By Any Other Name

by Eileen McGuire-Mahony | 7:21 pm, January 16, 2010 | Comments Off

People who live on fault lines shouldn’t play at geology…or something like that.

The point is, Danny Glover is an immoral ass.

Pat Robertson, who is also an immoral ass, is currently being lambasted in every language that has a newspaper for his crass delight in pronouncing Haiti’s misery to be the just wrath of ‘God’.  But all his conspicuous prayers are directed at a god who, if he exists, deserves to be condemned rather than praised. 

Honestly, what sort of loving and kind deity expresses his displeasure at one group, presumably the love ably decadent denizens of America, by visiting so much suffering on a third party?  And what sort of blessed fool worships such a ninny?

Well, Hollywood.  Specifically, Danny Glover, who is skating after ascribing the soaring death count, ready-to-explode epidemics, and shortages of everything to…global warming?

When news of the earthquake broke, I mused to myself, ‘How long will it be before someone blames all this on global warming?’.

Well, I was right and I wish I hadn’t been.  Danny Glover, who himself has yet to be punished for appearing in the ‘Saw’ franchise, delivered himself of the opinion that the Haitian earthquake was the result of not reversing the last 100,000 years of human progress in Copenhagen.

PPC currently has our best research monkeys trying to discern where Mr. Glover earned his Ph.D. in geology and seeking to ascertain when he received this divine knowledge from the powers that be, and we will update you as soon as we know something.

But bashing over-baked actors for pontificating on things they can’t properly pronounce is retreading old ground.  Let’s get down to the real problem here.

First, as Britain’s Daily Telegraph phrased it, Glover would have been called to task more had he summoned, as did Robertson, “a less-fashionable deity”.  When we being to allow people to get away with uttering the same offenses that we crucify others for based on the political spin on the respective statements, we are in trouble.

Second, asking us to accept that mystical forces mete out ‘justice’ on a cosmic scale not to those supposedly in the wrong but to those who are already the most poverty stricken and desperate is not only a stunning display of ignorant supernatural hokum, but is stating that the world is governed by malevolent and senseless forces.  And that is one step removed from saying that our actions have no meaning and we have no direct control over the arena in which we live out our days, absent prostrating ourselves before unknown forces.

Third, this rubbish politicizes natural disasters.  The Haitian earthquake occurred because the relatively small Caribbean Plate, surrounded on three sides by the North American and South American Plates, both of which are moving westward at approximately 3 cm a year, has an eastern border that runs perpendicular to the direction of relative plate motion, subjecting the Caribbean Plate to both compression and subduction.  At the point where Plate curves to form the northern border motion shifts to running parallel to relative motion, meaning that east-west strike-slip motion is highly likely.  And Port-au-Prince sits directly at the point where the Caribbean Plate’s eastern borders curves to become the Plate’s northern border. 

This made a major earthquake inevitable, but Haiti’s poverty and corrupt government made preparation a tactical impossibility.  And so, when the Enriquillo Fault, a major slip fault running across Haiti’s southern end, ruptured, it caused a 7.0 magnitude earthquake with an epicenter only 25 km from the capitol, and numerous smaller quakes for several hours after.

All the same rules of physics, laws of motion, and known peculiars of nature happened, as they have in every earthquake that has ever happened.  No magic, no retribution from an otherworldly realm of global warming wingnuts.  PPC would be interested to learn if Mr. Glover has prepared an exhaustive dossier on what insult to Gaia is responsible for ever seismic shift and natural disaster in earth’s history.  Until that eagerly awaited publication sets science on its ears, have a hot, steaming helping of facts here, and seconds iffin-you-want.

What was avoidable was the agony  that is only now beginning.  Shortages of water, food, shelter, medical supplies, trained personnel, and rescue equipment, the collapse of what little technology and communication infrastructure did exist, the contamination of what wasn’t crushed or washed away, disease let loose from corpses in the street, secondary deaths due to the delay in getting rescue teams and equipment in place, lack of sterility and modern techniques in providing medical care, and so on.  Make no mistake, every woe that Haitians dealt with before the quake exacerbates these conditions.

Already, we are hearing of riots, looting, and now we’ve got Aristede with his pretense of concern ready to stroll back in.  Meanwhile, the soi dissant cultural arbitrators are exploiting this as a way to spear their political enemies.

Haitians, those killed and those left to mourn, are human beings.  They are dignified moral creatures, each one an end in his own right.  They did not deserve the lives they faced every day and they did not deserve the quake that hit them.  The earthquake was a natural disaster that was going to happen sooner or later – any geologist could have told you.  Their tragic lack of preparation and nonexistent response capability is someone’s fault, though.

It is the immediate fault of the succession of petty tyrants who treated Haiti as a family toy.  But those who luxuriate in a fantasy land where industrialization never happened should look to Haiti, and to far too many other states, to see what it really looks like to live without benefit of modern amenities – hygiene, medicine, technology, infrastructure – what it looks like when men subsist without benefit of advents in agriculture, water purification, and construction.  And they should take a very hard look at the state of human dignity in a nation that has not recognized the modern, Western concept of equality before the law, women’s rights, human dignity, and the limited sphere of the government’s control over human life.

As for Mr. Glover, would you dare to look a survivor of Haiti’s disaster in the eye, a man who has survived the initial shock but who may not survive the aftermath, a man who can’t reconcile his fear of never seeing loved ones again with his fear of seeing what they look like when they are found, and telling him that all his agony is justly deserved for failing to be close enough to the earth?  And then will you send him back to his hard scrabble farm as proof of the dignity of man in nature?

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