America's Yet Unbridged Divide

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The election of President Barack Hussein Obama has cemented the fissure at the heart of American politics. It is a divide that ironically enough exists in the man himself. Part white, part black, like the antipathies made extant by his very name, Obama is the walking manifestation of the contradiction wrapped inside the enigma known as the U.S. of A.

Founded on the radical principle that "all men were created" the Founders promptly granted themselves the right to buy and sell others as chattel. Eighty years later the South would defend the practice by expounding states' rights yet at the outset it was the states themselves that often decided that owning other human beings ran against the Constitution. In fact, even earlier, in 1770, a colonial Massachusetts Superior Court found that slavery was unconstitutional on the basis of common law. In Georgia, the colony's governing trustees strictly prohibited the practice of slavery, declaring it to be not only immoral, but contrary to English law.

These early rulings were extraordinary when one stops to consider that in the mines and plantations across the 'New World' slavery was not only common practice but the backbone of Europe's economy. In fact were it not for the wealth of the plantation system, there might never have been an American Revolution.

"the vast sums pouring into France from Saint Domingue at exactly the same time made foreign aid to the New World a distinctly more attractive option than it would have been otherwise. The 1770s and 1780s were the richest decades Saint Domingue had ever seen. It goes without saying that the entire enterprise rested on the backs of the men and women whose labor powered it." --Ted Widmer

So why, if not the democratic conscience of the Founders, when it came to sanctioning slavery, was there an American exception? Simple: In order to manage the country's inherent contradiction the Right to Life, Liberty and Happiness was tacitly reserved for white skins. Despite the Massachusetts and Georgia court rulings, the Framers made sure that their "great Democracy" implicitly provided for slavery:

Article I, § 9 of the Constitution expressly states that "a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation not exceeding ten dollars for each person." Under Article IV, § 2, clause 3, the Fugitive Slave Clause, recognized the individual property rights of a slave owner in a slave, indicating a constitutional protection of slave property. Article IV therefore implicitly sanctioned the product that flowed from slave property, namely, slave labor.

John Locke himself, though he once eloquently deplored the practice, wrote Carolina's pro-slavery Constitution. And yet, through it all, the American people remained hopelessly divided. Aggrieved by their own frustrations, women understood that just as sexism justified their subordination, the pillar of slavery was America's racism. Conversely, when an angry mob killed the antislavery editor, Elijah Lovejoy, in Alton, Illinois, the North's poor were persuaded to join the abolitionists, not out of love for the African, but fearing the loss of their own liberties.

These historical contradictions persist, woven into our conceptions of the country itself. Which America one chooses to defend depends on whether a Constituted Right to Life, Liberty and Happiness was meant to extend equally from the days of George Washington to the contentious times of Barack Hussein Obama.

Celebrity, Care-Free

There is something tragically wrong when the distress of almost 10 million people is overshadowed by a pair of celebrated egos. No doubt, despite their recent sniping, Sean Penn and Wyclef Jean both mean to do well by Haiti, but when a columnist feels it just to write that "Wyclef Jean gave indispensable world attention to Haiti's incredible misfortune" one wonders what, in this age of international satellite television, does it take to arouse compassion? Are people still starving in Karachi because there is no Busta Rhymes to take up the cause of Pakistan?

Beyond what it says about our media/infotainment complex, this 21st century phenomenon points to the ineptitude, if not utter indifference, of our collective governments and institutions. Like New Orleans, Haiti's pain continues largely forgotten and those on the ground fear that the worse is yet to come.

Aid Fatigue?

It is almost impossible to believe but despite the horrendous images that followed the earthquake, James Dobbins, a former U.S. special envoy to Haiti and director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center claimed surprise at the scale of the damage.

"We (were) also somewhat surprised at the Haitian and international response. — so little of the rubble has been cleared, and so few of the basic decisions have been made."

It's hard to blame the Haitian government when you consider all the broken promises. As Jean Renald Clerisme, a presidential adviser, explained: "the Haitian government hasn't received the money it was promised by the donors, which it would need to buy land and reconstruct. 'At a big donors' meeting in New York, we were promised $10bn, but we haven't received even 2% of this money?"

So while the celebrities squabble and consume our attention, the suffering Haitian people are left to hold their breath and hope for the best.

Haiti's Poor: Dying For the Devil's Protection

Haiti's sad history speaks to the power of guilty projections and fear-based perceptions. That country's unexpected birth as a Free Black republic at a time when most Africans in the Americas were captive slaves is its only curse, but a curse which haunts to this day.

The reason men like Thomas Jefferson rejected manumission despite their denouncement of slavery was palpable fear. Fear that the slaves who had endured such cruel oppression would seek restitution in blood. The Haitian revolution made real those haunting fears, terrors which lurk in the American psyche, just as every peasant revolt in Europe conjured the horrors of the bloody French jacqueries five centuries after 1358.

