|
T A B L E+T A L K School reform is gaining momentum, but is privatizing education taking things a step too far? Take your side in the Education area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Can Amtrak survive? Gun smoke Who says women never lie about rape? Where have we gone? $400 million and a mule? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Browse the - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
![[ Media: Journalist snagged in kiddie-porn case ]](/news/1999/03/src/12newslinks.gif) |
||
|
-----The danceable tragedy
BY HERBERT GOLD | PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- Jean-Bertrand Aristide, once a priest and hero of the resistance to Haitian tyranny, then president, then exiled, then restored to the presidency by the U.S./U.N. "Operation Other Than War," now waits for Haiti's next democratic election, when he can run again. (He was limited by law to one six-year term.) In the meantime, he obstructs and Haiti sinks. He is a democrat who is also a savior, the Messiah. History is filled with such unstable leadership, but few nations in history are as desolate as Haiti seemed this Carnival season. In the dusty outskirt of Port-au-Prince called Croix des Bouquets, I offered to exchange my Grateful Dead T-shirt for a missionary's "With Jesus Haiti is Possible" T-shirt. Both of our shirts implied messages, I said, "a subtext." "I don't see your message in the Gospels," he said. "What's a 'subtext'?" My son Ethan and I arrived in February, just before Carnival, during the time of RaRa bands roaming the streets with their battered metal horns and honking bamboo pipes. We danced with the others, because Haiti is still the danceable tragedy, continually sinking but never quite hitting bottom -- there seems to be no bottom for Haitians. This week's shipwreck -- in which two boats sank off the coast of Florida, leaving as many as 40 fleeing Haitians dead -- is just the latest horror. What doesn't change is the 200-year surrealist melodrama of political life, in which every candidate except Aristide is a party of one. Since the end of the Duvalier kleptocracy, the procession of ephemeral power-grabbers and the cruel Cedras coup, speech is ample, murders are more common in street crime than among politicians, and functioning democracy is still a dream. The improvement in politics is confined to the right to political calisthenics. A typically objective newspaper report captions a photo of politicians with these helpful identifications: "From left to right, the opportunist Evans Paul, the putschist George Gilles, the ex-super-revolutionary Maoist Claude Roumain." Not the ideal of the just-the-facts journalism. For years now, choosing the leader of Haiti has been a one-man lineup. Aristide, you do want him, don't you? ... And a majority does still want him. But democracy suffers when the democrat in chief begins to believe only he is a democrat and nothing can be done without him. So nothing is being done during the current interregnum. He will surely be elected again in 2001. He waits in Tabarre, his mansion. ("Oh, it's not as big as that," said one of his devotees. But it is.) Rene Preval, the mild-mannered agronomist who is currently president, is considered a proxy for Aristide, waiting to reassume the mantle. He may aspire to be a proxy for himself. According to the newspaper Le Matin (Feb. 3), he "has not stopped the parliament from functioning; he has only made it inoperative." While the Messiah hovers over the eroded Haitian landscape in his spaceship non-mansion, people are, as usual, kept busy not eating much and dying young. Of course, real estate prices are firm. Planes drop cocaine as if the clouds are seeded for it. We visited an MRE beach resort on the St.-Marc road -- bikinied lovelies -- and dined with friends at an MRE restaurant, Cascade, in Petionville. In the American Army, MRE stands for Meals, Ready to Eat. In Haiti, MRE stands for Morally Repugnant Elite. During the Cedras coup days, I watched frightened people building boats on the beach at Petit-Grove. Again folks are beginning to wonder, "So, how's the weather in Florida?" The recent shipwreck won't stop them.
N E X T+P A G E+| Adventurers still show up, sometimes landing in jail |
||