MITHRIDATES
Funny. You would think a good Republican would want to wipe his hand on a Haitian after touching the man whose lending policies caused the financial crisis and whose failure to pursue Al Qaeda led to 9/11, not the other way around.
Showing posts with label haiti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label haiti. Show all posts
Friday, March 26, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Limbaugh, Parks Book Their Seats on the Jerk Jet
PHUTATORIUS
If there were an abundance of justice in this world, and said justice had poetic license to act — certain persons in this world would swap places with the suffering citizens of Haiti. Of course Pat Robertson would be named on the passenger manifest of Justice Air's next flight from Pampered Prosperity to Port-au-Prince. And if I had my way as booking agent, two other nimrod passengers would be joining him.
I was conflicted when I wrote about Pat Robertson the other day. What can be said about this nimrod that is new or interesting? And when it's obvious the guy's motivation in saying appalling stupid things is a need for attention, to stay "relevant" and in the public eye, isn't simply ignoring him the better and more constructive thing to do? Yeah, probably. But I'm a weak person, in my soul, and I'm insufferable. Some things I just can't let slide. So it is with Limbaugh, who because of my susceptibility to The Ridiculous wins the moral (if inconsequential) victory of seeing his name in print on Feigned Outrage, on the strength of an obviously calculated bid to "make waves" in the Eastern Caribbean.
More...
Limbaugh took to the airwaves with great vigor and vitriol last week, declaring that President Obama's attention to the crisis in Haiti was a cynical and opportunistic attempt to score political points. Geez, sound familiar, Rush? (Um, er, sound familiar, Phutatorius? All right, Writer's Conscience: knock it off . . .) Rush went on to suggest that Democrats will "use this to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community, both the light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country," adding that "Besides, we've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax."
Now let's assume for a moment — this will take effort — that Limbaugh isn't completely full of shit here. Let's assume that the President's "motivations" for rallying citizen support for the Haitian relief effort and his orders to the U.S. military to assist with the transport and distribution of supplies are purely political. So frickin' what? At times I've given change to someone in the street, and I've felt good about myself afterward, and I've asked myself whether the fact that I felt good about myself — and so gained something from it — detracts somewhat from the pure benevolence of the act. The answer to that question is undoubtedly "Yes." No act of kindness is totally and completely selfless, and that fact should never — never ever ever — cause a person to refrain from acting kindly. Barack Obama is our President. He's therefore The Person in the World Best Positioned To Do Good for Haiti. That goodwill might gather to him as a result ought to be a secondary consideration.
We have aisle seats in coach and Business Class still available, Mr. Limbaugh. Please note that federal regulations prohibit smoking in the aircraft cabin, and we'll kick your fat, freaky ass if you tamper with the smoke detectors in the lavs.
Lest it should appear that the work of nutjob politicizing the Haiti crisis is exclusively the province of the American right, let's board our next passenger, Alexia Parks of The Huffington Post. In response to President Obama's appointment of Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush to lead the Haiti Relief Effort writes the following:
Somewhere in this post, there might be the shade of a suggestion that the Bush Administration's policies toward Haiti might delegitimize relief efforts led by Dubya. But you'd have to work really hard to extract that logic from Ms. Parks's effusion of outrage. At best, then, this is a lost opportunity to make a plausible point. At worst — and this is what I'm inclined to believe — this comment is politics at its most unreadable.
I'm sorry, Ms. Parks: you'll have to check your ideological baggage at the end of the jetway, as it won't be able to fit in any of the overhead bins.
And it raises an important corollary to the point I just made about Limbaugh: just as it ought to be immaterial why the U.S. is trying to get help to Haitians in great danger and distress, it ought, too, to be immaterial who does it. But this is an observation entirely lost on the likes of Ms. Parks. It puts me in mind of folks on the left who loved to complain that the U.S. government, under Clinton, did not adequately address the Taliban's deplorable treatment of Afghan women. And then, suddenly, when a Republican Administration sends troops in to dislodge that regime by force, many of the same folks objected.
At bottom, I think I need to be a better person. A lot of folks are pulling together to help alleviate the situation in Haiti — with their money, with in-kind donations, with their own blood, sweat, and tears. 99.99999997% of the people in this world have responded to this crisis in ways that attest to our shared human values. That ought to be enough for me.
And maybe it will . . . once we've cleared this Jerk Jet for takeoff.
Donate.
