Bobby has made Mailer’s tag his own, but this is an adver­tise­ment fa mice elf agin. I’ll be read­ing my poems at Myopic Books this Sat­ur­day, Feb­ru­ary 20,  at 7 pm. Details here. Daniel Borzutzky is also read­ing, so please stop by if you’re in the neighborhood.

How awe­some is it that Sawyer was blast­ing “Search & Destroy” last night.

From Jack Shafer’s response to Luke Mitchell’s defense of Scott Horton’s arti­cle about the Guantánamo suicides:

Congratulations to Ben Ehren­re­ich and Slate on this ter­rif­i­cally sharp essay about the U.S. military’s role in the Haiti relief effort:

The much-​feared descent into anar­chy stub­bornly refused to mate­ri­al­ize. “It is calm at this time,” Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, deputy com­man­der of the U.S. South­ern Com­mand, admit­ted to the AP on Monday. “Those who live and work here … tell me that the level of vio­lence that we see right now is below pre-​earthquake levels.” He announced that four—four, in a city of more than 2 million—aid-distribution points had been set up on the sixth day of the crisis.

So what hap­pened? Why the mad rush to com­mand and con­trol, with all its ulti­mately mur­der­ous con­se­quences? Why the para­noid focus on secu­rity above saving lives? Clearly, Pres­i­dent Obama failed to learn one of the basic lessons taught by Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina: You can’t solve a human­i­tar­ian prob­lem by throw­ing guns at it. Before the pres­i­dent had fin­ished insist­ing that “my national secu­rity team under­stands that I will not put up with any excuses,” Haiti’s fate was sealed. National secu­rity teams pri­or­i­tize national secu­rity, an amor­phous and expen­sive notion that has little to do with keep­ing Hait­ian cit­i­zens alive

This leaves the more dis­turb­ing ques­tion of why the Obama admin­is­tra­tion chose to respond as if they were there to con­front an insur­gency, rather than to clear rubble and dis­trib­ute antibi­otics and MREs. The begin­ning of an answer can be found in what Rebecca Solnit, author of A Par­adise Built in Hell, calls “elite panic”—the con­vic­tion of the pow­er­ful that their own Hobbe­sian cor­po­rate ethic is innate in all of us, that in the absence of cen­tral­ized author­ity, only can­ni­bal­ism can reign.

1/ From an op-​ed by David Brooks last Thursday:

Haiti, like most of the world’s poor­est nations, suf­fers from a com­plex web of progress-​resistant cul­tural influ­ences. There is the influ­ence of the voodoo reli­gion, which spreads the mes­sage that life is capri­cious and plan­ning futile. There are high levels of social mis­trust. Respon­si­bil­ity is often not internalized.

2/ From a Sunday dis­patch by Dr. Evan Lyon of Part­ners in Health:

can’t get through much now but beyond the horror, one very strik­ing real­ity is that things are totally peace­ful. we cir­cu­lated in PAP in the middle of every­thing until just now. every­where. no UN. no police. no US marines and no vio­lence or chaos or any­thing. just people help­ing each other. drove past the main cen­tral park in PAP where at least 50K people must be sleep­ing and it was almost silent.

people cook­ing, talk­ing, some singing and crying. people are kind, calm, gen­er­ous to us and others. even with hun­dreds lying on the ground, open frac­tures, mas­sive injuries of all kinds.