Death Comes To Town, By Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture

January 20, 2011 Whitney Farmer 4 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music club on the beach in L.A. She has an M.B.A., and wishes that Ricky Gervais would try to take a cheap shot at her.

Two days ago, Baby Doc Duvalier arrived back in Haiti without notice. Beside him was another sleek paramour who flirted with the press through designer specs. Through a lawyer, Baby Doc pinky swears that the portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars that he unlawfully siphoned from the government treasuries – minus what he paid out to Michelle in their divorce a decade ago – has been donated to earthquake relief agencies. And Baby Doc has come home because…no one knows. He hasn’t provided any lucid comments to the press. Whether from dissipation or bad genes, he appears and acts decades older than his 57 years.

Sometime after Barbies and before makeup, I rode my Schwinn Stingray – red, boy-style, with a banana seat – to the bookstore and bought my first CRAWDADDY.

It was the December 1976 edition, and on the cover was William Shatner with the announcement that the first ‘Star Trek’ movie was going into production. Inside were all the details that I craved to learn. I still have this magazine at the club today and have bands sign their pictures of themselves. Unless the reviews that were given of their newest vinyl LPs were negative. Or unless too many of their bandmates are dead now.

Also in this magazine was a story about three days that a reporter spent in Haiti during the deadly days of Baby Doc Duvalier and his death squads. The only other time I had heard about Haiti before this had been as an exotic setting in one of the James Bond movies. My young eyes were first captivated by the brightly colored photos, and then my young mind was gripped by the horrors transmitted by the words of the article. Boogeymen – called Tonton Macoute in the patois of voudun – were real and traveled in packs as death squads that removed any who dared to hope for democracy in that island democracy. Voodoo was used as a grassroots form of justice in a land where flesh-and-blood beings wreaked more havoc than spirits. And ruling this nightmare was Baby Doc Duvalier, the pudgy dull offspring of a despot who had stepped into the oxymoronic title created by his father Papa Doc of President for Life. His only skills appeared to be in self-aggrandizement, delegated murder, and economic gluttony. His wedding to the craving and conniving Michelle was estimated to have cost over $1.2 million dollars in a country with an average daily income of less than $2.00 per person. It was a place where impoverished women sell sun-dried disks of dirt to feed the mineral cravings of customers suffering from long-term malnutrition. At that time, there was the greatest per capita of billionaires in the world within an 8 mile radius of Port-au-Prince.

From that moment, my life changed. I took different classes in school in order to hopefully be useful to that land someday. I learned French starting in 10th grade and studied the creole dialects on my own. Biological sciences filled my elective classes through junior and high school, and through college. In my senior year, I won a grant to support an internship placement at a health clinic in Dessalines in the Artibonite Valley. Two weeks before leaving, our medical team leader was diagnosed with cancer and we were delayed. Four weeks later – what would have been ten days after we arrived – there was a bloody coup that closed the door for the unseasoned like me. I had watched what had happened under Baby Doc and knew that human despair was caused not by lack of resources but by politics and the gatekeepers of power. While I waited for a chance to go again, I entered grad school to get my M.B.A. By this time, I was working in health care and had witnessed that good causes needed advocates that spoke the language of the bad guys fluently in order to be victorious. So, because of Haiti, I studied Mammon. While I walked through my regular life, I put money into well digging and supported Haitian artists that had come to the U.S., read the authors of that land and tried to teach myself Creole by doing side-by-side translations of documents pulled from the Department of Education’s website of the State of New York. Twice I came close to getting jobs there, and I kept trying to turn doorknobs to get there during times that my own life wasn’t the site of a humanitarian disaster. A friend in charge of a WHO region told me that I needed to get field experience, but no doors opened.

So, I’ve continued to work in finance and entertainment until I can get my big break in charity work. And I’ve always lifted my prayers to God for that land.

A vestige of my fascination with science from my pre-makeup/Schwinn Stingray years has given me an analogy that applies. In preparation for being an oceanographer, I studied sharks. Here is what I know:

Sharks show up where there is death to gorge themselves. Contrary to surfer myth, they don’t accidently bite humans: Their attack pattern is to deliver one mouth-filling bite and then swim away, allowing their prey to bleed out and become weak before they return to dine. This way, the predator is less likely to be wounded in the death throes. Sharks have no backbone – no bones at all – but in fact are completely supported by cartilaginous tissue. This tissue also comprises its hide and its teeth, allowing endless rows to fall out and be replaced in order to devour until the last day of life. The hotter the water, the greater the appetite of the beast. And they can smell blood and sense panicked movements from distressed creatures from miles away. Sharks are without emotion or regret, and they will devour each other even in utero.

It is telling that Baby Doc traveled without notice. It is telling that he arrived without forewarning and was allowed to enter the country after landing. It is telling that he wasn’t arrested and imprisoned immediately upon detection. It is telling that he was released without incident after being taken into custody and questioned. It is telling that he has returned to a land with no stability and billions of dollars in resources in limbo, waiting to be devoured by a predator with a silent network of boogeymen still entrenched in every sector of power.

He has returned to feed.

Quote of the Blog from God, Acts 12:23: “Immediately an angel struck Herod down because he accepted people’s worship instead of giving the glory to God. And he was consumed with worms and breathed his last.” Yes, please.