Bush’s reticence is well advised. His initial proposal of the program sparked a bitter backlash from the traditionalist, anti-immigration wing of his party that threatened to shatter his grass-roots base. Three weeks after Bush’s State of the Union address, at a House Republican retreat, angry conservative members of Congress surrounded presidential advisor Karl Rove and demanded that the White House bury the guest worker plan.

Thanks to Bush’s ensuing silence on immigration reform, the degenerating situation in Iraq and a grinding presidential race, the intraparty conflict Bush’s proposal caused has largely subsided. But in Arizona, where rapidly changing demographics and a constant stream of Mexicans and Central Americans crossing the border into the state have inspired a wave of public resentment, the anti-immigration backlash is still gaining momentum. It has propelled a divisive anti-immigrant ballot proposition that is using anti-elitist populism and coded racial appeals to harvest votes from fearful and frustrated Arizonans. Some of the proposition’s supporters are even working to defeat Bush in Arizona. While it’s hard to gauge how much impact they are having, the furor over immigration could spell trouble for the GOP — not only by weakening Bush’s base but also by awakening the sleeping giant of Arizona politics — Latino voters, most of whom are Democrats.

“Bush brought the immigration debate to the table. But he’s scared now because he’s gotten so much blow-back from his own party,” said Virginia Abernethy, a Vanderbilt University emeritus professor and self-described “ethnic separatist” who edits the journal of the Council of Conservative Citizens, self-advertised as a “European-American rights” group. “And now,” she told me, “I think we’re getting to a tipping point where the base will not vote for a politician who doesn’t represent their views on immigration.”

In July, Abernethy was appointed national chairwoman of the campaign for the Arizona ballot initiative, Proposition 200. The proposition would bar undocumented immigrants from receiving a host of public services and, because of an unfounded assumption by its proponents that undocumented immigrants are voting in state elections, would require Arizonans to prove their citizenship when they vote.

An anthropologist at the center of the paleoconservative intellectual movement for over 30 years, Abernethy has played a key role in defining the new anti-immigration movement’s ideas and strategies. She’s the “grand dame” of the movement, says Prop. 200 director Kathy McKee. Prop. 200 is also being used as a vehicle by America’s largest anti-immigration organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which has spent years trying to secure Arizona as a platform for its nationwide organizing efforts.

Opposing the initiative are not only Latino civil rights groups like National Council of La Raza and liberal unions like the Service Employees International Union but also Arizona’s political establishment. Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, the conservative Arizona Chamber of Commerce and the state’s entire congressional delegation, including Sen. John McCain, all vehemently oppose it. They argue that Prop. 200 will wreck Arizona’s business climate while imposing onerous requirements on the state’s residents by, for example, threatening public employees who fail to report any suspected undocumented immigrant in their midst with up to four months in jail. The opposition also claims that by forcing Arizonans to prove their citizenship before voting, Prop. 200 would make absentee balloting and clipboard registration impossible. And they say the proposition would put all Arizonans in danger by barring undocumented immigrants from receiving immunizations and requiring firefighters to verify a resident’s citizenship before putting out a fire in his or her home.

“What Prop. 200 will really do is, in effect, poison our own well to stop other people from drinking our water,” said Steve Roman, a Republican consultant working on behalf of those opposing Prop. 200. “The biggest unintended consequence is that it will take the focus off of real immigration reform, which must take place at the federal level.” Asked if he’s concerned that Bush has studiously avoided discussing immigration reform on the campaign trail, Roman paused before carefully replying, “I am not focused on anything other than this proposition specifically.”

Despite the breadth of the opposition, encompassing Democrats and Republicans, labor and business groups, and a blitz of anti-Prop. 200 ads starring the popular McCain, supporters still outnumber opponents by 42 percent to 29 percent, according to a poll conducted on Oct. 11 by Northern Arizona State University. “People in Arizona believe illegal immigration is a significant problem, and they perceive this proposition as being an anti-immigration bill, whether it is or not. In other words, it’s the only thing out there that lets them voice their frustration,” said Bruce Merrill, an ASU political science professor who has also done polling on Prop. 200.