If there were an abundance of justice in this world, and said justice had poetic license to act — certain persons in this world would swap places with the suffering citizens of Haiti. Of course Pat Robertson would be named on the passenger manifest of Justice Air's next flight from Pampered Prosperity to Port-au-Prince. And if I had my way as booking agent, two other nimrod passengers would be joining him.
I was conflicted when I wrote about Pat Robertson the other day. What can be said about this nimrod that is new or interesting? And when it's obvious the guy's motivation in saying appalling stupid things is a need for attention, to stay "relevant" and in the public eye, isn't simply ignoring him the better and more constructive thing to do? Yeah, probably. But I'm a weak person, in my soul, and I'm insufferable. Some things I just can't let slide. So it is with Limbaugh, who because of my susceptibility to The Ridiculous wins the moral (if inconsequential) victory of seeing his name in print on Feigned Outrage, on the strength of an obviously calculated bid to "make waves" in the Eastern Caribbean.
More...
Limbaugh took to the airwaves with great vigor and vitriol last week, declaring that President Obama's attention to the crisis in Haiti was a cynical and opportunistic attempt to score political points. Geez, sound familiar, Rush? (Um, er, sound familiar, Phutatorius? All right, Writer's Conscience: knock it off . . .) Rush went on to suggest that Democrats will "use this to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community, both the light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country," adding that "Besides, we've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax."
Now let's assume for a moment — this will take effort — that Limbaugh isn't completely full of shit here. Let's assume that the President's "motivations" for rallying citizen support for the Haitian relief effort and his orders to the U.S. military to assist with the transport and distribution of supplies are purely political. So frickin' what? At times I've given change to someone in the street, and I've felt good about myself afterward, and I've asked myself whether the fact that I felt good about myself — and so gained something from it — detracts somewhat from the pure benevolence of the act. The answer to that question is undoubtedly "Yes." No act of kindness is totally and completely selfless, and that fact should never — never ever ever — cause a person to refrain from acting kindly. Barack Obama is our President. He's therefore The Person in the World Best Positioned To Do Good for Haiti. That goodwill might gather to him as a result ought to be a secondary consideration.
We have aisle seats in coach and Business Class still available, Mr. Limbaugh. Please note that federal regulations prohibit smoking in the aircraft cabin, and we'll kick your fat, freaky ass if you tamper with the smoke detectors in the lavs.
Lest it should appear that the work of nutjob politicizing the Haiti crisis is exclusively the province of the American right, let's board our next passenger, Alexia Parks of The Huffington Post. In response to President Obama's appointment of Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush to lead the Haiti Relief Effort writes the following:
No, President Obama. NO! You cannot take this step. It is like opening the door to looters and thieves. This act must be undone. It is not bi-partisan. ItMs. Parks goes on to suggest that the Bush appointment impliedly introduces Dick Cheney into the relief effort, presumably based solely on Bush's prior association with Cheney, as nothing I've read remotely suggests that Bush and Cheney signed on as a package (or, for that matter, than they're forever joined at the hip).
is foolhardy, and shows the degree to which the Bush and Cheney drones are still
undermining real change that must take place, top to bottom in Washington.
* * *
What Haiti needs is visionaries, not vacuous placeholders.
Somewhere in this post, there might be the shade of a suggestion that the Bush Administration's policies toward Haiti might delegitimize relief efforts led by Dubya. But you'd have to work really hard to extract that logic from Ms. Parks's effusion of outrage. At best, then, this is a lost opportunity to make a plausible point. At worst — and this is what I'm inclined to believe — this comment is politics at its most unreadable.
I'm sorry, Ms. Parks: you'll have to check your ideological baggage at the end of the jetway, as it won't be able to fit in any of the overhead bins.
And it raises an important corollary to the point I just made about Limbaugh: just as it ought to be immaterial why the U.S. is trying to get help to Haitians in great danger and distress, it ought, too, to be immaterial who does it. But this is an observation entirely lost on the likes of Ms. Parks. It puts me in mind of folks on the left who loved to complain that the U.S. government, under Clinton, did not adequately address the Taliban's deplorable treatment of Afghan women. And then, suddenly, when a Republican Administration sends troops in to dislodge that regime by force, many of the same folks objected.
At bottom, I think I need to be a better person. A lot of folks are pulling together to help alleviate the situation in Haiti — with their money, with in-kind donations, with their own blood, sweat, and tears. 99.99999997% of the people in this world have responded to this crisis in ways that attest to our shared human values. That ought to be enough for me.
And maybe it will . . . once we've cleared this Jerk Jet for takeoff.
