Nicholas Kristof, Charles Murray and the "Culture of Poverty"

Blaming the Poor for Their Own Poverty
by CAMERON RIOPELLE
Counterpunch
February 10-12, 2012

Nicholas Kristof and Daniel Patrick Moynihan have much in common. Namely, they have constructed variations on the “culture of poverty” argument. In “The White Underclass,” his recent op-ed piece for the New York Times, Kristof brings our nation’s favorite blame game back: “In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan released a famous report warning of a crisis in African-American family structures, and many liberals at the time accused him of something close to racism. In retrospect, Moynihan was right to sound the alarms.”[1] Kristof does not call Moynihan a racist—no, he is merely something close to racist. This is far from comforting.

Kristof, like Moynihan, blames poor black families for their own struggles. Unlike Moynihan, he graciously extends this blame beyond black families and to white families as well—an update for these colorblind times. With Kristof’s muscle, the “culture of poverty” argument is taking on the contemporary poor generally, purportedly without race in mind. He has a grudge against the poor because he thinks they do not get married enough, that they do not engage enough in nuclear family structures, that they use too many drugs, and they have the gall to think that capitalism might work for them, when it is obvious to everyone else that it does not: “But the glove factory closed, working-class jobs collapsed and unskilled laborers found themselves competing with immigrants.” With the poor forced to compete with the invoked specter of immigrants, Kristof concludes that the “pathologies” discussed by Moynihan are real and relevant, and that we must build our social policies with this blame in mind.

Kristof’s piece is inspired by a new book by Charles Murray, Coming Apart, which blames liberal social policy for these problems. On the surface, Kristof opposes many points in the book, but if Kristof’s musings on the poor are any sign of how liberal policymakers think about such matters, then Murray has already won his point. The language is so drearily predictable. The working-class are men. There is a fixation on drug use as if it is solely a problem of the working-class and the poor. There is a framing of blacks and whites against immigrants. That this narrative about race and poverty reappears so easily and is so accessible tells us what we should already know: this argument is antagonistic to the poor and it is popular enough that liberals and conservatives can readily agree about it and move on to the debate over whether liberal or conservative social policy can fix the problem. There is no fixing the imagined.

In order to make clear his benevolence to the working-class subjects of this article, Kristof is quick to inform the reader that he is from a working class background, born in Yamhill, Oregon. This is irrelevant. Regardless of one’s roots, it is misleading to inform us that “growing numbers of working-class men drop out of the labor force.” We should be accountable for what we write and for how we write it. The way he phrases it, Kristof blames the victim–and also assumes a general maleness on the part of the workers. Kristof’s solution to this “male problem” of joblessness is antiquated and moralizing: he suggests that men may be tamed into the workforce through the civilizing effects of marriage. Unemployment is not pathological. The jobless do not drop out of the labor force; the labor force drops out on them.

Cameron Riopelle is a Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois.

Be Aware: Nick Kristof’s Anti-Politics

By Elliott Prasse-Freeman
at the The New Inquiry

“How can you watch people die in the streets?”

“You don’t look, you close your eyes.”

Nicholas Kristof, Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times journalist, is often hailed as a defender of the downtrodden, courageously reporting those man-made events that “shock the conscience.” As he traipses the globe to report on its most grisly moments, Kristof is followed, physically and digitally, by a significant swathe of educated, upper-middle-class America: 200,000 people like his Facebook page, a million track him on Twitter, and that’s not to mention his column in the Times. He even periodically holds a contest to allow young journalists to follow him in the field. Hence, whether decrying sex work in Cambodia (Kristof once bought a young girl out of sexual slavery) or relaying images of hacked-apart bodies in Congo, Kristof’s witnessing reaches a significant number of people. His words diffuse through book clubs, church groups, and even think tanks and governments to shape grassroots activism and policy alike. On the issue of civilian deaths in Darfur, for which he won his second Pulitzer, both critics and supporters cite Kristof’s importance in shaping both the Save Darfur movement and the U.S. President’s opinion.