Prop. 200 advocates call their opponents a “cheap-labor lobby” that is threatening the working class, and routinely portray undocumented immigrants as criminals. In doing so, the Prop. 200 campaign has assiduously cultivated the support of what sociologist Donald Warren termed “Middle American radicals,” or MARs. “MARs are a distinct group partly because of their view of government as favoring both the rich and the poor simultaneously,” Warren wrote in his 1976 book, “The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation.” “If there is one single summation of the MAR perspective, it is reflected in [the] statement … the rich give in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill.” This group, historically assuming varying demographic forms but now generally white and middle or working class, is defined by its belief that it is squeezed between a powerful, internationalist elite and a besieging “other,” sometimes possessing characteristics like dark-hued skin, criminality and subversive intent.

Sam Francis, an influential paleoconservative columnist who was fired a decade ago by the Washington Times for defending slavery, now works with Abernethy as editor of the Council of Conservative Citizens’ journal and is active with anti-immigration groups like the American Immigration Control Foundation. He has referred to the movement’s appeal to Middle American radicals as the “sandwich strategy.”

Francis and Abernethy’s Council of Conservative Citizens, which evolved from the race-baiting White Citizens Councils that battled integration in the South, was active in George Wallace’s presidential campaigns and in the anti-busing demonstrations of the early 1970s. Wallace carried five Southern states in his 1968 independent presidential bid by harnessing the resentment of socially conservative whites against flag-burning radicals, civil rights protesters and the federal government. The same strategy undergirded the anti-busing demonstrations, when urban, ethnic whites took to the streets to battle the inner-city blacks and “limousine liberals” who were trying to forcibly integrate their schools.

Abernethy, who was on a fellowship at Harvard Medical School at the height of Boston’s anti-busing demonstrations, said it is that experience that informs her understanding of anti-immigrant sentiment in Arizona today. “These lower-middle-class people saw their schools and their values under threat,” Abernethy said of the anti-busing protesters. “It is always people with moderate resources who want to be upwardly mobile who see themselves under threat when people who are not like them come into their community, or when people threaten their jobs because they’re willing to work for less with no benefits. So I think [Arizona is] somewhat like Boston. In Arizona, because of the language issue and the voting issue, resentment may be more intense.”

According to ASU’s Merrill, Prop. 200 supporters are more likely to be conservative Republicans than Democrats, are less likely than Prop. 200 opponents to have a high level of formal education, and are most likely to live in the most urbanized area of the state, Maricopa County, which contains Phoenix, its sprawling suburbs and nearly 50 percent of Arizona’s voting population.

Another likely factor in Prop. 200′s popularity is the huge migration of retirees to Maricopa County and greater Arizona in recent years. A 2002 study by ASU’s School of Public Affairs showed that nearly half of Arizona’s retirement age population is from out of state and that 85 percent of the retirees are white. By 2050, the study predicts, the state’s retirement population will have tripled to 3 million. This swelling population has fueled an increasing demand for new housing, a phenomenon that, ironically, is luring droves of Mexican migrant laborers to the state’s metropolitan areas to fill construction jobs.

Democratic state Rep. Tom Prezelski considers Arizona’s out-of-state retirees a wellspring of support for the anti-immigration movement. “I think Prop. 200 is strongest in retirement communities and some of the more transient, faster-growing areas. People who haven’t lived here that long and don’t understand our history or culture, they walk in here thinking there’s some kind of conspiracy going on,” Prezelski said. “I don’t think the retirement community mentality can allow for a full understanding of what’s going on. They tend not to look beyond that oasis.”

Arizona’s retirees are notorious for backing tough law-and-order measures. In Maricopa County, they are among the most fervent supporters of country sheriff Joe Arpaio, a draconian figure who makes male prisoners wear pink underwear and once installed webcams in his jail, allowing Internet users to view female inmates using the toilet. Retirees’ “biggest concern is crime and violence, and that’s why they love Joe Arpaio,” Merrill explained. “He talks the language that they like. The way immigration issues are presented, they’re framed in terms of crime and violence, so they support it.”

Indeed, Prop. 200 director McKee, herself a Phoenix-area retiree, named the measure “The Arizona Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act.” She has also asserted that “for a good proportion of these people [undocumented immigrants], the American dream is crime and welfare, not jobs.”