Donate.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Haiti and Pat Robertson's Petty and Incompetent God
PHUTATORIUS
Pat Robertson says Haitians got their just deserts in the form of a 7.0 earthquake, because their ancestors "made a pact with the Devil" to get out from under the French. At risk of generalizing, I'll venture the notion that a lot of the time people say really stupid things because they don't think before they talk. This is the greatest of gifts to bloggers, because it allows us to do the thinking-through afterward, and so we end up with a fairly newsworthy post.
So let's get to what I believe to be the considerable flaws in Pat's thesis.
More...
There is some historical support for the suggestion that Haitians conducted a voodoo ritual in advance of the 1791 insurrection against French colonist occupiers:
There is no evidence that the Haitians obtained the assistance of the Devil, necessarily, as their Lafayette, but we'll cut Pat a break on this point and assume he was taking some rhetorical license here. The upshot is that Haitians turned on the white Christians who were brutalizing and enslaving them, and they enlisted the aid of a god of their own. That god wasn't Pat Robertson's God, these Haitians weren't practicing as Christians, and so there's basis enough here for divine retribution 220 years later, in Pat's view. Fine. Done.
It's what happens next that doesn't make any sense. First, the Haitians win. That is, the side aided by the Devil triumphs over the Christian French, and the Haitians are awarded independence. You'd think Pat Robertson's God, if He were All That, could have nudged his army, better trained and resourced, to victory over this ragtag bunch of rebels with Ogoun/Satan backing them. But it's commonly the case that Satan presents counterparties to his contracts with earthly spoils, only to have them lose their immortal souls in the process. That's the way divine justice works, after all: win here and now, lose later and Elsewhere. That could well have happened in this instance.
Except it seems Pat Robertson's God was Heaven-bent on earthly retribution, and so, after stewing for some 220 years, PRG slapped this week's earthquake down on Port-au-Prince. These two centuries of delay might seem like the bat of an eyelash to the Embodiment of Eternity, but the practical effect of it is that none of the folks at the voodoo ritual were on hand to suffer the result of the quake. PRG, being omniscient, would have known this, and yet He acted anyway. This starts to look a lot less like justice than it does about revenge — particularly when you consider that God, being omniscient, would be well aware of the old saws that "justice delayed is justice denied," whereas "revenge is a dish best served cold."
But of course even in the case of revenge, you'd want to make sure that your act of vengeance was directed at the very persons who have offended you. Now it may be the case — Pat doesn't discuss this — that certain persons in Haiti continue to practice voodoo in lieu of Christianity. Maybe those folks could fairly be the object of PRG's transferred wrath. Still, though, an earthquake is a rather blunt instrument with which to knock out nonbelievers. One would think that Pat Robertson's God, being omnipotent, would be able to smite and strike down anyone he pleased, with perfect precision. Until I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume that not every victim of this earthquake had it coming, in Pat Robertson's terms.
(And what about folks in the Haitian Diaspora? Some 60,000 Haitian emigrés live up here in Boston, where the ratings for The 700 Club are low and dissipated liberal elites sleep in on Sundays? Why do the emigrés get off scot-free? Shouldn't the scourge have been sinner-centered, and not simply directed at a spot on the globe? God has to be better than this. Seriously: if this is how it works, Pat, don't be surprised to find Mithridates and me slaughtering a pig in your back yard tomorrow. Hey, everybody can dream . . .)
Which leads me to my next quibble with Robertson's thesis: why punish at all? One would think that Pat Robertson's God, being omnipotent, would not be overly concerned about whether folks down here are adequately crediting and revering Him for His works in this earthly realm. It seems to me that if You're not secure in Yourself, then You're not really all that omnipotent. I mean, geez: Your son forgave the Romans.)
Finally, I don't think Pat thought through the implications of his argument. If a nation-state can be so tainted by its close association with a non-Christian faith, then do we not have an obligation, as His agents on Earth, to follow PRG's example and destroy those countries with overwhelming force? Pat, are you endorsing a foreign policy by which we affirmatively act to obliterate all non-Christian nations? I don't think even you would say that out loud.
If Pat's arguments about Haiti are true, then he believes in an insecure, tottering, ham-handed God who holds grudges too long and acts erratically in discharging them. For my part, I think this says more about Pat Robertson than it does about God.
If you liked any of this, donate $100 to the American Red Cross to help the poor people in Haiti. If you didn't, donate $200.
Pat Robertson says Haitians got their just deserts in the form of a 7.0 earthquake, because their ancestors "made a pact with the Devil" to get out from under the French. At risk of generalizing, I'll venture the notion that a lot of the time people say really stupid things because they don't think before they talk. This is the greatest of gifts to bloggers, because it allows us to do the thinking-through afterward, and so we end up with a fairly newsworthy post.
