Now, this place is not like anywhere else in the world. Obiah, dirty hands runs through the streams where water used to flow. After hours the donkeys scream over the walls. Ever heard a donkey scream? The winds rise, the seas roll, moorings slip free, things happen with no logical explanation. You'd have to be accustomed to Voodoo audio to get a night's sleep.

There are so many of more of them then Haitian Barack Obamas. Although there are people from everywhere camping out until something else somewhere else beckons. Jacmel - which is a town just over the mountain, a day's jitney to Port Au Prince (beautifully creative artworks with wheels and seats you share, sound systems tuned with high bass, squeeze your white person body in between boxes for suitcases wrapped with twine) is known for the damage done by Hurricane David. My friends there happen to be a Belgian couple (there is always a European couple in these places that have lived there seemingly forever) whose original reason for travel was a sail around the world. Their craft lies beached, keel even with the horizon, a 50 ft. rusting hulk of ribs, a memory of David and the reason they linger in Jacmel. I would tell you they are amazing people, but the last time I saw them it looked like they were well on their way into alcoholism. Harmless, genteel, soulful people in a very long drawn out painless suicide, after all, what future would they have in Jacmel in their condition. I have much love for them. Everyone they ever knew before the yacht was trashed must have been to visit them by now. Perhaps they have achieved a certain kind of fame, I wouldn't know, but I have met people in the US that know them and stayed with them. Not a coincidence. They have enough money to live richly in the poorest section of a decrepit and decadent slaveholder's town Papa Doc is reported to having said "would be forgotten" while visiting Jacmel to dedicate the new concrete dock because an onlooker spat on him. The people came to learn there was truth to those words as medical and dental services, eventually, all services passed them by, repeatedly. It may or may not be true, but it was explained to me by various people as if it were common knowledge. Undoubtedly, Jacmel is now in more serious trouble. I cannot imagine the horror unfolding, I know it is beyond our capacity to understand unless maybe you were caught under the rubble of the WTC. Think of an entire destitute country, clawed apart by big ag and panties manufacturers, women and children eating mud cookies, galvanized shacks abutting more galvanized separated by curtains of colored plastic strips, squatting because chairs are too precious, chickens and sick dogs roaming about the dwellings, potties spilled and broken, think of ground zero in Manhattan spread across French terraced mountains from the Caribbean to the Bay of Gonaives rippling out to Santo Domingo, to Kingston, to Havana, to the Grenadines, a 7.0 may well have been felt very far away. The aftershocks, 24 at this count, are registering 5.0 mag.

What are we going to do about it? Oh, the usual despite the adjective catastrophic proceeding disaster. Our grave media delivery men are vying for selection to do an on-location. We'll probably see Xe over there with AK47's and various microwave weaponry to maintain (maintain?) order because there is no order and there was so little, if any, to begin with. The victims will accidentally be referred to as insurgents by Harry Reid. Haiti will be observed to be comparable to a war zone. The missionaries have already landed.

You cannot say this is worse than Katrina. In the same way you wouldn't compare Banda Aceh with Pompeii, if you were not present at all of them.

They say the buildings that house the officials that would normally be in contact with the US State Department are lying in ruins. Rubble and dust. What could possibly lie ahead for Haiti now? How do people rebuild from nothing? Everyone living in daily catastrophic disaster before this morning will now live in the decaying rubble of catastrophic disaster for the remainder of their lives. They are a highly emotional people in general, they hold nothing back, if they cry, they wail, if they are happy, they dance in the muddy streets. Surely there are human cries tonight, swimming in fact in a vast sea of tears and for everyone, wretched conditions totally unimaginable to most Americans, from today forward.

The Americans will want to do something, they will be told to donate to the cause. There will be disaster relief movements and there will be carpetbaggers. If we were smart, instead of public relations celebrities, we would refrain from handling this disaster in the typical fashion. We should get food and medical supplies and experienced search and rescue workers over there. We should use Predator drones with thermal imaging to find the people under the rubble. We should get earth-moving equipment sent in now on C-130s. But already Hillary says its too difficult. Well, why Hillary? We do it for war, don't we? We made the world's largest luxury embassy city in Iraq and its too difficult to hop on down to Haiti? Our idle freighters can't spare a convoy? What is it, the fuel expense? If you are going to keep up appearances, you'd better reserve a little extra fuel for disaster aid.

It isn't cash this place needs now. I fear the corrupted will inhale any money appearing as aid and the Haitians will be left with debt in the quadrillions, possibly well into infinity. We must not put ANY restrictions on anything we should be giving freely as one people to another, no abortion restrictions, no medical trials on the desperate, no political fomenting dependent on aid. Give the gift of help without strings attached, is that possible? We need to stop this phony holier than thou superstar boss act now. This is the perfect time to put aside political posturing and do something good for someone else without taking back. However, the world being what it is, operating as it does, a lot of people will make a lot of money because disaster always brings the cockroaches out of hiding. This situation isn't an American situation, its a CARICOM situation, but the US has to meddle because as you will hear at any moment now, its the Christian thing to do. What about the real thing to do? That is a question you won't hear.

For the Haitians, if they are not deluged with more corruption than they already live amidst, they are used to working hard, inventive and imaginative and capable of evolving into a stronger country provided the corporatists of the econo-agro-ocracy back off.

At this moment a TV newscaster is saying Haiti is not capable of dealing with a disaster on this scale. We'll hear a lot about that in the coming weeks. I ask you, what did the early inhabitants of Planet Earth do when disaster struck? And what did the early peoples in faraway locations do? And we are still here, I think.

Now I'm going to relight the fire in the fireplace and sit on the hearth and send healing thoughts far south. Tonight I will sleep in a bed in a house while Haitians have nowhere at all to sleep or pee or gather their thoughts or just take a break. What else do we have they don't? We have a cowardice they lack. They do not hesitate to speak up and they speak from their hearts. They will go on because they have always gone on, all of life has always been unbearable suffering and its a hard, raw lifestyle that claws its living out of nothing yet lives. In comparison, we are marshmallows talking about survival. It is to weep.