Abernethy has used somewhat more imaginative language to boost Prop. 200. In an article for the anti-immigrant webzine VDare, Abernethy attacked the proposition’s labor union opponents: “Today’s unionistas support mass immigration because poor and uneducated immigrants are potential recruits.” In her articles for paleoconservative journal Chronicles and the Council of Conservative Citizens’ Citizens’ Informer, of which she is editor, Abernethy charges Latin American immigrants with everything from causing California’s 2001 power crisis to driving untold numbers of middle-class whites into homosexual lifestyles. Her menacing portraits of Latin American immigrants and their powerful friends conspiring to leave the average Joe out in the cold perfectly reflect the “sandwich strategy.”

Alexis Mazon, chairwoman of the Coalition to Defeat Prop 200, a Tucson grass-roots group, said, “The backers of Prop. 200 have taken advantage of people’s anger about a host of complex problems to pin the blame on our most vulnerable group, which is migrant workers. This isn’t original, nor is it surprising. But it’s an incredibly effective tactic and it’s worked again and again throughout American history.”

Although Prop. 200 has benefited from the support of FAIR, which spent approximately $500,000 last spring on the signature-gathering drive that ensured the measure a place on the November ballot, FAIR recently disavowed any connection with Prop. 200′s grass-roots leadership after FAIR waged a failed court battle to seize control of the campaign last spring. The disavowal was couched in personal attacks on McKee and the controversial Abernethy designed to make FAIR look like the moderate wing of the Prop. 200 campaign. In a July press release, FAIR called Abernethy’s ethnic separatist views “repugnant” and “divisive” and dubbed McKee’s behavior “inexplicable and erratic.”

Given FAIR’s long history of involvement with both women, however, the press release stretches the limits of credulity. Not only has FAIR’s founder, John Tanton, published Abernethy’s polemical studies in his Social Contract Press journal, but he has been a board member of an anti-immigration outfit she has directed, Population Environment Balance. Meanwhile, on the “Get Involved” section of its Web site, FAIR still lists McKee among its national network of grass-roots activists.

If there is anything that truly distinguishes FAIR from Prop. 200′s leadership, it isn’t ideology but, rather, the scope of the two groups’ ambitions. McKee’s objectives with Prop. 200 are entirely parochial, while for FAIR, Prop. 200 represents the best chance to secure Arizona as a beachhead for its national agenda. “Arizona has become an important bellwether,” said Devin Burghart, a coordinator for the Chicago-based Center for New Community, which monitors the national anti-immigration movement. “FAIR hopes to use the state as a platform to roll out their arguments to the entire country, either to push measures similar to Prop. 200 in other states or use it as a means to pressure Congress to take action on immigration.”

FAIR is backing a handful of anti-immigration congressional candidates nationwide. Its star candidate is Kris Kobach, a Republican running to unseat Democratic Rep. Dennis Moore in Kansas’ 3rd District. Kobach is serving as FAIR’s attorney in a contentious court battle the group is waging to prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving in-state tuition rates at public colleges in Kansas. A former general counsel to Attorney General John Ashcroft, the youthful, handsome Kobach not only is the darling of the anti-immigration movement but is being groomed as a future Republican leader. He was even awarded a coveted speaking role at the Republican National Convention in New York. On the opening day, Kobach took to the podium to call for the deployment of the U.S. Army along the U.S.-Mexican border to stop immigrant border crossers, in a bold rebuke of the party’s more moderate immigration platform. (The national press ignored Kobach and missed the simmering issue.)

Yet far from being isolated for his hard-line views, Kobach got a visit from Vice President Cheney, who came to his district to campaign for him. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert also went out of his way to endorse him.

Back in Arizona, the anti-immigration movement is continuing to harness resentment of Bush’s guest worker proposal, and some activists are even campaigning against the president. Ron Prince, who worked with FAIR on numerous failed anti-immigrant ballot measures in California, has launched a radio ad campaign in Arizona that encourages voters to punish Bush for his proposal by ousting him from office. “With this contest, where both Kerry and Bush are standing on the edge of the cliff, just one little push could make all the difference,” Prince told the North County Times, a conservative Southern California daily.

While the effect that Prince’s ads and the Prop. 200 campaign will have on Bush’s chances in Arizona is unclear, a poll released after the second presidential debate shows that Kerry has pulled within striking distance of Bush after slipping badly in September. According to Northern Arizona State’s poll, Bush leads Kerry 49 percent to 45 percent — a net gain of five points for Kerry since the first debate. And now that Bush reiterated his support for the guest worker plan in the final presidential debate (held in the heart of Arizona), Prop. 200 could gain increased momentum.