Kristof’s ability to frame and deliver the world’s horrors to millions—in a way that keeps those millions coming back for more—seemingly should make him worthy of the hero worship that has attended his rise. Indeed, what is worse than a privileged bourgeois population that knows nothing of the way the other half (or rather the other 99 percent) lives? And yet the devil as always remains in the details—or in Kristof’s case, the lack of details. For, when exploring why Kristof has become a high priest of liberal opinion in America (arrogating the right to speak on almost any sociopolitical phenomenon, provided it involves an easily identifiable victim), we crash into what can be called Kristof’s anti-politics: the way his method and style directly dehumanize his subjects, expelling them from the realm of the analytical by refusing to connect them to systems and structures that animate their challenges. Kristof’s distancing double move provides us with precisely what is worse than a bourgeois not knowing about the world’s horrors: knowing about them only enough to simultaneously acknowledge and dismiss them, to denude them of political and moral demand, to turn them into consumable and easily digestible spectacles. We are encouraged to look only so we can then close our eyes.

To address this apparent paradox—and to explore what social values, imaginaries, and desires Kristof embodies—I will introduce the concept of the open secret, arguing that elite American discourse is increasingly defined not by ideological obfuscation (where there are secrets that we just do not know), but by an insidious mélange where secrets still exist but also often seem somewhat open, recognized through the side of the eye, becoming things we must know but cannot acknowledge. Kristof is a virtuoso at introducing vexing questions about how various violences might have structural determinants … only to immediately silence those questions. As a result, his reporting allows us to process the trauma of a world of contradictions and incoherencies while concurrently collectively agreeing on an official and comforting narrative: that of progress through the diligent application of universal liberal values. Against Kristof’s double move—opening up the caesura, allowing the pressure to escape, closing it again—the project must become to begin thinking through ways of speaking our open secrets, of holding that caesura open and doing politics in the gap.

Close Reading

In order to grasp Kristof’s success, it is important to deconstruct his style and method. He is remarkably efficient with words, evocative through stories, and convincing in tone. After reading perhaps hundreds of his columns on the underdeveloped world, certain patterns emerge: Broadly speaking, Kristof often employs clever journalistic and prose devices to weave personalized traumas into bite-sized morsels of digestible horror. By playing on his audience’s Orientalist, classist, and racist fantasies, Kristof fabricates legible narratives out of snapshots of distant worlds. He then crafts stunningly simplistic solutions to the seemingly irrevocable problems that plague those backwards places. Kristof accomplishes this by using a standard and replicated formula: some mixture of (1) a construction of a bestial and demonic Other creating a spectacle of violence; (2) a rendering of the object of that horror—a depoliticized, abject victim, usually no more than a body; (3) a presentation of a (potential) salvific savior figure(typically the West writ large or a Western agent—some teleological process immanent in capitalism or development, the reader himself (who can act by donating money), and almost always Kristof himself as well); and (4) an introduction of potential linkages with larger systems and structures … only to immediately reterritorialize around the non-political solutions and the savior implementing them.

We can illustrate Kristof’s rhetoric by reading him closely. “From ‘Oprah’ to Building a Sisterhood in Congo” exemplifies his oeuvre. As the title indicates, Kristof begins by grounding the story (he describes himself in a “shack” in a DRC village) through the mediation of Lisa Shannon, an American who has found herself a long way from home. Why is she here? The answer comes in a tableau of horror: Militiamen (the bestial Others) inexplicably invade the home of a Congolese named Generose (the abject victim) and proceed to do terrible things to her. Instead of glossing these details to get to the story’s point, Kristof encourages the reader to connect viscerally and voyeuristically with a victim who is not only stripped of politics and identity, but also of clothes, becoming simply and only a body and a name:

As Generose lay bleeding near her husband’s corpse, the soldierscut up the amputated leg, cooked the pieces on the kitchen fire, and ordered her children to eat their mother’s flesh. One son, a 12-year-old, refused. “If you kill me, kill me,” he told the soldiers, as his mother remembers it. “But I will not eat a part of my mother.”
So they shot him dead.

(emphasis added)

The imagery here is staggering: Generose is rendered, with leg hacked off, lessthan her body. In the inexorable arms race of reducing people to bodies, rape—the violation of the body—is supplemented and then superseded by maiming and cannibalism, where the destruction and consumption of the body lead to its partial elimination. But this serves Kristof’s objectives well: Here the body creates more symbolic capital by virtue of becoming less than itself. Because somehow this is not enough, the young boy stands up in the face of evil to be shot down, made the sacrificial lamb who will need to be resurrected and redeemed.

Besides introducing the Other and the victim, this section has an important additional effect: It serves as a way of silencing. Against the suggestion that Kristof should gloss the details of the horror to get to the point of the story, it becomes clear that those details are the point. As a result, the horror is too great to be responded to politically; politics is callous, insensitive, inadequate, somehow just not enough against this evil. The effect of this technique is to leave the reader stunned, numbed, and disarmed, waiting for something to make this horror go away.