So let's get to what I believe to be the considerable flaws in Pat's thesis.
More...
There is some historical support for the suggestion that Haitians conducted a voodoo ritual in advance of the 1791 insurrection against French colonist occupiers:
This event was a Petwo Voodoo service. On the evening of August 14th Dutty Boukman, a houngan and practitioner of the Petwo Voodoo cult, held a service at Bois Caiman. A woman at the service was possessed by Ogoun, the Voodoo warrior spirit. She sacrificed a black pig, and speaking the voice of the spirit, named those who were to lead the slaves and maroons to revolt and seek a stark justice from their white oppressors.See also Dutty Boukman's Wikipedia entry.
There is no evidence that the Haitians obtained the assistance of the Devil, necessarily, as their Lafayette, but we'll cut Pat a break on this point and assume he was taking some rhetorical license here. The upshot is that Haitians turned on the white Christians who were brutalizing and enslaving them, and they enlisted the aid of a god of their own. That god wasn't Pat Robertson's God, these Haitians weren't practicing as Christians, and so there's basis enough here for divine retribution 220 years later, in Pat's view. Fine. Done.
It's what happens next that doesn't make any sense. First, the Haitians win. That is, the side aided by the Devil triumphs over the Christian French, and the Haitians are awarded independence. You'd think Pat Robertson's God, if He were All That, could have nudged his army, better trained and resourced, to victory over this ragtag bunch of rebels with Ogoun/Satan backing them. But it's commonly the case that Satan presents counterparties to his contracts with earthly spoils, only to have them lose their immortal souls in the process. That's the way divine justice works, after all: win here and now, lose later and Elsewhere. That could well have happened in this instance.
Except it seems Pat Robertson's God was Heaven-bent on earthly retribution, and so, after stewing for some 220 years, PRG slapped this week's earthquake down on Port-au-Prince. These two centuries of delay might seem like the bat of an eyelash to the Embodiment of Eternity, but the practical effect of it is that none of the folks at the voodoo ritual were on hand to suffer the result of the quake. PRG, being omniscient, would have known this, and yet He acted anyway. This starts to look a lot less like justice than it does about revenge — particularly when you consider that God, being omniscient, would be well aware of the old saws that "justice delayed is justice denied," whereas "revenge is a dish best served cold."
But of course even in the case of revenge, you'd want to make sure that your act of vengeance was directed at the very persons who have offended you. Now it may be the case — Pat doesn't discuss this — that certain persons in Haiti continue to practice voodoo in lieu of Christianity. Maybe those folks could fairly be the object of PRG's transferred wrath. Still, though, an earthquake is a rather blunt instrument with which to knock out nonbelievers. One would think that Pat Robertson's God, being omnipotent, would be able to smite and strike down anyone he pleased, with perfect precision. Until I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume that not every victim of this earthquake had it coming, in Pat Robertson's terms.
(And what about folks in the Haitian Diaspora? Some 60,000 Haitian emigrés live up here in Boston, where the ratings for The 700 Club are low and dissipated liberal elites sleep in on Sundays? Why do the emigrés get off scot-free? Shouldn't the scourge have been sinner-centered, and not simply directed at a spot on the globe? God has to be better than this. Seriously: if this is how it works, Pat, don't be surprised to find Mithridates and me slaughtering a pig in your back yard tomorrow. Hey, everybody can dream . . .)
Which leads me to my next quibble with Robertson's thesis: why punish at all? One would think that Pat Robertson's God, being omnipotent, would not be overly concerned about whether folks down here are adequately crediting and revering Him for His works in this earthly realm. It seems to me that if You're not secure in Yourself, then You're not really all that omnipotent. I mean, geez: Your son forgave the Romans.)
Finally, I don't think Pat thought through the implications of his argument. If a nation-state can be so tainted by its close association with a non-Christian faith, then do we not have an obligation, as His agents on Earth, to follow PRG's example and destroy those countries with overwhelming force? Pat, are you endorsing a foreign policy by which we affirmatively act to obliterate all non-Christian nations? I don't think even you would say that out loud.
If Pat's arguments about Haiti are true, then he believes in an insecure, tottering, ham-handed God who holds grudges too long and acts erratically in discharging them. For my part, I think this says more about Pat Robertson than it does about God.
If you liked any of this, donate $100 to the American Red Cross to help the poor people in Haiti. If you didn't, donate $200.
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