Even if Arizona’s anti-immigration backlash doesn’t derail Bush in the state this year, it is certain to spell trouble for Republicans in the future by driving a higher share of the state’s swelling, mostly Democratic Latino population to the polls. “The power elite in Arizona is made up of older white, Republican businesspeople and the Christian right, and their strategy has always been to never let anything like Prop. 200 get on the ballot because they don’t want to give the lower socioeconomic groups and minorities the motivation” to vote against them, said ASU’s Merrill. “Latinos basically don’t vote here. If they ever get to the point of becoming more politicized, in a decade they’re going to control politics in the state. So the elite wants to let a sleeping dog lie.”

If voters approve Prop. 200, critics of the measure say it’s so poorly worded — the term “public benefit,” for instance, is never clearly defined in the proposition — that it is unlikely to withstand judicial review. But if Prop. 200 is approved and judged legal by Arizona’s Supreme Court, the Center for New Community’s Burghart said it could add more fuel to the flames of Arizona’s anti-immigration backlash — and serve as an instrument of further polarization.

“What the Prop. 200 people have done throughout their campaign is detract from the real issues that are important in Arizona. It’s clear the issues people are concerned about are the issues that Prop. 200 doesn’t really address,” Burghart said. “What you have, then, is a self-fulfilling prophecy where even if [Prop. 200] does stay on constitutional grounds, when people realize it doesn’t solve any of these problems, it’s only going to intensify their frustration.”

And we the ogling people drink it in.

Like any X-rated content, this smut is all flesh and no substantive plot. The lens flits between body parts and journalists pulling perverse Cronkite-in-Vietnam impressions (at one point, CNN showed Cooper and his T-shirt saving a child). But there is little discussion of how western Hispaniola was a man-made disaster before an earthquake made it a natural one.

Though neighboring the planet’s wealthiest nation, Haiti has long been one of the world’s poorest places. It sports 80 percent unemployment and a GDP smaller than the annual executive bonus fund at a single Wall Street bank. The destitution is tragic — and a reflection, in part, of colonial domination.

For much of the last two centuries, Western powers used embargo threats to force the country’s population of erstwhile slaves to reimburse their former European masters for lost “property.” As Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates recounts, America aided these efforts from the beginning because President Thomas Jefferson feared a successful black republic would “inspire slave insurrections throughout the American South.”

Crushed by this oppression, Haiti was then assaulted in the 1990s by American “free” trade policies that destroyed its agriculture economy and tried to turn the country into the world’s sweatshop. In recent years, as the menace of Western-backed coups lurked, Haiti has at times been compelled to pay more interest on its debt than it received in foreign aid.

This is the real story of Haiti that the black T-shirts and safari button-downs (and, alas, their viewers) have never cared about. They’ve only noticed the country when a cataclysm provided more telegenic images than the daily death and despair of the island’s pre-earthquake squalor.

Even now, as the casualty count rises, disaster pornographers barely mention the macabre history. They know that doing so would break unspoken rules against holding up a foreign policy mirror to America and against riling the politicians and business interests that contributed to Haiti’s demise.

Rather than reporting on what made Haiti so poor and therefore its infrastructure so susceptible to collapse, we get clips of Haitians momentarily cheering “USA!” as food packages trickle into their devastated capital. Rather than inquiries about how poverty made Haiti so ill-prepared for rescue operations, the disaster pornographers instead obediently follow George W. Bush, who self-servingly says, “You’ve got to deal with the desperation and there ought to be no politicization of that.”

“Politicization” — so that’s the safe-for-TV euphemism they’re using these days, huh? Evidently, it must be avoided — evidently, nothing kills an audience’s heaving passion faster than “politics” or (God forbid) contextualized news.

Anything like that — anything beyond the exploitation of raw disaster porn — well, it might ruin the money shot. 

This means a grand tour of sorts of Hispaniola, the island shared in an east-west split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, whose capitals we’ll be stopping in. The border between these nations is one of the few international demarcations clearly visible from 30,000 feet — the latter’s green tropical carpet abutting a Haitian deathscape of denuded hillsides the color of sawdust. You could argue that Hispaniola is perhaps the least glamorous landfall in the Caribbean. But you can’t beat the weather and the on-board pineapple tray.