Enter the third part of the triptych: the witness who plays the messianic role, both for Generose and the reader. Shannon, leading a normal life in the U.S., heard about Generose’s story in a normal way (by watching Oprah), yet she makes the extraordinary and laudable decision to go live in the DRC. Consequently she becomes the true subject of the rest of Kristof’s column, not only the redeemer for the boy and the body left behind as residual but a surrogate for the reader as well. She goes so we don’t have to. As a way of highlighting Shannon’s sacrifice, Kristof further infantilizes Generose:

“God sent me Lisa to release me,” Generose told me fervently, as the rain pounded the roof, and she then compared Lisa to an angel and to Jesus Christ.

Scrunching up in embarrassment in the darkened room, Lisa fended off deification.

To be clear, believing in Jesus does not make one an infant. But the way Generose is portrayed—saying outlandish things while our heroine squirms awkwardly—presents Generose as not being sophisticated enough to grasp the awkwardness that her statement would induce. Generose is too simple or too irreconcilably traumatized.

Consequently, the reader connects even more intensely with the savior, empathizing not just with her sacrifice but with sacrifice in the face of such savages who cannot understand the way one should communicate. Hence, even as Kristof insists that these women share a kinship connection (the title of Shannon’s book is 1000 Sisters), the reader is encouraged not to see them as part of the same humanity.

It’s worth noting here that Kristof publishes photos and names of his victims, indicating that he does not see them as part of the same discourse and hence is free to treat them as objects. This is consistent with a larger point: In Kristof, the victim is wholly constructed and constituted by violence, or more specifically, violence that can be turned into narrative. She (and it’s usually a she) literally doesn’t exist until violence is done to her body and Kristof reports on it; she ceases to exist when violence is cleansed away through the savior’s ritual act. The victim does not continue on and face ordinary problems such as impoverishment or limited access to health care. She has served her purpose, and Kristof is off to report on the next mass rape. So he can use her name and photograph—she doesn’t exist afterward anyway.

This narrative, however, constitutes only the easily assailable part of a Kristof column. In many ways the most important part typically occurs next and is gone so fast that the reader almost misses it:

While for years world leaders have mostly looked the other way, while our friend Rwanda has helped perpetuate this war, while Congo’s president has refused to arrest a general wanted by the International Criminal Court, while global companies have accepted tin, coltan and other minerals produced by warlords—amid all this irresponsibility, many ordinary Congolese have stepped forward to share the nothing they have with their neighbors.

Here, ever momentarily, there is a mention of broader linkages—but only so they can be dismissed. We hear vaguely about the “irresponsible” international community, another state (Rwanda), big business, a global institution (the ICC), but what are the connections between these actors? How do they lead to the violence done to Generose? We don’t know, and Kristof does not encourage us to ask. Indeed, if Kristof believed that the challenges of the postcolonial state—the patterns of extraction that preempt industrialization and economic structural transformation, the destructive geopolitical machinations by states ostensibly defending human rights—were really problems, wouldn’t he spend more time on them?

Moreover, what are we supposed to do about this? Hold our government to account? Question the consumption patterns of our society and ourselves? No, we are supposed to give money and celebrate Congolese resilience, and be aware. Hence, despite appearing critical, Kristof’s model column is actually pacifying, paralyzing, mystifying, and in these senses is profoundly conservative. I compare this moment to the introduction of a vaccine, where a bit of the virus (politics) is allowed into the bloodstream (the field of vision of the American bourgeois) so that it can immediately be eradicated by the immune system (the reterritorializing power of the comforting American progress-through-charity ideology). Hence, this potential hinge point where the piece could be made meaningful is instead taken the opposite direction, toward the ordinary-people-helping-themselves-with-a-little-help-from-their-friends trope. Kristof concludes by emphasizing the easy charity solution, returning to the horror at the beginning but recodifying it, infusing it with hope:

Lisa is organizing a Run for Congo Women…with Congolese rape survivors participating. You can sponsor them atwww.runforCongowomen.org. And one of those participating in the run, hobbling along on crutches and her one leg, will be Generose.

The reader smiles at the power of the (sub)human spirit: “hobbling along on one leg,” like an animal. And scene.

Short-Circuited Awareness

What are the social and political ramifications of this kind of document? People may defend the story because it is somehow true, because Kristof saw it, and therefore he is “raising awareness.” But what is to be done with this knowledge? What kind of awareness has he really raised?

