Haiti, Dr. King, and a modest proposal for eating the rich (beginning with the tech billionaires)

January 18th, 2010

If you

think you can imagine

the brutality of Haiti right now,

you’re wrong.  The reality of the smell of rotting

human flesh, of the sound of a machete striking a face to loosen

a hand’s grip on a bottle of water, is unimaginable. But you can get a tiny,

tiny peek in when you watch masked policeman putting the boot on people

who are trying to get something to eat and drink because they’ve been

hungry and thirsty for days.  It boggles the mind, but in 2010, with

all our internets and C-130s and helicopters and armies, we

haven’t figured out how to get food and water to people

who are desperate and dying from lack of it –

not in less than a week or

three, we haven’t.

Well, actually,

we have.  It looks something

like this:

That would,

demonstrably, have kept all this

from getting spooled up in Haiti this week, this looting

and police shooting and mob violence and

slashing and stomping and

burning of human

beings:

If you

don’t believe me, read

this brief explanation in thirty seconds.

If you can refute the assertion that an organization

like EarthNationLive would now be distributing food, water,

medical care, and shelter very effectively in Haiti, and

would have been so doing for days now,

email me.  (I’m not going to wait

by my inbox for that

email.)

We just

can’t get the tiny seed of money

necessary to implement it, in spite of having

asked oh-so-nicely and occasionally more confrontationally

for a decade or so.  Because the idea is, let’s admit it, a little revolutionary.

It could, say, be used to diminish the power of the Superclass.  It could,

properly administered, change a balance of power that has existed

among humans since the beginning of humans: the one

where the few live on the backs of the

many.  And let them eat shit.

And let them die.

The trouble

with funding an organization

like EarthNationLive is that it’s expensive —

not for long, just up front, after which it pays for itself

a zillion times over.  A huge piece of software is needed to make

it happen, and the upfront funding for a giant concert.  So the price tag is,

say, $20,000,000.  Maybe it’s $8,000,000, if Google or Ebay or Apple pitches in

some savvy software engineers and office space.  But it’s a bunch. And the

people who have that kind of money, or control those armies of engineers,

are members of the Superclass.  And like it.  And would rather not see

too much change in the world they dominate, even if it means

watching Katrina turn into Banda Aceh turn into Thailand

turn into the Irriwaddy Delta turn into Port-au-Prince,

as they have done in the past and

very surely will do again

and again.

Philanthrophy

after the fact – they’re all for that, of course.

That’s just good P.R. when you’re sitting on billions.

Charity, quiet or loud, is good and respectable

P.R.  But contributing to the kind of change

that would reorder the world, that would

actually prevent the next bloody

catastrofuck?  There’s

precious little

interest in

that.

I’m

writing a new book,

I’ve decided, sort of along the lines

of Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal”,

which proposes that the people of the world, instead of attacking

and cannibalizing one another, might ought to dine on the rich.  Beginning

with the tech billionaires, who best understand the power of the internet

to create change.  It brought billions of dollars and G550s and houses

all over the world to them, after all, and it could bring much

more modest things like a little peace and rest and

food and water and roofs and relief to other

people in their shanties all over

the world, if they wanted.

But it doesn’t.  Because

they don’t.

I’m just

fleshing out the book idea now.

I have to be careful not to offend the delicate

sensibilities of billionaires, of course, and of their lawyers

and security chiefs, and the ready-to-respond government law enforcement

agencies that a billionaire’s political donations buy.  Especially if

I start naming names and printing old correspondences.

So it’s going to require very careful writing.

Watch this space.  Contribute your

thoughts and energies,

if you like.

Because
you know what?
This photo is 25 years old now.
Bruce Gilden took it in 1984. It’s of a flour worker
eating his lunch in Port-au-Prince. And Port-au-Prince today
is just like the Port-au-Prince of 25 years ago. The names of the Superclassers
who make use of it for more or less slave labor have changed — one of
today’s proponents of sweat shops in Haiti is William Jefferson
Clinton — but the beat goes on. And boy am I weary of
listening to it. Not weary like the dreads
and sufferers of the world are weary,
not weary like the unwashed and
unwatered masses of the
world are weary, but
I’m plenty weary
enough.

If I sound

a little crazy here —

proposing that we eat billionaires! —

well, good.  Ol’ Martin Luther King, whom

President Obama and everyone else is celebrating

today, was a little crazy, did you know that? He got upset

once when he was a kid and jumped out of the third story

window of his house. He got upset another time and organized

the Montgomery Bus Boycott — not as a symbolic protest, but because

he’d calculated that the amount of money that went into city coffers as

a result of black people using the bus systems was so large that if it were

subtracted, Montgomery couldn’t pay its police officers or firemen or keep

the water department running.  Then he went to Jack and Bobby Kennedy,

who didn’t give a flying fuck about black people, and said, “I’ve proven

that I can shut down a major city in the South.  With the network of

black churches, I can shut down every major city in the South.

If the South grinds to a halt, the economy of the nation does,

too.  Now would you like to send the National Guard to help

me integrate the lunch counters and public schools

and universities of Alabama and

Mississippi?”

So sometimes

a little bit of crazy is very much

of a good thing.

Happy birthday

three days ago, Doc. I shouted out to MLK

on his birthday itself, so scroll down if you’d like to read

all that.  Here’s a little reprise, though, short and

sweet.  Just the way billionaires like it

when contemplating right

and wrong:

When
I speak of love,
I am not speaking of some
sentimental and weak response.
Love is somehow the key that unlocks the
door which leads to ultimate reality.
Let us hope that this spirit will
become the order of
the day.

Martin Luther King, Jr.