Even if blame lies everywhere except among the victims themselves, it doesn’t change the fact that Haiti will never get out of grinding poverty until it abandons much of its culture.Haiti, you see, has a "poverty culture" that transcends every other contributing factor to its misery. Haitian immigrants to America do well because "American culture not only expects hard work, but teaches the unskilled how to work hard." Goldberg is right about that: Read any slave narrative and you can see how African newcomers learned how to work hard in the face of the expectations of the lash. But I digress. Goldberg offers no evidence that Haitians don't work hard, leaving it to the reader to draw the conclusions that because Haitians are black and poor, they must be lazy.
What makes Goldberg such an expert on Haiti? I slogged through his biography and looked back through his archives at the National Review. Except for this one piece, I found no evidence that he has written about Haiti in the past or ever traveled there. He does, however, have a Haitian-American in-law -- apparently, some of his best friends are Haitian-Americans -- and read a book that allows him to compare Haiti with Switzerland and Japan and find it wanting.
The solution, Goldberg assures us, is "tough love." He doesn't say what that means and I don't want to know. I mean, how much tougher could it be there? Whatever the answers for Haiti may be, they include more love and less toughness.
Meanwhile, that anorexic cretin Ann Coulter "thinks" that Bill Clinton's participation in the bipartisan effort to assist Haiti is nothing but "shame and embarrassment." It's actually rather instructive to watch her appearance on Fox News (where else?), so click on the link. Earth to Ann and the wingnut right: You're carrying on about something that happened twelve years ago.
More to the point, President Obama did what other presidents before him have done in the face of a natural disaster: He asked the most recent ex-Presidents of each party to head a bipartisan fundraising effort. As for Clinton's reputation, if Coulter would get her head out of her Fox News, she'd know that he arguably has more international prestige than any other living American.
Where is Rush Limbaugh in all of this? He's persuaded that Obama and the Democrats are secretly delighted by the earthquake because it has allowed them to shore up support among African-Americans, who typically vote Democrat 95% of the time. Rushbo's latest paranoid fantasy is that Democrats will propose making Haiti a state. After all, "there's a lotta votes down there." Come to think of it, it's not a bad idea...
What would the nation do without Justice Anthony Kennedy and his commitment to free speech? Kennedy, who apparently stays up nights worrying that those poor, beleaguered corporations are denied their First Amendment right, authored the Supreme Court opinion that overturned decades of precedent to legalize corruption. He can drink some warm milk and go to sleep now, but what about the rest of us? There was already too much money in politics, but this decision will make everyone yearn for the good old days of 2008 when all it took was a billion dollars to get elected president. If there's a silver lining, it's that the decision is apparently so poorly reasoned and so unrelated to the actual case at hand that a more favorable court should have little difficulty overturning it. Just how old is Kennedy, anyway? More here and here...
Obama at one...
The baseball offseason offers Red Sox fans a chance to navel gaze, agonize over the past, and pick at old wounds. The top (or bottom) breakups in team history are here...
Witchi tai to...
As if it weren't enough that the rich get richer, the red take from the blue, too. (Thanks to Projections for calling my attention to this.)...
Posts
3 comments:
I've found that avoiding Faux Noise is good for my blood pressure, so I've avoided having to hear most of the catcalls over Haiti. When you listen to or read all the rhetoric from the Right over the President's response to the disaster in Haiti, you really can't help but see the rampant racism. They might as well raise the Southern Cross and have done with it.
That's quite a collection of renegade Sox! I still can't think about Dan Duquette without boiling over. And I loved the Spaceman and agreed wholeheartedly with his opinion of Don Zimmer.
I know many Haitians and their work ethic is beyond being a good American. Many of them work 2 and even 3 jobs to support themselves, their families here and their families in enforced poverty-stricken Haiti. The whole family has jobs, even the kids, though often the parents will insist the child not work during the school year, because -- guess what? Haitians also value education! Who knew?
And they have been contributing their asses off in every way from the first to get cash and supplies to Haiti -- when the U.S. couldn't manage to because the chaos was too great.
Roy: I have mixed feelings about Popeye because I always had a great deal of personal affection for him, regardless of his limitations as a manager. Hey, it wasn't his fault that management left him so pitching poor in '78 that he had to start Bob Sprowl in one of the Boston Massacre games.
Anyway, here's a good Zim story: When told that Ferguson Jenkins had called him a "fat, bald, old man who knows nothing about pitching," Zimmer came back with "three out of four isn't bad."
F: One of the biggest lies that the right has gotten away with since the days of Ronald Reagan is that the poor -- read "black and brown" -- are lazy and don't work. Of course, they work harder than anybody, just as you describe. The "poverty culture" argument is nothing new: There have been variations on it since Daniel Moynihan's report, which gave the right an opening big enough to drive a tank through.
Someone who knew better once told me that immigrants from south of the border should have to learn English. How and when, I wanted to know. Rural workers are herded together in concentration camps. Urban workers hold down multiple jobs and have to get around via inadequate public transportation. And anyway, first generation immigrants as a group rarely learn English. But the next generation picks it up just fine.
Post a Comment