Notice how in Kristof’s writing (and in Western advocacy campaigns writ large) “raising awareness” involves shaming citizens around knowledge rather thanaction: “Did you know this is going on?” one exclaims, while clutching her pearls. “Oh yes, I did read about that. Just terrible, isn’t it?” goes the appropriate response.

Merely knowing about (parts of) it rather than doing something about it signifies the critical orientation toward the phenomenon. And as a result, Kristof’s attempts to shock the conscience serve, perversely, to push out the frontier of what no longer offends or alarms. As his tales of horror are continually processed into the new normal of horror (rape of five-year-olds? That’s old hat. Only rape of four-year-olds shocks anymore), readers not only expect always greater horror but come to demand it weekly. Note also that one of the main actions one can take is to simply write on Kristof’s blog in support of, well, awareness.

Keeping readers in a constant state of becoming aware creates an indefinite loop that would be laughable if it were not so productive. And while it produces awareness of abused bodies over there, it resolutely refuses to make readers aware of their complicity in those abuses. The material conditions that reinforce the world’s structural violences apparently do not qualify as awareness-worthy.

As a result, awareness makes the reader less educated about what animates a horrible situation and less equipped to respond to it conceptually or politically.

Kristof’s kind of awareness-raising is a vacuous (and vapid) tautology that motivates no social change but rather exists to serve itself, an endlessly churning machine to project the ultimate liberal humanitarian fantasy: a clean, orderly, decent world without having to change anything. His glosses become social facts that are difficult to displace.

Rebuttal: Writing Differently

If the typical Kristof piece on the underdeveloped world actually does harm, the task becomes to ask, “What would it look like to not write like this?” It can be done, but even though critique itself is productive, providing a material alternative can sometimes be more politically useful.

Rewriting Kristof involves two objectives, the first flowing into the second. First, we’d invert the way Kristof thinks of his story’s main characters, discarding the typical necessity of mediating the object-body’s story through the gaze of the Western avatar. In discarding the surrogate, we gain 200 words to better tell Generose’s story, and in telling it, we would start with a simple thought exercise: How would we write about Generose if she were the audience of her own story? That is, if she and her family would read it, rather than it being read only by thousands of people thousands of miles away? Would we present her as an animal? Or would we try to tell her story in a sensitive way? Would we allow her to remain an object of violence? Or would we allow her to become a subject—not an empowered subject (because it is clear that she has endured horrible things that are not of her choosing) but a political subject, a human subject with a variety of concerns that go beyond her being hacked to bits?

That story might explore the daily challenges of village life, only then moving on to explain why she was attacked. On this, we would propose questions or theories with the help of local academics, NGO members, Generose herself. Was her village seen as a source of resources for the local militia? Was violence deployed to pacify the population for the purpose of political control? Did these militiamen have grievances that motivated their actions? These questions would not excuse the violence but rather make it explicable. If it was simply deranged, senseless brutality, these questions would put that in context.

That paragraph would contextualize Generose, making her a political actor part of a larger political economy. But what is that larger political economy? This is where the first part of our story dovetails with the second: examining broader linkages that produce the conditions that allow Generose to be subjected to these abuses. Filling in the abyss that Kristof creates between those bodies over there and the readers here would involve looking at Congo’s history. Not mentioning U.S. support for the Mobutu regime that began this cycle of violence is noteworthy. For the purely venal objective of selling papers, wouldn’t that bring Kristof’s readers further into the story? Whether this is an intentional obviation by Kristof’s editors, sloppiness on Kristof’s part, or simply his unwillingness or inability to think politically is an open question. We would then contextualize DRC against other African economies, outlining how DRC stands as a particularly egregious case of the general pattern of exclusion through incorporation that attends natural-resource exporters.

This alternative article would not require vast amounts of research. Kristof uses academic literature fairly often, the critical difference is that he focuses on thestatistics of suffering rather than the structures of violence.

Instead, a story must simply provide analysis that interrogates those structures and hence the reader as well: Is the ICC really a legitimate tool, given that its foundation prevents it from policing the great powers? Does that illegitimacy create blowback that could lead to more violence and suffering (as with al-Bashir expelling humanitarian workers from Darfur)? How do we constrain the global profit motive when we as consumers require cheap and available goods? Going beyond awareness, our article would make connections between the rapacious extraction of wealth committed by Wall Street and the violence experienced by those, like Generose, at the end of the line.

