Iowa

Cynicism dies hard after the Iowa caucuses, even though the press certainly seems to take them seriously. And so they become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy – not in the sense that they accurately predict the ultimate Republican nominee (they don’t), but that they give an imprimatur to some candidates while turning the big losers into roadside litter. Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry could come back from their dismal showings, but it seems pretty unlikely. Maybe they just want to be vice president. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is seeking to turn his 8-vote victory over Rick Santorum into an indicator of his inevitability. I don’t think that less than a quarter of the 112,255 votes cast translates into a mandate for anything, but I do think Romney will be the candidate because everyone seems to think he is the one Republican who can beat Obama. But obviously he still doesn’t go down well with the hard right, and they are refusing to go down easily. Rick Santorum, who tells people over and over and over again, that he is the only candidate to have to visited all 99 of Iowa’s counties, moved in a few days from the far end of the debate podium to the new unRomney. He almost won, as he has been predicting for months. Ron Paul did, too, despite new disclosures about his unsettling past and unsavory fellow travelers. Newt Gingrich bore testimony to the power of well-funded, quasi-anonymous negative advertising, as Romney’s supporters spent millions bashing him from front-runner to also-ran. People complain about the coverage of the horse race instead of the issues, but the horse race is the only interesting thing about this primary. On to New Hampshire.

Her Whole Life

Today is the 33^rd birthday of our second child, known as little Joanie. She was born more than three months prematurely and weighed under a pound. She lived almost three days, finally giving up her fight for life on January 5^th. She lies now in London Grove cemetery, next to her grandparents and her cousin, Dallas, who died of SIDS in 1974. Joanie’s gravestone reads simply: “Joan Blaine, January 3-5, 1979, “God’s own, the earth’s and ours.” It is not our custom to bear our sadnesses in public, but I think it is also important to acknowledge a life that was lived to its fullest, however curtailed it was. Joanie never got out of an incubator, never drew a breath on her own, never probably knew where she was and why she was here. But she lived, and we rooted for her to live longer, although the odds were always prohibitive. When a child lives such a short time, it sometimes seems self-indulgent to talk as if the grief at her loss could compare with those who lose a child they have known far better and loved far longer. And so the tendency is to say nothing, to say, I have four children, knowing that I have five. In this I think the pro-life people have a point. Life is precious, and no one can judge when another’s life begins. But to make that belief a litmus test of political ideology is as shameful as to fail to recognize the sacredness of life – all life – itself.

Haiti

Haiti           In the lead book review in yesterday’s New York Times, Adam Hochschild reviewed Laurence Dubois’ Haiti: the Aftershocks of History. In 1804, after almost 15 years of horrific guerilla warfare against France, Britain, Spain and the new nation to its north, Haiti became the second republic in the New World – and the first black-led republic anywhere. Only the United States was older. Yet the comparisons end there. The U.S. embarked on a journey to become the richest and most powerful country in the world, while Haiti has remained the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, wracked by poverty and disease, ruled by a series of vicious dictators, victimized by its history of natural disasters. Hochschild’s reading of Dubois places the blame firmly on the conditions of Haiti’s birth: the long, terrible years of Caribbean slavery on the earth’s richest agricultural island, where thousands of slaves were worked literally to death; the destruction of an infrastructure on which to build a nation; and the continuous violence that prevented democracy from establishing itself on that fertile and bloody land. The review underscores the question of America’s role in the world, which has become a critical litmus test of today’s politics. Are we the beacon of freedom – our statue of liberty literally (or metaphorically for the growing number of nativists) welcoming those who seek a better life? Or is American imperialism a powerful force for evil – one that has supported Haiti’a most vicious dictators and put American corporate interests ahead of Haitian human rights? Increasingly, there seems no middle ground.