Umbrella Man - Part 3: The Émigré

George de Mohrenschildt with his fourth wife Jeanne

The American George de Mohrenschildt who introduced himself to Haiti Commerce Bank president and Duvalier crony, Clémard Charles in August 1961 to discuss some business opportunities in the desperate country,  was born Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt in 1911 in Mozyr, Russia (now Belarus) to a family of privilege that was Swedish by heritage though Russian for generations.  The family business was oil, which was why the von Mohrenschildts were in oil-rich Belarus when George was born (and not in elegant St Petersburg where his parents had met), but when the Bolsheviks confiscated oil companies' holdings in 1920, his father Sergius attempted to find a place in the new order by developing an interest in land reform.  His aristocratic ways betrayed him, however, and he endured some arrests.  Escaping with the help of two Jewish doctors from Siberia where he had been sent for life in 1922, he moved his family to Poland.  Shortly after the family's arrival, de Mohrenschildt's mother died in an epidemic  of typhoid.  The details of George de Mohrenschildt's life from that point are shrouded in a cloud of shifting lies told by de Mohrenschildt himself, both to glamorize his past where glamor was called for and to obscure the details when secrecy suited the circumstances.  As de Mohrenschildt  chronicler Joan Mellen writes:

He was a tall, comely man over six feet tall with thick, wavy dark hair, (some remembered it as dark blond). His eyes were light blue – or, as he himself described them, green. He spoke with a pronounced accent that to some sounded German. There was nothing straightforward about him.

He was educated in turn at Polish Cavalry Academy, at the Institute of Higher Commercial Studies at University of Liège in Belgium and years later at the University of Texas at Austin.  But he had other interests than academics. While in school in Belgium he had been arrested in Antwerp for public drunkenness, giving a false name to police and resisting arrest-- an incident that both followed him and set the tone for the rest of his life.

He was preceded to the US by his brother Dmitri von Mohrenschildt who had success as a professor of foreign language at Dartmouth where he also edited an anti-Soviet journal and had a side career in military intelligence.  An early recruit of the CIA in 1950, Dmitri contributed to Reader's Digest -- the ubiquitous monthly that was the mass propaganda outlet of the organization--  and helped to start Radio Free Europe.  de Mohrenschildt's father, Sergius von Mohrenschildt, too had done some intelligence work in Russia for the Abwehr, Hitler's Intelligence Service, in the 1930's and was  briefly courted by the CIA in the 50's, though relocating the elderly man with the Nazi past proved too daunting for anything to come of it.

In 1938, George von Mohrenschildt set off by himself in a sailboat from Le Havre, France to New York, declaring his intentions to immigrate to the American officials who met him ashore at the North American end of his traverse.  It didn't take long for him to make a splash in some circles of New York society. With a cosmopolitan sense of humor, he amused himself by shocking Americans with the fascist point of view in conversations, even taking it as far on occasion as giving a Heil Hitler and Nazi salute for emphasis. His politics were as fluid as the details of his history: in other circles, he extolled the benefits of communism.  He was the kind of guest that would make you have to check your children afterward to make sure he hadn't said anything untoward or behaved inappropriately with them. At this stage of his time in America he replaced the 'von' in his surname with 'de' "to make it sound less German."  Among those he was closest to were the Bouviers.  Jacqueline recalled being bounced on his knee as a child and calling him Uncle George.  But it was the future first lady's aunt, Edith Bouvier Beale (to be immortalized in the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens) with whom he was closest, and whose relationship he would mention when he needed to make an impression.

Ensconced in America, he had a knack for getting high paying jobs that indulged his aversion to work.  For a time he was an insurance adjuster for a New York firm he was eventually asked to leave because he could not pass an insurance exam.  In Texas, he did petroleum geology for Humble Oil.  But his activities outside of work, sometimes got him in trouble.  In 1941, he was spotted in a small boat off the coast of Corpus Christi, suspiciously close to a military installation.  When the Coast Guard approached him, he greeted them warmly, told them he was fishing.  When they asked him about his camera and some drawings he had been doing of the buildings on the shore, he told them it was just a hobby that kept him entertained when the fish weren't biting.  The Coast Guard wasn't exactly biting either.  The FBI began a file on him that was dutifully added to on reports of each new outlandish incident.