Channeling the Needs of the Symbolic

Against this critique, a common defense of Kristof is that by putting us in the scene so viscerally he gives heretofore invisible subjects a human face, thereby allowing the reader to enter into the scene and then act. The close reading above shows that Kristof resolutely does not give his victims any humanity. It also shows that any action that he recommends would likely do little sustainable good. But does he succeed at least in opening up new opportunities? Will his readers learn, become more involved, go beyond his impoverished glosses? Put differently, would anyone read the alternative version above? This is a more vexing question, and it returns us to the deepest power of the Kristof column: the vaccine.

In an article entitled “Sewing Her Way Out of Poverty,” Kristof again deploys his standard four-part formula. Here the Other is poverty, the object is Jane the former “prostitute,” and the saintly Westerner is a woman named Ingrid Munro who changes Jane’s backward ways: “Jane was pushed to save for the future, to lean forward.” The narrative continues as expected: From squalor and a life squandered, Jane carves her perilous path out of poverty, helping her children get to school. But then:

catastrophe struck. Cynthia’s big toe was mangled in a traffic accident, and ultimately it was amputated … Jane devoted every scrap of savings to medical costs—leaving Anthony unable to return to school. Our documentary team took up a collection, and Anthony is now back in class.

But the crisis was a reminder of how fragile the family’s gains are. Jane’s life reflects the lesson of mountains of data: Overcoming poverty is a tumultuous and uncertain task, but it can be done.

Here Kristof puts his argument’s self-contradiction directly in the reader’s face and dismisses that contradiction with an ingenious device: not by refuting the contradictory element with reasoned argument, but by blithely ignoring it. To wit: For Jane to stand as a success story (using NGO intervention to “overcome poverty”), the reader must understand her to have achieved enough income or assets to, for instance, prevent a random accident from making her incapable of covering basic needs (such as school fees). Yet this is precisely what happened to Jane, who was only saved (again) by the largesse of Westerners who just happened to be there at that time (and charitable—or duped—enough to give). Thus, the success story that Kristof showcases would have been a failed case if not for his own intervention! That this plays to Kristof’s adoring fans is beside the point—it effectively operates as a way of recodifying the meaning of “overcoming poverty.”

We are left realizing that such an overcoming does not signify structural transformation of a society and political economy such that a health shock would not leave one again in destitution. Nor does it suggest that poverty alleviation involves a political project whereby the damned of the earth can demand and then achieve better conditions. Instead, Kristof himself bestows the passage from poverty as a gift.

Kristof then couples this with another substitution: Jane’s passage out of destitution (tenuousness as it is) becomes a synecdoche of the “mountains of data” that show that “anti-poverty programs work.” He symbolically projects Jane as representing all those struggling in miserable material conditions. And yet, against the suspicion that poverty is too complex to be “sewed out of,” Kristof closes this gap by asserting that (1) what we are doing is just fine (simply give money) and (2) no political changes on our part are necessary (no restructuring the global economic architecture through different trade policies, taxation regimes, different aid platforms, etc.).

This returns us to this essay’s opening epigraph. In the 2011 film In Time, the underclass hero asks the privileged heroine how she can stand to observe inequality that results in people dying before her. She responds, “You don’t look, you close your eyes.” Read metaphorically, this means the stratified society builds devices that allow one to remain effectively blind to its divisions, eyes closed. But perhaps we should read the exchange superficially: Stripping away any Hollywood artifice, we are left with a person who sees the horror before her and then choosesto close her eyes. Because how could she know to close her eyes if she didn’t look in the first place?

This is the quintessential distillation of the parallax: looking without looking, knowing what not to know. And because we cannot figure this out on our own, we learn when and why to close our eyes from those who are experts at opening and closing them.

Kristof’s sad gift is to act as a perfect exponent of the symbolic order. He is one of those rare few who have totally mastered the symbols and affects of society, who by being completely captured by them is able to be one with that order and hence capable of reflecting and magnifying social desires back to society, guiding us through collective decisions about normative goals and goods.

Looked at this way, focusing our ire on Kristof appears mostly misplaced. Slavoj Žižek writes that institutional desires are somewhat autonomous of their members, rather acting to produce their constituents. We can think of the New York Times and its readers as a site operating analogously: Both directly (through the editing process) and indirectly (through book deals, blog posts, and numbers of Facebook likes for particular articles), Kristof receives feedback on the desire he helps create. The Times animates him, rewards him, slightly corrects him when/if he ever goes off script, etc. The Times in turn is responsive to and hence animated by our symbolic order itself. It becomes clear that if there were no Kristof, we would create another one.

