Leave it to shameless partisans (on the right) and religious lunatics/zealots (also on the right) to politicize a natural disaster. Shit happens, and cannot be attributed to anything other than dumb luck--bad luck. When a jackass like Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson spews anything controversial, it cannot be dissected. This would validate the inanity of its sensational idiocy. It only gets worse when an insidious loser like David Brooks throws his hat into the ring. I refuse to offer a link to his column for the New York Times, but I will provide access to Matt Taibbi's pointed, blunt rebuttal.
Amid such complete disaster and horrors, it's an easy, and cheap, rhetorical sophistry to use something atrocious as a blunt, awkward cudgel to illustrate a point. The problem, though, is that it reeks of bad taste and utter insouciance to do so. Limbaugh is an idiot, and regularly says nonsense that his listeners frequently follow. So I wasn't surprised to hear that he said something uncouth about the tragedy, although I was disgusted with his coldness. And just him in general.
The same goes for Pat Robertson. He has attained the tolerability of age, but this does not mitigate the crazy proclamations he makes. He said similar despicable things about New Orleans and its denizens when Hurricane Katrina hit. That disaster was horrible, but the earthquake in Haiti makes it look like a fickle rainshower (the mind can hold something that results in dozens dead, but thousands is incomprehensible, especially when the culprit cannot be embodied. The Holocaust was more devastating, of course, but at least it could demonize, rightfully, Hitler & Co.). So translating it into religious terms is both irresponsible and infuriating.
Both disasters exposed the rampant incompetence of those who responded. FEMA, as run by Michael "Brownie" Brown, did little to contain the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the hard-hit poor of New Orleans, and it's hard to think of one person who could be held responsible for the Haiti earthquake--although someone, no doubt, will. In the early days after the calamity, awful images regularly still flash on television screens. Turning the earthquake into an instrument of propaganda is a cheap, crass gambit that should shame whoever wants to do it. Yes, this happened and that should have happened, but it did and that didn't, so move on. Sitting in front of a microphone and talking is easy, and listening is easier, except when what is being said is an affront to decency. Irony runs out when something is as offensive as what any of these people said. We're humans, and it's wrong--just wrong--to think dismissively about such desolation.
You may wish harm on someone else, but this has its limits. No one who's not a reckless psychopath can envision something as, pardon the pun, earth-shattering as the earthquake and its fall-out in Haiti. I could never develop a scenario as big and terrible as the one there. Perhaps this also says something about my limited imagination. On the plus side, though, I'd never subject anyone to sitting through something as inane as 2012. I might not think up such catastrophes, but I can--and do--wish them on those who choose to use it as an opportunity to air their dumb political thoughts and inclinations. Limbaugh is deaf, and relies on a cochlear implant, but he can still talk, which is heaven for a moron. You can talk and talk and never hear the audible objections from rational dissenters.
Not once--even for an instant--did I think about fantastically switching places with a Haitian resident who, unlike me, does not have MS. There is irony in mentioning something and then denying its potential existence, but screw it--I'm chalking it up to empathy and not to aloof selfishness. I, clearly, do not even consider this a possibility. I do, though, recognize that the impulse toward that sort of magical thinking exists.
Sadism and schadenfreude may not be acceptable with regard to victims of capacious natural disasters, but they're oddly applicable to tone-deaf asses like Limbaugh or Robertson. Or intellectual charlatans like David Brooks.
R
