Haiti: The Spectacle

Haiti falls
apart and America's journalists are on the ground, bringing us the
spectacle of devastation. We care, we donate, we shake our heads in
horror at the human toll of poverty.

A bare foot sticks out of a pile of cinder blocks.

"They've
been digging for five hours," says Anderson Cooper. He sticks his mike
in the rubble. Oh my God, she's alive. We can hear her screaming! "They
only have this one shovel."

OK, freeze frame. Something is so wrong with this picture, this moment: to be watching - live!
- in comfortable detachment as a group of men dig desperately, by hand
and with that single shovel, to free a 15-year-old girl trapped in the
wreckage of a building. Will they get her out in time? Suddenly it felt
like a "Star Trek" episode: "We have many extra shovels aboard the
mother ship, but it's important that the Haitians free their survivors
with their own tools. We're obliged to observe the cultural
non-interference policy, you see."

Cathy Lynn
Grossman, Faith and Reason columnist for USA Today, analyzed Cooper's
CNN report, a video clip lasting three minute and 40 seconds, as an
ethics issue. "How," she wondered, "do journalists balance their job -
bringing words and images of the suffering to those with resources to
help - with the immediate demands of a disaster? If we journalists drop
our pads, cameras, and microphones and dig one by one for survivors,
who will bring the word back to those who could help hundreds of
thousands?"

I see her
point and all, and have no personal criticism of Cooper, who was indeed
doing his job. And the girl, within the span of the video clip, was
rescued, seemingly unhurt. My sense of the obscenity of this viewing
moment - mike in the rubble, our live witness to the desperation of the
rescue effort - has nothing to do with the ethics of the profession, or
"ethics" at all. It's infinitely bigger. It's about the compromised
morality Cooper and most of his colleagues serve: the morality of our
relationship to poverty, and Haiti's poverty specifically.

Come on, we
know this, right? We don't exist in pristine isolation from "the
poorest nation in the Western hemisphere." Haiti - its infrastructure
on shocking display this past week, its belly torn open, bodies lined
up on the sidewalk, survivors wailing in unimaginable grief - is a
creation of the colonial West. More cruelly its creation than most
other Third or Fourth World states.

Rather than
portraying Haiti's tragedy virtually free of context, as spectacle -
here's how the incomprehensibly poor are forced to suffer in this world
(your donation will help) - responsible and useful journalism would
convey the tragedy in the context of serious questions about the nature
and causes of failed states.

I'm not
saying this would be easy, or simple. We would still see the desperate
survivors digging frantically in the rubble, or wandering the streets
grief-stricken, looking for the corpses of their loved ones. But pity
would turn to outrage if we began to see this tragedy in the context of
centuries of ruthless geopolitics, which left Haiti as it was just
before the earthquake hit: "a Fourth World failed state on a fault
line," as writer Ted Rall put it, without a government that could even
implement and enforce a building code requiring the steel-reinforced
construction that would have saved thousands of lives.

Haiti's
every attempt at self-government has been undermined by the West,
particularly France and the United States. In 1825, for instance, two
decades after the first successful slave rebellion in world history
ousted the French overlords from the island, France surrounded the
country with gunboats and demanded "reparations" - 125 million gold
francs - for their lost slave income. Haiti, under threat of
annihilation, capitulated to the extortion and spent the next century
hemorrhaging its own treasury to pay it off, putting itself in thrall
to French and American bankers.

The United
States, a slave-holding nation, refused to recognize free Haiti for 60
years. We invaded Haiti under President Wilson in 1915 and occupied the
country until 1934, diverting, according to Rall, "40 percent of
Haiti's gross domestic product to U.S. bankers."

From 1957
to 1986, the CIA-backed "anti-Communist" Duvaliers - Papa Doc and Baby
Doc - ruled Haiti with cruelty, stole millions, and ran up an enormous
international debt that has kept the country further mired in
impossible poverty. In 2004, we orchestrated the abduction of Haiti's
democratically elected and popular president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
His ouster thwarted any historical accounting of France's shakedown of
Haiti in 1825, for which Aristide had presented France with a bill for
$21.7 billion, including 179 years of compounding interest.

"They've
been digging for five hours," says Anderson Cooper. No, I'd say it's
been more like five centuries, ever since Columbus landed, thinking
he'd made it to India.