Where does this leave us? We should not despair at Kristof’s rise to prominence. The circuit constructed between liberal subjects on one hand and political-economic and symbolic power structures on the other—which Kristof stories flow through and help reinforce—is hardly impregnable. This has much to do with the era of the open secret.

While the residue or gap that constitutes the open secret can assist in sublimating potential pressures, allowing people to become cynical and enervated (“What can we do, we all know the system is set up against us … yet no one will admit it!”), it can also liberate us from constantly uncovering secrets, expecting that information will itself change people’s minds. The era of the open secret lets us see the obscene underbelly and the official, insisted-upon truth in one field of vision. Given this, the task is not to try to find and broadcast some Truth but rather to make interventions on social desire itself.

This might be better illustrated with an anecdote. Psychoanalyst Felix Guatarri once relayed a story about an octopus swimming around polluted Marseille harbor, happy as an octopus could be, despite (or actually because of) the muck. An artist took him out, put him in clean water, and the octopus promptly died. The points here are (at least) three. First, this may serve as a metaphor of life under postindustrial capitalism: We are these octopuses, and the things we value and seek out have been so fashioned by our massive political-economic and symbolic machine that if we were to be presented with something that might appear objectively good (clean water), we might reject it and die. Second, there are no objective interests: The octopus demonstrates that once desire becomes refashioned, there’s no going back. The Kristofs of the world are able to adapt, and then tap into this social desire; the left often cannot. Hence projects should not hysterically project beliefs or practices based on deduced rationality; the cleanliness of the water is radically subject to the perspective of the octopus in question.

Finally, there is opportunity for improvisation: Desire has changed, and it can change again. This will likely occur by mining the gap between the official discourse and its underbelly, and using that contradiction—and the trauma that speaking it causes—to shatter the agreed-upon common sense. This would entail not simply screaming the truth from the rafters—and as a result perhaps creating reactionary rejection (a more aggressive and obdurate shutting of the eyes)—but rather using that act of speech to rejigger values and ways of seeing, such that closing one’s eyes is still possible but no longer desired. This article is hence not meant as an exposé of some Truth about Kristof, but rather an attempt to make it slightly neat or even cool to no longer objectify the poor or ignore our arbitrarily privileged position within a brutal global political economy.

Occupy Wall Street may (perhaps inadvertently) provide us with a particularly sophisticated example of how to “speak” the open secret: By not speaking—by resisting attempts that would coerce it into making legible claims—OWS performs demands on others to think and act politically. To wit, when mainstream Kristof-types attempt to capture OWS by reducing it to a set of policy prescriptions, OWS remains silent. When cynics insist that “we don’t know what you want,” OWS, as Doug Rushkoff suggests, says, “I don’t believe you.” In refusing to provide a solution that nests comfortably inside the existing system of power relations, OWS both effectively denies the cynic’s acceptance of the open secret (where we must pretend that the system is containable through regulation; that it won’t produce as a matter of course stratification, exploitation, and crisis; that capitalism can be made to work for the middle class), as it also makes a fairly radical demand on everyone to begin thinking what the system might look like instead.

Haiti - What the Press Coverage Tells US

The Horror of Haiti




Dissident Voice
January 22nd, 2010

by John Chuckman


It is relentless, the pictures of terror-stricken people, broken limbs, and bloated dead, and many of us cannot stand to see or hear more.

One has to ask: what are we to do with such information?

Create pressure on governments to keep the assistance flowing? Perhaps, but there is no shortage of assistance being sent to Haiti. There is however a huge problem in Haiti’s limited ability to absorb the assistance.

Whether it’s small and inefficient sea ports, one small and inefficient airport, a lack of decent roads, and a lack of government direction – all aspects of any place as poor as Haiti – it takes time for outsiders to come in, unload their cargoes, and organize a distribution network from scratch.

Certainly the disturbing reports and pictures are useless from the point of view of prevention. It was a natural disaster, not to be predicted, not to be prevented. One could argue that post-disaster investments could ameliorate events the next time there is an earthquake. But the kinds of images and reports being broadcast will be long forgotten if and when the world’s governments get around to re-building.

So the question for me remains, what are we to do with such information?

