Beyond Cat Creole and Shaggy Dogs

FREJUS, France — Sen. JD Vance keeps on slandering legal Haitian immigrants who his constituents welcomed to fill crucial jobs. Truth from outraged townsfolk, local officials and the Republican governor of Ohio fails to dim his headline-grabbing lunacy.

"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people," he told Dana Bash on CNN, "then that's what I'm going to do." A telling measure of a man who would do anything to be president.

Miss Sassy, the wayward feline who started the fuss, came home to the woman who told police she feared it had ended up as cat creole. No matter. At least 35 bomb threats and racial taunts at anyone black paralyzed peaceable little Springfield.

TV screens continue to show a hate-spewing Donald Trump: "They're eating the dogs!" When he rants at rallies, "We've got to get them the hell out of there," crowds chant, "Send them home."

As this running non-story sucks up national attention, few Americans take note of the overriding global crises that fearful, godforsaken Haiti encapsulates.

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Haiti, only 700 miles from Florida, is a worst-case example of the violence, natural disasters and climate calamities that force multiple millions of decent, hard-working people across the globe to abandon their familiar surroundings.

Disdain for their plight reveals the racist, selfish policies Trump and Vance envision. The United States badly needs migrant labor, and it has room to shelter refugees. For people who preach Christian charity, a blanket "piss off" is cruel hypocrisy.

As president, Trump dismissed Haiti as a "shithole," akin to African states cursed with bad leaders, where so many Americans think foreign black lives don't matter. Vance, with a thin grasp of recent history and short on human empathy, echoes his contempt.

The Haiti I once loved to visit was run by a grasping, ignorant despot known as Baby Doc, son of Papa Doc, the dreaded François Duvalier. His tonton macoute thugs cracked down hard on anyone who stepped out of line, which Haitians were careful not to do.

A rich ruling class in hills above Port-au-Prince ran industries. Artists thrived. Poor people got by on a lush arable green half-island in waters thick with fish. They found solace in religion, simultaneously revering Roman Catholic and voodoo priests.

Tourism boomed. No hotel I know approaches the old Oloffson, a converted 19th-century mansion run by Al Seitz, a lovably gruff New Yorker. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Mick Jagger were regulars. Seitz died in 1982, and his widow, Sue, made it a nonstop party.

Graham Greene set "The Comedians" there. With its turrets and towers, he likened it to a Charles Addams New Yorker cartoon: "You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from a chandelier behind him...But in the sunlight...it seemed fragile and pretty and period and absurd."

Baby Doc was run out of Haiti in 1986, and complex politics got ugly. A local family muscled the lease away from Sue Seitz. The hotel fell into disrepair until 2010 when an earthquake wrecked it — and much of Haiti beyond.

That magnitude-7 quake killed up to 300,000 Haitians, left 1.9 million others homeless and destroyed much of the country's infrastructure. The $8 billion reconstruction costs surpassed the annual GDP.

For a brief time, Haiti commanded attention. TV crews rushed in, and anchors cooed over babies rescued from the rubble. Later calamities, less dramatic yet devastating nonetheless, barely made the news.

Drought wiped out 70 percent of food and export crops between 2015 and 2017. During that period, Hurricane Matthew decimated housing, livestock and utilities. Then in 2021 another monster earthquake struck. A vicious tropical storm followed.

From 2010 to 2020, the U.N. managed only $13 billion in relief. Some donors pledged more than they delivered. Much of what arrived mysteriously vanished. Volunteer agencies worked hard at relief and development, largely unnoticed.

In 2022, Biden urged more than $50 billion in aid to Haiti. Republicans resisted, and Congress cut that to $26 billion. Americans spent $136.8 billion that year on their pets.

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With back-to-back-to-back catastrophes, a series of governments failed, leaving a power vacuum filled by scores of heavily armed rival gangs. They terrorized sections of the capital with grand-scale looting and serial rape of captive women.

U.N. missions helped police keep order but had limited mandates. In 2010, Nepalese troops brought cholera, which killed nearly 10,000 and infected about a million others. Hospitals were overwhelmed as malaria and dengue fever began to run rampant.

Today Haiti is largely at the mercy of a ruthless ganglord who calls himself Barbecue. A U.N. contingent of 400 Kenyan police, with two dozen Jamaicans, is essentially powerless.

And now as climate change worsens, the outlook is grim. With barren fields and no income, the bulk of Haitians are starving.

Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker knows Haiti well. Not long ago, he told me in chilling detail about how gangs seize women off the streets, at times raping them repeatedly for weeks if they survive.

He has followed the collapse since 2010 when a knife-wielding mob from a damaged prison chased him down a street. Just recently, he reported how Barbecue — Jimmy Chérizier — led raids that freed most of the 4,000-plus men in Haiti's two main prisons.

Barbecue, a former police officer, now a self-styled revolutionary, has plans to remake Haiti. He wants to replace the lighter-skinned elite power structure to give poor people a voice.

“They zombified the people," he told Anderson. "They zombified them in every sense. We have to start fighting against that, and while we fight for that we must sensitize people, and that’s the work our alliance … has been doing in poor neighborhoods.”

Past foreign incursions in Haiti have come to grief. But Anderson's solid sources say that without a well-structured sizable intervention force to establish order and leave behind a functioning government, Barbecue's rabble is likely to control the country.

Ralph Senecal, a Haitian who runs an ambulance service in Port-au-Prince, captured the absurdity up north in a heedless America where Trump claims Haitians are eating dogs.

When Anderson wrote to ask if his family was OK, he replied, “No, we are not okay, and my family is very scared for their safety...No one will care about us because like your ex-president Trump said, we live in a kaka country.” Caca, as in shithole.

It is so bad, Senecal said, that "dogs are eating dead people in the streets all over Port-au-Prince."

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That is just Haiti. Today's world is awash in skilled, resourceful people with no taste for dogs and cats, eager to work hard, pay taxes and loath to break laws lest they get sent back to a place they risked death to escape.

It is pointless to appeal to the better nature of people who don't have one. The facts alone are indisputable.

Studies show the United States, at full employment, needs four million new immigrant workers a year. Beyond hardship, heavy cost and global contempt, a mass deportation plan would torpedo the economy that Joe Biden rebuilt after Trump's depredations.

A bipartisan panel acceded to Republican demands to secure the borders and expedite screening. Trump killed the plan so he could campaign on Biden's alleged failings at the expense of migrants and refugees in desperate straits.

After so many years, Trump is a known quantity. He is capable of almost anything. But he now looks terrible and so diminished he sometimes seems to be speaking in tongues. His medical and psychological readouts are guarded as closely as his tax returns.

Even if he avoids prison or a padded room and gets elected, he is likely to implode before long.

Vance is 40, smart and articulate in his truth-twisting. He echoes his master's voice and adds frightening thoughts of his own. His stated indifference to what happens in Ukraine is enough to make him unfit for the Senate, let alone the White House.

Harris did not dump 20,000 Haitians on Springfield. The 12,000 or so now there filtered in over time by word of mouth from friends who found it to be a good place. She helped Central American states improve living conditions so people could stay home.

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Human tsunamis are just beginning. War clouds loom in the Mideast. If Ukraine cannot beat back Vladimir Putin, he will invade elsewhere. Conflicts flare across Africa as terrorist groups and murderous "strongmen" gain ground. Much of Asia is in turmoil

The global ecosystem is fast nearing that crucial tipping point. Millions now face famine in countries like Sudan, cursed by simultaneous war and drought, which once had the capacity to feed much of Africa. Fisheries collapse as oceans warm and acidify.

As the European Union cracks down hard, migrants and refugees look to the United States. If its front doors are barred, people with nothing left to lose will find a way in through broken windows.

This morning on CNN, the headline is Hurricane Helene, potentially among the most damaging storms in recorded history. Winds across the shallow Gulf of Mexico shelf could sweep waves up to 10 feet high onto the Florida shore. Climate change is real.

Footage shows frantic preparations by wealthy communities: emergency shelters, evacuation routes, sandbags, plywood panels, relief supplies, generators, medical facilities, rescue teams. With luck, commentators say, Helene could remain to the south.

Luck for whom? The hurricane is already pummeling Cuba, Jamaica and, as usual, Haiti, where people can only hunker down and pray.

The Republican catchphrase, "Fortress America," is attractive for people who refuse to look up at what is beyond their direct line of sight. In today's world, that is beyond delusional.

It is hard to imagine a worse American president than Donald Trump at a time when a worldview based on reality, sensitive diplomacy, firm intelligent decisions, integrity and human empathy are so vital to keeping the planet intact. But there is JD Vance.