A nurse takes a woman's blood pressure in a makeshift camp in front of the national palace in Port-au-Prince on Thursday, January 14, 2010.
I'm going a little off the beaten track to comment on a particularly noxious editorial in The Wall Street journal under the headline Haiti's Tragedy. In the face of unmitigated natural disaste,r the role of the editorial in a newspaper falls somewhere between advocacy and analysis. The Globe's lead editorial Thursday was in this sense a model of probity and propriety. The Journal, on the other hand, took this obscene tragedy as a signal opportunity to promote a bizarrely self serving interpretation of the quake and its aftermath:
"The earthquake is also a reminder that while natural calamities do not discriminate between rich countries and poor ones, their effects almost invariably do. The 1994 Northridge quake was nearly as powerful as the one that struck Haiti, but its human toll was comparatively slight. The difference is a function of a wealth-generating and law-abiding society that can afford, among other things, the expense of proper building codes."
This is tantamount to suggesting that had Maldivans the wit to be born in a mountainous region of the world the effects of global warming on those soon to be swamped islanders would be considerably less severe. In an op-ed in Thursday's New York Times, Tracy Kidder points out that:
"Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. (In more recent years American administrations fell into a pattern of promoting and then undermining Haitian constitutional democracy.)"
The interests that The Wall Street Journal represents in making their "argument" regarding Haiti - Republican, parochial and xenophobic - will in this instance be overwhelmed by the better angels of the American nature. But make no mistake, the nutbar ideology that equates wealth generation with moral superiority is still abroad in the land to the south. Pray to God that their tea partying, gun totting insanity remains at bay.
(Photo: A nurse takes a woman's blood pressure in a makeshift camp in front of the national palace in Port-au-Prince on Thursday. Logan Abassi/United Nations)