With nothing else to do I wander the Port-au-Prince apron. Behind our dormant freighter a row of scarred, treeless hills bakes in the noon heat, raped for charcoal by millions of hungry Haitians. In front of the terminal, men ride past on donkeys and women balance baskets atop their heads. Somebody has started a cooking fire on the sidewalk. Haiti is the poorest country in the entire Western Hemisphere, and the squalor along the airport perimeter is at least as distressing as anything I’ve seen in Africa.

And, how to say this, it smells. If you’ve ever been to the tropics, maybe you’ll understand: It’s not a bad or foul smell, necessarily, and this isn’t to be taken as some Ugly American pejorative of things foreign or other-skinned. But it’s pungent. For those who live with changing seasons, it’s like the smell of a neighbor’s fireplace or wood stove on the first cold night of the year. Except it has no season; it’s simply always there, ceaseless and permeating like the heat of the Sahara or the numbness of a glacier. It’s the odor of rain forests burned, of foliage, charcoal and garbage incinerated — these destructive, ubiquitous pastimes of the Third World — and it hits you the second you step from an airplane in almost every latitudinally challenged republic on earth.

I notice a pallet of large white drums being unloaded from our airplane. Something doesn’t look right — crew member intuition — and, concerned that we’d accidentally transported some hazardous material, I ask a loader if he knows what the barrels contain. A forklift carries them to a corner of a ramshackle warehouse, and the driver pries off one of the heavy plastic lids.

What’s revealed is a tangled white mass of what appears to be string cheese floating in dirty water. A vague, quiveringly rotten smell rises from the liquid. The driver sticks in his hand and gives the ugly congealment a churn. “For sausage,” he answers. What we’re looking at, it turns out, is a barrel full of intestines — casings to be stuffed with meat at some horrible Haitian factory. Why the casings need to be imported while the meat itself is apparently on hand, I can’t say, but somebody found it necessary to pay the shipping costs and customs duties to fly 400 gallons of intestines from Miami to Port-au-Prince.

Thirty-three minutes away is Santo Domingo, the filth-and-stucco capital of the Dominican Republic — or the D.R., as savvy travelers and baseball announcers love to call it. The neighborhoods around the airport are some of the poorest on the island, and we’re two days on the heels of a terrible storm. Most of the roofs are missing, and as our jet drops its tires and aims for the runway at Las Américas International, we look straight into the islanders’ concrete-block lives, their belongings violently mingled: plastic bags, rain-soaked clothes, corrugated tin. And in all directions are the triangular, tornado-shaped plumes of garbage fires.

What it lacks in glamour, maybe, Santo Domingo makes up for in history. This is the oldest capital in the New World. With some time to kill, I hire a taxi, this time with no resistance. I’m going to see Christopher Columbus, who died in Spain but whose remains, depending which historian you believe, are interred beneath the cathedral here.

To me there’s something about that name, Santo Domingo, that evokes images of 15th-century explorers, their gray-sailed ships anchored offshore. To others, maybe, it’s thoughts of the slave trade, of indigenous islanders keeling over from those special European gifts of smallpox and typhus. Or boats taking cannonballs through their hulls, bars of gold falling to the ocean floor.

As with every big capital down here, the whiteness of the skyline is striking. White paint is splashed over everything: hotels, apartment blocks, schools. From the highway it looms ahead, clusters of white buildings set against brilliant blue beachfront; against emerald hillsides; against the mushrooming, oil-black storm clouds. And as the taxi brings me closer, I taste and feel that tropical force of humanity and heat — a grimy ooze through every white crack.

Later, in darkness, we’re loading up for the leg home, as it were, to Miami. They’ve unloaded our pallets of automobile parts and tractor tires — tools that will help turn the landscape of this small country into parking lots and strip malls like the rest of the world — and soon we’ll be gone.

I’m in a foul mood, and our captain is a retired Air Force pilot who’s boring us to tears with embellished stories: adventures of earthquakes in Pakistan, crash landings in the Kenyan countryside. He’s old and his face is wrinkled and it makes me miserable to hear him, because who cares, really, about his stories, now that he’s just some old retired serviceman with three ex-wives who’s lost all his hair? And I feel myself, like a disease, turning into the next version of this guy.

