British physician and pundit Theodore Dalrymple offers a two-page summary of Haiti's desperation and its dismaying likely future. Of the latter he writes, ignoring fashionable P.C.:
....No one can remain unmoved by the pictures of Port-au-Prince after the earthquake (the situation outside the capital remains unknown, but one can imagine). Everything that can be done should be done: the financial resources necessary are, comparatively speaking, tiny.
But because of the very problems that contributed so much to the disaster in the first place -- appalling infrastructure, absent administration -- such relief will be difficult to provide efficiently, without the absurdities of supplies accumulating where they are not useful, and not reaching the places where they're desperately needed. Terrible as the Haitian army was, and often harmful as its role was, its deliberate and total dissolution in 1994 may now be a severe handicap, an unintended consequence of a good intention. And after the immediate crisis has passed, what? International administration? Restoration of national sovereignty under a government incapable of governing? More aid that results in little but corruption and infighting?
Laissez-faire? The mind reels.
In ghastly conjunction with Haiti's unfolding agony, a Royal Caribbean luxury cruise liner carried on with docking elsewhere at Haitian beaches, for the amusement of its passengers. The action has proven a PR disaster, as well it should be. True, tourist revenue is routinely collected all across the world by countries riven with desperate poverty, but in the midst of a mega-catastrophe decency demands suspending business-as-usual.
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