I am reminded of another disaster, one that happened in the last few years. It was not a “natural” disaster but the deliberate work of the immensely powerful.

In this other disaster, roughly a million people died, about five times the current estimate of death in Haiti. I don’t know how many were crippled, but it must have been a great number. This other disaster created more than two million refugees fleeing for their lives. Most of them fled to poor but generous countries, not being welcome by the rich and powerful, and especially not by the country responsible for the mayhem.

As far as pictures and reports, most of them seen in North America were sanitized. Many if not most of the reports were dishonest, clearly not informing people of the magnitude of the horror as it happened. There was a brave group of reporters who produced images every bit as terrible as those we see from Haiti, including scores of hideously mangled children.

But those pictures were not broadcast in North America, were not published in The New York Times or other newspapers “of record.” Indeed, the reporters taking these images and writing tough reports actually became targets of the forces causing all the horror.

I’m referring, of course, to the invasion of Iraq, an event whose toll of killing and damage easily compared to the dropping of a thermonuclear bomb on a good-size city.

Of course, the great and bitter irony is that that disaster was both preventable and could even have been stopped once it had started. One could almost guarantee that publication and broadcast of pictures and reports comparable to what’s now coming from Haiti would have stopped that demonic brutality. Here indeed gruesome, truthful press coverage could have made a difference, but not in Haiti.

And there was another, smaller disaster recently, smaller but still terrible, and it was completely preventable. In this one about 1,400 people died, including 400 children, and a great deal of the infrastructure of a relatively poor people was destroyed. The damage cannot even be repaired because those responsible for the horror maintain a siege on the victims, allowing no material assistance to be delivered.

Here too you likely will not have seen the kind of pictures or read the kind of stories coming out of Haiti. Some were available – I recall one of poor people trying to avoid stepping in a stream of blood flowing down a narrow street – again the work of amazingly brave reporters, but their work could only be found at not-widely known sites on the Internet. None were published or broadcast by the establishment press in North America. These events occurred in a place called Gaza.

If you think the press is objective, if you think the press does not slavishly serve the interests of the powerful, you just might want to think again.
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See also the excellent article by Mirah Riben on adoptions from Haiti in the wake of the earthquake.

Blood Diamonds

I finally saw “Blood Diamonds” last week. The movie was difficult to watch for a number of reasons and I had to stop about half way through, do something else until the nausea passed before I could finish it.

The story is fairly predictable: tough, worldly wise, white man searches for jewels and riches in jungle, meets white woman, and finally redeems himself.

The lead character in the movie Danny Archer is an Afrikaner, or “Rhodesian” as he euphemistically prefers to call himself, who smuggles weapons into Sierra Leone, trades them to the RUF guerrillas for uncut diamonds and smuggles the diamonds out. He had also served in Angola as part of the South African military presumably during the 80’s when the South African Defense Forces entered Angola to fight with UNITA and were accused of repeatedly of atrocities against civilians. For example in a 1978 attack South African troops killed more than six hundred Namibians at a SWAPO camp in Angola. South Africa's Truth Commission called it "one of the biggest single incidents of gross [human rights] violations." For many veterans of the South African military, however, it is still celebrated as the largest paratroop drop since World War II and "a complete success," with "at least 608 SWAPO fighters killed" and only four dead among the attackers. More recently mass graves have been found near SADF camps.

Nice guy.

To make this despicable man palatable, the director casts one of Hollywood’s heart throbs Leonardo DiCaprio in this role. The baby faced Archer shows up in a plane – tough talks to a bunch of RUF militia and commander – who you cant help thinking would have this guy for breakfast in real life if he didn’t have the white establishment behind him.

He’s caught trying to cross the border on foot with the diamonds sown into a goat’s back. One is left wondering why they didn’t fly over the border using the same plane they came in. In the meantime, the devastiatingly handsome model, Djimon Hounsou, who plays Solomon Vandy has also been captured, first by the RUF to work in the diamond fields then by the Army and they both arrive at the same prison. Archer interest in Solomon is piqued when overhears a RUF commander accuse Solomon of hiding a large “pink diamond.”

The contrast between these two characters is striking – Archer is calculating, able to make decision and take actions to protect himself and his interests both financial and personal. Solomon on the other hand seems incapable of any thought or action to save himself or his family. Even though he finds the diamond and tries to hide it, he’s found out and only saved by fate as the army attacks the rebels at that exact moment. As the movie unfolds he falls from one disaster into the next unable to save himself and seems on the verge of despair until he finally accepts Danny’s offer of help in exchange for showing him where he hid the diamond.