I’m tired and I need a shower. I’ve got grease on my shirt. From the metal railing I see the moon. It’s an odd, eerily dangling crescent surrounded by an inky redness, like the moon of the Turkish flag. There’s something wild and strange about it.

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Reports by news outlets have stated that emergency efforts in Haiti have been hampered because the Port-au-Prince airport’s radar was knocked out. Can planes take off or land with no air traffic control radar?

First of all, so that everyone understands, “radar” is a somewhat generic term that can mean different things, the same basic technology used for different purposes. We have cockpit radar, for instance, which is used by crews to detect storms and precipitation. But in this context we’re talking about air traffic control (ATC) radar, which allows controllers to monitor the position, speed and altitude of flights, sequencing them appropriately. There are radar facilities for the higher, en route sectors of airspace, as well as local, or “terminal,” facilities that manage traffic coming and going from particular airports.

But while it might sound primitive, all around the world you will find airports, as well as large swaths of en route airspace, lacking radar coverage. Over the oceans, for example, and in much of Africa. Or at Port-au-Prince. It had no radar even before the earthquake.

Lack of radar means that flights are sequenced “manually” through the use of position reports. Planes on oceanic crossings are spaced by time and altitude along paths or longitude and latitude, sending periodic position reports to distant ATC facilities. In and around airports themselves, controllers handling arrivals and departures will often ask crews for updates on their exact bearing and distance to a particular radio beacon or point-in-space fix, as well as their altitudes, and space them accordingly. Holding patterns are sometimes assigned when multiple flights are inbound, and instructions to turn, climb or descend will sometimes be referenced to fixes, distances or radials. A takeoff clearance might include the following:

“Air Haiti 209, cleared for takeoff. Maintain runway heading until passing 3,000 feet, then turn right on course. Maintain 5,000 feet until passing the 340 radial from the PAP VOR.” Occasionally with climbs or descents there’s a time restriction: “Cleared to climb from level one-three zero to level two-four zero by time one-six four-five. Report reaching. Time now one-six three-five.” In other words, “You’ve got 10 minutes to climb from 13,000 feet to 24,000 feet, and let us know as soon as you get there.”

It sounds old-fashioned — and it is — but it works pretty well, albeit at a much slower pace than at radar-equipped airports. Luckily, if not necessarily, traffic tends to be light at most non-radar airports.

The congestion problem at Port-au-Prince isn’t about radar being “knocked out” (it wasn’t there in the first place), but rather the sudden influx of humanitarian flights into airspace — and tarmac space — that is normally uncrowded. Up to 200 aircraft a day have been arriving at Toussaint Louverture International, with some stacked in holding patterns for 90 minutes or more. At one point all inbound flights from the U.S. were “ground stopped” due to saturation on and around the airport.

In addition, the Port-au-Prince control tower was badly damaged, requiring U.S. military personnel to set up a temporary facility. The media was conflating the terms “control tower” and “radar.” Although tower controllers will use radar, if available, they are not the same things. The loss of the tower, from which aircraft are cleared to taxi, take off and land, was a much more critical issue than a lack of radar it never had.

Speaking of the media, I also heard a CNN reporter describe the Port-au-Prince airport rather emphatically as “tiny.” Not sure what that was about. While it might lack the room for dozens of military transport jets, it’s pretty spacious by Caribbean standards. It has a 10,000-foot runway and a wide rectangular apron.

There is no such thing as “Air Haiti,” by the way. Years ago a small company with that name existed, but today Haiti is one of relatively few countries around the world lacking a national airline. Two others in the region that jump to mind are Guyana and Belize.

As far as earthquakes go, I keep getting asked what might happen if a runway starts shaking just as a jet is taking off or landing. I really don’t know. It depends, I guess, on the severity of the shaking and the speed of the plane. I don’t know what a magnitude 7 temblor feels like, but suffice it to say things would get bumpy. Probably not bumpy enough, however, to damage anything, as aircraft are designed to withstand some pretty severe jolts. As we know, it’s not the shaking of the ground that kills and injures people, but rather buildings falling on top of them. Overall, a plane is probably a pretty safe place to be — much safer than a building.

