Big Mike: God’s Hand In Haiti

This is the most challenging post I’ve ever written. How can I talk about anything — Sarah Palin, say, or some funny little tiff I had with The Loved One — when an entire city has been wiped out? Port-Au-Prince today stinks to high heaven of death.

There’s a line in Woody Allen‘s “Stardust Memories” wherein he says something along the lines of, I can’t ever enjoy myself as long as one person in the world is suffering.

To survive with our sanity intact, we need to have well-functioning denial mechanisms. Every minute of every day people around the world are being raped, murdered, chopped up with machetes, crushed by tyrants, and so on. We have to pretent none of it exists or else we’d become paralyzed by our own compassion and empathy. But sometimes something so huge happens that we have to take a break from worrying about who’s got the remote or why investment bankers are swimming in bonus cash again.

The Haiti earthquake is one of those huge somethings.

You’d think people would put aside their personal agendas and bullshit myths and rationalizations for just a couple of days while Haitians try to climb out from under their collapsed buildings. Just a little token of respect for human beings who are trying to survive another ten minutes on this Earth.

But no, there’s always an asshole. His name in this case is Pat Robertson. Here’s what he said about Haiti yesterday on his “700 Club” TV show:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon the third or whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Okay, it’s a deal….’ Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another. Desperately poor. The island of Hispaniola is one island. It is cut down the middle — on one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, et cetera. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to god. And out of this tragedy something good may come.

As he puked these words out, a crawl at the bottom of the screen showed a phone number his legion of god-zombies should call to donate money to his organization’s relief efforts.

Robertson clearly was referring to the Haitian slave revolt of 1791, when transplanted Africans threw the French out and formed only the second republic in the Americas. The establishment of Haiti as a nation governed by brown people is a landmark for anybody whose skin is not so pallid as Pat Robertson’s. I would have hoped a good man of god might view that as a rather cheery development but not this particular former serious candidate for President of the United States.

If only Haitians had remained under the yoke of slavery (a system the French, apparently, didn’t need the help of the devil to administer) they’d be as healthy and prosperous as their island neighbors. You know, the Dominican Republic, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world and more than 42 percent of its population living beneath the poverty line. But, of course, Dominicans are primarily white and Christian so they have to be living better lives than Haitians, even without the earthquake. Oh, and the Dominicans have great resorts, too. That counts for a lot.

Had the Haitian slaves not revolted, this damned earthquake wouldn’t have occurred! So kick open that wallet and send some good green to the 700 Club. It’d be the Christian thing to do, don’t you think? Or don’t you?

All I know is, Robertson had better show where every eff-ing penny of those donations goes. I’m afraid a lot of that money’s gonna go toward the son of a bitch’s next trip to a Dominican resort.

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