It was fear of Haiti's poor that led its light-skinned rich to trade their country's future for French protection, a deal that would prove a true Faustian bargain. Now that fear of delayed black vengeance is once again causing needless suffering and heartbreaking death.



So why, after all this time, have the needed supplies not arrived? Again, that insidious fear of the poor and exploited black: "Violence in Haiti as residents fight to survive", says Johannesburg World News; "Violence in Haiti Hindering Aid Effort" trumpets the Associated Press; "Violence grows in Desperate Haiti" cries Sphere News. But how justified is the fear and our collective inaction. (Putting aside just how foraging for food comes to be criminal looting.)

Here's what those actually on the ground are reporting:
From the Guardian: The myth of Haiti's lawless streets. "To withhold aid because of the 'security situation' is a miserable excuse for agencies' failure to deliver desperately needed help."

Army Lt. Gen. Ken Keen of the U.S. Southern Command: "I must say, all the places U.S. forces have gone thus far have been very calm. [ ] Post-earthquake security problems are not impeding the U.S. military's humanitarian efforts." Apparently Lt. Generals do not tremble at the thought of facing dark-skinned jacqueries! That does not mean his mission is wholly benevolent.

"So send in the marines, okay?"
The Washington Post: "Haiti's elite spared from much of the devastation." "Through decades of coups, hurricanes, embargoes and economic collapse, members of the wily and powerful business elite of Haiti have learned the art of survival in one of the most chaotic countries on Earth -- and they might come out on top again."

From the WSW: "US military operations block relief efforts in Haiti"
"The US troop build-up is proceeding, citing as justification fears of possible “looting” by Haitians desperate for food and water—with the New York Times writing that “the threat of mass looting seems to increase by the day.” However, there have been no reports of violence against aid personnel.

Doctors Without Borders issued a statement yesterday protesting the US military’s continuing refusal to allow its planes to land at the Port-au-Prince airport. It quoted Loris De Filippi, the coordinator at Choscal hospital in the Cité Soleil neighborhood of Port-au-Prince: “they are begging us there in front of the hospital. It’s a very unacceptable situation. What we are trying to do is to expand our capacity to answer these calls. But we need supplies to get to the airport—and we don’t know why the planes are being redirected.”

So on top of being slandered by our Limbaughs and Robertsons Haiti's poor must perish so the rich can feel safe and secure. It's enough to turn the stomach to remember it was the same landed brown elite who first strained to join the Great Egalitarian Revolution.

Fattened for the Kill

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

In Haitian Creole the word for pig and bank is the same.

For almost a century, the indigenous Haitian pig had been the poor's most valued asset. Cheap to feed and easy to raise the Creole pig was literally the peasants’ "savings bank”— an asset that could be converted to cash when times were tough. They also aerated the soil; kept sanitation levels stable by eating household waste which they then turned into nitrogen-rich fertilizer. Even a vegetarian had to admire the virtues of Haiti's little black pig.

But that was decades ago.

When the latest swine flu scare erupted in Mexico the American pork industry shuddered. Pork lobbyists flocked to the halls of Congress desperate to assure the bacon loving public that their meat was safe to eat. Meanwhile in Egypt 300,000 pigs were being slaughtered.

Under pressure, the W.H O. responded: the virus was to be referred to not as the swine flu but rather the N1H1 virus. No doubt the poor in Haiti heard this and shook their heads. If only they had lobbyists back in 1983. Maybe they would not be here left eating mud.

In 1983 a rash of swine flu was reported in the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor on the island of Hispaniola. Supposedly afraid that the disease would affect its own pork industry the U.S. ordered its puppet Baby Doc Duvalier to eradicate the Haitian Creole pig or it would "shut down the country".

The Haitian peasant was given a choice: kill your pig or be buried beside it. But before you think the U.S. government heartless know that the Haitians were given white Iowa pigs as compensation. Only one problem... well actually two ... the fat white pig could not take Haiti's heat... or the spartan diet.

The peasants tried everything: they arranged to have special concrete houses to keep their new pigs cool (which the Duvalier government made them pay for). But the Iowa pig does not eat just anything. Special feed had to be imported but at the cost of about $100 per-year-per-pig the new white pigs were eating up more than a poor black peasant could ever expect to make.

There is a double irony to this allegory on race and modern capitalism. The white Iowa pigs had been kept fat by being drastically confined while the little black pigs had been free to forage. In order to keep their pigs from succumbing to disease (pigs have extremely efficient metabolisms) they were pumped with cocktails of prophylactic antibiotics.

As reported by Nick Kristof the consequence, besides the tainted excrement being absorbed in our soil and water supply, has been an outbreak of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) known as a “flesh-eating bacteria.” In 2005 the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that MRSA was killing more than 18,000 Americans each year, more than were currently dying from AIDS.

Well, I suppose it beats eating mud...