A runway coming apart is another story. Striking a fissure at high speed would be dangerous — albeit statistically unlikely. I am not aware of anything like that ever happening, although the 1974 disaster film “Earthquake” features a scene where a 707 touches down just as a major temblor hits Los Angeles. The runway fractures and the crew executes a go-around just in the nick of time.

The last scheduled passenger flight to leave Port-au-Prince after the quake was an American Airlines flight to Miami. Presumably the crew ensured that runway conditions were safe. This would have been done by taxiing along the surface, and/or by sending a vehicle out to assess things.

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Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.

Nevertheless, you can’t say “Travolta” without adding “outspoken Scientologist,” and that, inevitably, is where the story gets murky. Because along with all those desperately needed supplies that the dude graciously hauled down there, Travolta also packed something else – a phalanx of Scientology ministers.

This isn’t the first time a high-profile member of L. Ron Hubbard’s religion has rushed to the scene of disaster. Tom Cruise deployed himself to New York City after the 9/11 attacks — and eventually used his mission there as an opportunity to call the Environmental Protection Agency a bunch of “liars”  for their cleanup efforts. Scientology stayed on to help create the auspicious-sounding New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, treating firefighters who’d survived the attacks – and their lingering physical effects — through a “purification” program with no scientific credibility and for which some firefighters allegedly were asked to fork over as much as 5 grand. That’s why people get a little creeped out when Scientologists come to the rescue.

And knowing that when Travolta made a similarly swift and generous gesture toward the people of New Orleans after Katrina, the church similarly hustled off to the Gulf Coast to counsel survivors, one gets a sense that the shell-shocked victims of January’s quakes may be in for at the very least some old-fashioned Thetan dogma.

A U.N. spokeswoman told the Associated Press last week that at least 800 relief planes have been on a waiting list to get in to Haiti, which can only handle about 130 flights a day.  So when Travolta told reporters, “We have the ability to actually help make a difference in the situation in Haiti and I just can’t see not using this plane to help,” it’s hard to believe the impulse is coming from anything but a truly decent and altruistic place. (It also makes one wonder how he swung it.)

But missionary work almost always comes with a mix of well-intentioned altruism and occasionally flat-out troubling proselytizing. And spreading good works can also mean spreading some dubious philosophies — along with some troubling “cures.” And it’ll be interesting to see what Scientology, which has long been associated with celebrities who can afford the high cost of becoming “clear” will do in a country that was already the poorest in the Western hemisphere before an incalculable disaster.

The bottom line is, unless you’ve personally flown four tons of supplies to Haiti today, John Travolta has done more for its people and their immediate, life-or-death needs than you or I have or ever will.  It also doesn’t change that hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck sense of dread that come from watching a gift bestowed with what sure look like a whole pack of yellow-shirted “volunteer minister” strings attached. 

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who’d survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn’t arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer — his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I’ve seen I’m not convinced.

What Would You Do?

Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.

By day three, you’re pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.

So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid any time soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.

The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they’re people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven’t shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn’t mean anything now.

If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?

Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?

It’s pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn’t obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.

If Words Could Kill

We need to banish the word “looting” from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.

“Loot,” the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out “At one time loot was the soldier’s pay.” It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers’ pockets and as imperial seizures.

After years of interviewing survivors of disasters and reading firsthand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.

Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it’s usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don’t need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.

Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.

The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

They also deploy the word “panic” wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control — the American military calls it “security” — rather than relief. A British-accented voice-over on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a “stampede” and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.

Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti’s dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they’ve never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that’s theft, but I’m not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.

In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed. Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it’s not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.

A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I’ve heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.

A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.

Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services — like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina — to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn’t label that looting.

Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing … Well, you catch my drift.

Woody Guthrie once sang that “some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don’t end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected — or appointed — office.

Learning to See in Crises

Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I’m making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse — food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment — might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.” It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hog-tying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.”

For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”

That one might not be totally accurate, but it’s likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

At the dawn of the millennium, three catastrophes were forecast for the United States: terrorists in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco with her earthquake kit and is about to make her seventh trip to New Orleans since Katrina. Her latest book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” is a testament to human bravery and innovation during disasters.

These would be tragic losses under normal circumstances, but they are even more so considering the vulnerable state of Haiti’s women in the wake of this catastrophe; they could use these activists’ help like never before. In memory of this admirable humanitarian trio, I’ll leave you with a video clip of Democracy Now’s tribute to Merlet.