When the US entered the Second World War, de Mohrenschildt secured a 4F status on the basis of having "a weak heart".  When asked, he made it clear he was not interested in helping out with the war effort.  Instead he desired a re-entry visa to permit him to visit a married older woman he was having a torrid affair with in Mexico City.  In light of the Corpus Christi incident, his request was denied.  When he complained, the board was obliged to remind him he was lucky to not be deported altogether.  In spite of his difficulties with the authorities, he carried on his affair until it stopped being to his benefit, at which point he entered his tumultuous first marriage to a teenage heiress. With de Mohrenschildt pursuing other women in front of his wife and perpetrating domestic abuse with a hammer in private, it ended in divorce in 1944, after two years.

In 1945, out of options in the east, he moved to Texas and entered the University at Austin to study petroleum geology. Scandal followed him there: womanizing, cheating on exams, publicly shaming his Czech born Russian professor over his poor Russian accent.  As Joan Mellen put it, he acted like a man who "had nothing to lose."  Nevertheless he earned his Master's Degree, and in 1946 began working as an officer for the Rangely Field Engineering Committee in Colorado, where he promptly returned to his pattern of shirking and bilking his employers, first of money in the form of a salary paid his second wife for a made-up job, and then in furniture which he had loaded up in a trailer and carted to his accommodations.  Caught in the act, he lost his job and his wife, but back in Texas, he soon rebounded with wife number three, Wynne Sharples, his wealthiest yet, an oilman's daughter studying to become an MD.  The usual volatility and physical abuse ensued. Of de Mohrenschildt's attitude in these years, Joan Mellen writes:

He resented the rich and successful, since he was neither, and periodically professed sympathy with Marxism. “Comes the revolution,” de Mohrenschildt told Sharples, “you and your family will be first to go.” Mannered, sly, he pretended to be sympathetic toward the poor and the marginalized. “The best people are the Negroes,” he said. “They are simple and good and not rich.” As if he were Levin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, he said, “All we need is nature and the peasants.” Yet on occasion he slapped the servants.

To get away from his wife's complaints during the day, he used her money to start a business in 1954 developing oil deals, but the business hemorrhaged money.  In 1956, Sharples filed for divorce.  de Mohrenschildt contested it until his wife threatened to expose him as a homosexual.  He settled for 100 shares of his father-in-law's oil company.

1956 was also notable as the year of his first visit to Haiti where he remained until his client Sinclair Oil gave up on the prospects for finding new sources.

In his capacity as a petroleum geologist in Texas in the 50s, de Mohrenschildt worked for several outfits with strong CIA connections: Brown & Root, Schlumberger, and Pantepec Oil for whom he did surveys in Venezuela. Moreover, even after his divorces he retained relationships with CIA-connected former in-laws.  His second wife's uncle was in Guatemala for the CIA-backed coup that deposed the popularly elected, land reforming president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954.  His former step-nephew who had been future CIA director George H.W. Bush's roommate at Andover Academy was a partner in several ventures.   de Mohrenschildt had powerful connections in George Brown of Brown & Root and his former boss, the independent oilman John Mecom.  According to the Los Angeles Times, Brown and Mecom were invested in a venture called the San Jacinto Fund, whose mission was to use business and government pretexts for CIA assets as a means of infiltration in foreign and domestic affairs, a program that was not subject to public approval or review.   As the article stated:

The Americans thus involved made it possible for the CIA to penetrate, financially, the structure of private institutions here and abroad without public knowledge of what was going on. And they made it possible for the beneficiaries of this secret money to accept it without suspicion of taint.

 The defects of de Mohrenschildt's personality -- recklessness, amorality, narcissism, facility with lying, tactlessness, objectionability, lack of ethics-- were assets in intelligence.  The fact that he had apparently no one who'd be willing to protect him gave him the special quality of disposability which made him perfectly suited for the kind of work the agency was up to.  He began his association in 1957.

That year, he was sent to Yugoslavia officially to advise the government on the management of oil resources, but was ejected after 8 months for making drawings of military fortifications.  (In the typically perverse way his life worked, he would be back in Yugoslavia within 2 years without protest or incident).  His next assignment was Ghana where he had more success, followed by several other trips to Europe, notably Hungary, yet another country under the purview of the Soviets, and the site of an unsuccessful insurrection in 1956.