Probably the only sympathetic black character with some semblance of intelligence is the savvy black bartender M’ed (Ntare Mwine). He’s obviously the kind of person westerners relate to when they are in Africa – people in the service industry who “befriend” then and who get them things not otherwise easily accessible, drugs, women, and guns in the case of Danny. According to the script: “Every war zone has a place like this. Soldiers, smugglers, opportunist of every stripe stand shoulder to shoulder at a bamboo bar. Bad guys and do-gooders, UN workers and eco-backpackers drink overpriced, watered down liquor, trade gossip and hook up for desperate expatriate sex.”

At one point when the bar is damaged by some shelling Danny tells M’ed that it “Might be time to get your family out my friend.” M’ed : “And go where, mahn? Jus’ fire up de chopper and fly away like you people? No, mahn, dis my country. We here long ‘fore you came and long after you gone.” You know then that M’ed has just become another of Hollywood expendable black man. Later we see him dead in the background.

At the bar we are introduced to Maddy(Jennifer Connelly) – an American journalist. Perhaps unwittingly, Zwick shows us an uncomfortable reality - the way most American journalists work nowadays – from their hotels in an alcoholic haze talking with other expatriates. Maddy has only been there four months but seems to know all of Archer’s professional history as well as his connections to the underground diamond trade – names, places everything. Even as she sanctimoniously lectures him, you know she will be falling for the white lead in the movie. Within minutes of meeting him she peppers him with questions and asks for his help with a hint of sex to trade for it. Embedded American journalists! Later she offers to help Solomon find his family – but only because Archer promises her a scoop – waving his notebook that presumably documents names, dates and places.

At one point in the movie Archer is telling her how his parents were brutally murdered and she melts into his arms all of his repugnant past actions are justified and forgiven.

As with Archer and Solomon, the contrast between the two main military commanders, one black and the other white, couldn’t be more cartoonish. On the one side is the hilariously named RUF commander Captain Poison, and the South African Mercenary Colonel Theo Coetsee. One is 60, suave, handsome, cultured and drinks martinis, the other is vicious, young, ugly with a deformed eye, covered by a pirate eye patch and smokes joints. In reality Coetsee would have mutilated and killed many more people than Poison ever could yet he painted with a sympathetic brush while Poison in spite of his emancipating rhetoric is shown as pure evil. Towards the end of the movie, Coetsee gives orders to snuff out the population in a whole area while the RUF lives among them. The South African lives comfortably on a farm, surrounded by wealth and status, putting him in the same class as the other whites portrayed in the movie and one can imagine him easily mixing with the hypocritical western diplomats seen in the movie. Poison on the other hand is a man who scrapes out an uncomfortable existence never sure if he will live to see another day. Coetsee is coldly efficient and professional while Poison is volatile, disorganized and impulsive. Yet the real exploiters of Africa are portrayed sympathetically while those who, however misguided, fight for their land’s self determination are vilified.

There are instances of racism depicted casually throughout the movie, it would seem to provide the same dirty pleasure provided by documentaries on “sex trade” and “prostitutes in Thailand, Philippines or Russia” type documentaries on TV or the sexploitation movies that exploit and moralize simultaneously. Archer brushing off girl prostitutes callously, African getting out of a white man’s path, Archer telling Solomon, “I know people, white people. Without me, you’re just another black man in Africa, all right?” Perhaps the worst incident occurs during march through the countryside as the dynamic between Archer and Solomon changes imperceptibly to that of master and slave. When Archer commands Solomon to head in a particular direction (toward the diamond) rather than the camp where Dia might be staying, the father refuses to follow orders. “You gonna need some of that old discipline, eh?” taunts Archer. Again, Solomon denies him, “You are not the master.” But then Archer reveals what’s at stake, not just power and wealth, but racism, calling Solomon “kaffir.” But Zwick shows its true colors when he has Solomon say “I know good people who say there is something wrong with us, besides our black skin, that we were better off when the white men ruled.”

As Rebecca Beirne states: It is this statement that echoes across the film, acting as a justification of and incitement to colonialism, disavowing the role colonialism has played in creating Africa's problems, and proclaiming that Africans are childlike or savage beings that need white masters to rule over them in order to stop them from killing one another: a chilling message from a contemporary Hollywood feature film, and a reflection of how much western societies' attitudes have cycled back to the colonialist mentalities of time past.


Here is another review