Miserable Places

One of the books I’m reading at present is Tracy Kidder’s 2003 Mountains Beyond Mountains, a gift from some friends this summer. The focus of the book is the work of Paul Farmer, physician and anthropologist, healing the sick, diseased and infirm in disaster-ravaged Haiti. Farmer is a remarkable man, Kidder’s book on him is great and you should pick it up. An excerpt from the author’s site:

It was two weeks before Christmas 1994, in a market town in the central plateau of Haiti, a patch of paved road called Mirebalais. Near the center of town there was a Haitian army outpost–a concrete wall enclosing a weedy parade field, a jail, and a mustard-colored barracks. I was sitting with an American Special Forces captain, named Jon Carroll, on the building’s second-story balcony. Evening was coming on, the town’s best hour, when the air changed from hot to balmy and the music from the radios in the rum shops and the horns of the tap-taps passing through town grew loud and bright and the general filth and poverty began to be obscured, the open sewers and the ragged clothing and the looks on the faces of malnourished children and the extended hands of elderly beggars plaintively saying, “Grangou,” which means “hungry” in Creole.

I was in Haiti to report on American soldiers. Twenty thousand of them had been sent to reinstate the country’s democratically elected government, and to strip away power from the military junta that had deposed it and ruled with great cruelty for three years. Captain Carroll had only eight men, and they were temporarily in charge of keeping the peace among 150,000 Haitians, spread across about one thousand square miles of rural Haiti. A seemingly impossible job, and yet, out here in the central plateau, political violence had all but ended. In the past month, there had been only one murder. Then again, it had been spectacularly grisly. A few weeks back, Captain Carroll’s men had fished the headless corpse of the assistant mayor of Mirebalais out of the Artibonite River. He was one of the elected officials being restored to power. Suspicion for his murder had fallen on one of the junta’s local functionaries, a rural sheriff named Nerva Juste, a frightening figure to most people in the region. Captain Carroll and his men had brought Juste in for questioning, but they hadn’t found any physical evidence or witnesses. So they had released him.

The captain was twenty-nine years old, a devout Baptist from Alabama. I liked him. From what I’d seen, he and his men had been trying earnestly to make improvements in this piece of Haiti, but Washington, which had decreed that this mission would not include “nation-building,” had given them virtually no tools for that job. On one occasion, the captain had ordered a U.S. Army medevac flight for a pregnant Haitian woman in distress, and his commanders had reprimanded him for his pains. Up on the balcony of the barracks now, Captain Carroll was fuming about his latest frustration when someone said there was an American out at the gate who wanted to see him.

There were five visitors actually, four of them Haitians. They stood in the gathering shadows in front of the barracks, while their American friend came forward. He told Captain Carroll that his name was Paul Farmer, that he was a doctor, and that he worked in a hospital here, some miles north of Mirebalais.

I remember thinking that Captain Carroll and Dr. Farmer made a mismatched pair, and that Farmer suffered in the comparison. The captain stood about six foot two, tanned and muscular. As usual, a wad of snuff enlarged his lower lip. Now and then he turned his head aside and spat. Farmer was about the same age but much more delicate-looking. He had short black hair and a high waist and long thin arms, and his nose came almost to a point. Next to the soldier, he looked skinny and pale, and for all of that he struck me as bold, indeed downright cocky.

He asked the captain if his team had any medical problems. The captain said they had some sick prisoners whom the local hospital had refused to treat. “I ended up buyin’ the medicine myself.”

Farmer flashed a smile. “You’ll spend less time in Purgatory.” Then he asked, “Who cut off the head of the assistant mayor?”

“I don’t know for sure,” said the captain.

“It’s very hard to live in Haiti and not know who cut off someone’s head,” said Farmer.

A circuitous argument followed. Farmer made it plain he didn’t like the American government’s plan for fixing Haiti’s economy, a plan that would aid business interests but do nothing, in his view, to relieve the suffering of the average Haitian. He clearly believed that the United States had helped to foster the coup–for one thing, by having trained a high official of the junta at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. Two clear sides existed in Haiti, Farmer said–the forces of repression and the Haitian poor, the vast majority. Farmer was on the side of the poor. But, he told the captain, “it still seems fuzzy which side the American soldiers are on.” Locally, part of the fuzziness came from the fact that the captain had released the hated Nerva Juste.

I sensed that Farmer knew Haiti far better than the captain, and that he was trying to impart some important information. The people in this region were losing confidence in the captain, Farmer seemed to be saying, and this was a serious matter, obviously, for a team of nine soldiers trying to govern 150,000 people.

Thanks S and D.

Bike People

See… that sounded like an admonition, but you add a ‘for’ in there and it’s just a website.

Maybe in the same way that Republicans do things like pay $200 for a ticket to hear Sarah Palin speak not because they like her (yeah sure, even they aren’t that stupid), but because they know it pisses off liberals, maybe people will buy and ride bikes just because they know it will piss of conservatives.

Okay, I guess because we don’t derive joy in that way – or is it that we just get our kicks in other ways? – that won’t work. But you have to admit it is a kind of icing on a kind of cake.

_arm_n_

The government is playing a game of hangman with the auto industry, which, only using the two words ‘cars’ and ‘economy’, is missing a couple of important letters.

It’s not a game really. But the word they come up with is the key. Because what’s happening is that the auto industry will not return to what it was, and I can’t say whether this is objectively good or bad – the livelihoods of millions of people are at stake and will change because of it. I can say that the industry and its products were objectively unsustainable, never geared toward lasting, if you will. The term Rustbelt was earned, obviously.

What will it all change to? Many, smaller ventures, likely, but when you expand the word list to include fortune and manufacturing, the people at stake might be able to actually avoid completing the figure on the gallows.

The situation should make us (we seem to only respond to force) begin to think about post-industrialization in a different way perhaps, and not just in terms of a service industry where we make money from money but no longer make any thing. We will continue to need many things, primarily food and but also jobs, for people. How do you create jobs for people? How do you make food? Where did all the people who made the cars come from?

On a very related point, conservatives scream socialism! so often and so loudly that they don’t even see when something really is socialism, like the president firing the CEO of a major corporation and ordering another to sell itself. Another pitfall of a discourse littered with chickenlittle-type hyperbole.  The timing couldn’t be better for this short-term policy solution. When they might reasonably object to something, the moral authority has been used up in petty political slander. A self-neutralizing opposition is good for President Obama, but I trust they wisen up. There will be need to be smart, effective opposition, eventually.

Food, and where it comes from

There exist all manner of local food co-operatives and CSA ( Community Supported Agriculture) projects. In most of the rest of the world this is not a newsflash in need of acronyms; but even Americans are becoming increasingly in tune with what our far-flung system of food distribution hath wrought. Organic and long shelf-life don’t really go together, though if we demand them at any price, they can be found. But there are some truisms that crush this paradigm occasionally, like the fact that fruits are seasonal and vegetables taste best on or near the day they come out of the ground.

Enter Athens Locally Grown. Well… I did. Fresh and online, it’s the largest farmer’s market in Georgia. Watch below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKM3KW0Eo6w]