By 1959, he had married his 4th wife, Jeanne Le Gon another aristocratic Russian national who had been born in Harbin, China, a fact that de Mohrenschildt jokingly acknowledged in one of his CIA noms de guerre, "Phillip Harbin."  In late 1960 through 1961, he and his new wife embarked on what they told friends in Dallas was a "walking tour" of Central and South America.  The funding for what was described as a lark remained mysterious, as do details of what transpired for the 14 months that de Mohrenschildt and his wife went off the grid.  Not much is known about the adventure, but at its conclusion, de Mohrenschildt entertained the idea of writing a book about it, and went as far as writing President John Kennedy to invite him to contribute an introduction to it, mentioning his friendship with the First Lady's mother, Janet Auchincloss and her aunt Edith Beale as enticement.  The offer was declined, and no book was produced.  What is known about the trip from CIA records is that along the way the couple encountered personnel in training by the CIA in Guatemala for the ill-fated top secret Bay of Pigs invasion intended to depose Fidel Castro in Cuba that the newly elected President Kennedy would green light in April 1961,  and immediately come to regret.  It's also known that the tour wound up in Haiti where de Mohrenschildt spent several weeks and met with Duvalier's banker Clémard Charles for the first time.

Charles was president of Haiti's first private financial institution, Banque Commercial D'Haïti or Haiti Commerce Bank.  An early supporter of François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier's 1957 presidential campaign, Charles had used bribes to ensure that the Army would not stand in the way of a Duvalier victory-- something not to be taken for granted.  As an unusually wealthy self-made man in Haiti and an unofficial officer of Duvalier's specially created volunteer secret police, the Tontons Macoute, he had Duvalier's ear.  Furthermore, Duvalier preferred to deposit the millions received in foreign aid into the Commerce Bank rather than the National Bank of Haiti.  (For his part, de Mohrenschildt used the services of the Haitian National Bank to procure no less than seven loans beginning in 1959.)

To Clémard Charles, George de Mohrenschildt was not merely a customer so much as a partner in the ventures he brought to him.  As a business contact stemming from de Mohrenschildt's first meetings with him, Charles vouched for de Mohrenschildt to Haitian officials in his plan to conduct a geological survey of Haiti for petroleum and mineral resources, with de Mohrenschildt to  provide the funding for explorations to minimize  any interested investors' risk. Subsequently de Mohrenschildt shared an ambitious idea for Charles' consideration, the development of a Haitian Holding Company which de Mohrenschildt conjectured would do nothing less than re-structure Haiti's economy.  According to Joan Mellen's description:

As outlined in a document generated in Dallas on de Mohrenschildt’s letterhead and dated August 1, 1962, the Haitian Holding Company would be incorporated in the state of Texas. It would provide the following to Haiti: increased tobacco planting; a new cigar factory; cheap housing; a new wharf; and a hydroelectric plant “in conjunction with the dam that had already been built in 1953 by Brown & Root.” It promised projects that included: canning lobster tails; marketing coconut candy; building a cotton wool plant; organizing a local insurance company (Papa Doc had already granted Charles a monopoly on automobile insurance on the island); operating a sisal plantation; hemp factories; several sugar plantations; a casino; a film production company – and more.

The prospectus for the company made mention of "Haiti's special geographical position" in a less than veiled reference to the strategic and economic counterpoint Duvalier's Haiti provided to Castro's Cuba.

But Clémard Charles had more in mind than the mere economic development of Haiti when he chose de Mohrenschildt's partnership over other prospects of the time.  It was de Mohrenschildt's Texas connections that gave him special cachet.  Texas itself was a powerful state that boasted petroleum money and outsize political influence in the US.  The free wheeling nature of Texas ambitions were suited to the challenges of economically underdeveloped Haiti. Both Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush were Texans who had profited from corruption in Haiti -- Johnson with kickbacks from the Haitian meat industry in return for pro-Haiti votes, and Bush from dealings in Zapata Oil.  More importantly to Charles, Texas was the land of CIA, which everyone knew was capable of, and by all indications planning on, removing the erratic dictator Duvalier from such a geopolitically strategic vantage as Haiti.  It was in his capacity as CIA asset that de Mohrenschildt stood to be more useful to Clémard Charles.

If the CIA wanted to remove Duvalier, then Charles wanted to be the replacement.  He expressed the ambition to de Mohrenschildt who made it a project to see that Charles' proposition got a hearing in the right channels. Letters were exchanged between de Mohrenschildt, Charles and officials in Washington, and meetings were arranged.  In May 1963, Charles flew to the US under the pretext of government business and met with officials in New York and Washington to discuss his qualifications and his serious intentions.  In Washington, officials were dismayed when Charles was joined by de Mohrenschildt whose reputation preceded him, and who in typical overbearing fashion managed to alienate the Department of Defense personnel in attendance to the point that Charles' name was unceremoniously scuttled down the list of potential horses to back in anti-Duvalier schemes.  Charles and de Mohrenschildt didn't know that, however, and de Mohrenschildt continued to insinuate himself into Charles' campaign, at one point stealing stationery from the exclusive Tennis and Racquet club in New York in an effort to impress would-be investors in the Haitian Holding Company.

Charles' ambitions were not de Mohrenschildt's only preoccupation in the spring of 1963.  The previous summer he had returned to Fort Worth for one last order of business. de Mohrenschildt the snobbish cosmopolitan socialite was now with his wife squiring a recently arrived rough and unpleasant young American ex-marine who had recently reversed a defection to the Soviet Union, returning to the States with his Russian bride after nearly 3 years.  Lee and Marina Oswald were not the usual sort that de Mohrenschildt associated with but suddenly they were very much travelling in the same circles that fall.  The attentions de Mohrenschildt lavished on the couple included paying outstanding bills, providing a place for Marina to stay when Lee was in a violent mood, offering job counseling and sheparding the couple around town to one function or another.  In February 1963, the de Mohrenschildt's hosted a party for the Oswalds attended by among others the son of one of Voice of America's executives, and by Ruth Paine who would take Marina and the Oswald's newly born baby daughter June in later that spring while Lee went to New Orleans for the summer.  One spring night while de Mohrenschildt was sharing home movies of his Latin American walking tour with neighbors, Oswald showed up.  When asked about this unlikely friendship, de Mohrenschildt described it as charity toward an emigrée and her American husband.  In actuality his role was -- to use a CIA term-- to "babysit" Oswald; to groom and tend to an asset for whom someone had plans.  Oswald's time in Russia had been spent as part of a "false defector" program used as a cover by operatives expected to infiltrate Soviet society for intelligence.  Marina, whom Oswald married after only 6 weeks of courtship was the niece of an employee in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Minsk -- the setting of de Mohrenschildt's early childhood-- where she and Oswald had met. Back in the states following his Soviet mission, Oswald's time was managed by de Mohrenschildt in Fort Worth and by Clay Shaw, immortalized in the movie JFK, in New Orleans.

A relic from the time was a souvenir photograph Oswald had given de Mohrenschildt and inscribed "To my friend George, from Lee Oswald".  Taken in Oswald's backyard it shows Oswald brandishing his soon-to-be infamous Mannlicher-Carcano rifle in one hand and holding copies of The Militant and The Worker rival communist newspapers in the other, with headlines referring to a recent  unsuccessful attempt by an unknown assailant to kill the staunch anti-communist conservative General Edwin Walker through a window of his East Texas home.  On receiving the photograph, de Mohrenschildt joked: too bad that Oswald had missed.  A second inscription on the back of the photograph, written in Russian, ostensibly by Marina, read: "Killer of fascists.  Ha-ha-ha!"

By June of 1963, de Mohrenschildt was ready to move to Haiti permanently.  He had already said goodbye to Lee and Marina in April, and would be gone when Oswald returned to Texas from New Orleans to rent an apartment by himself in Dallas.  It seemed that de Mohrenschildt's work with Oswald was done.  Back in Haiti, Papa Gede, the vodou loa of President François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, the sworn enemy of President John F. Kennedy, had other ideas.
*****
Umbrella Man:

Part 1: Ayiti

Part 2: Bèl Gason

Part 3: The Émigré

Part 4: The Opening

Epilogue & Selected Bibliography

Umbrella Man - Part 2: Bèl Gason

Papa Gede   

Bèl gason 

Gede Nibo

Bèl gason

Lè li abiye tout an blan

Li pòtre yon depite

Lè li abiye tout an nwa 

Li pòtre yon senatè 

(Papa Gede is a handsome man

Gede Nibo is a handsome man

When he dresses all in white, he looks like a deputy.

When he dresses all in black, he looks like a senator.)

- Traditional

François Duvalier, 1957

One night in late 1954, a car pulled up in front of a house in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.  The driver waited. At last the figure of a woman carrying a suitcase appeared in the doorway.  The driver helped the woman into the back seat, and per instructions drove a winding course through the streets of the city.  When his passenger was sure that they were not being followed, the driver returned to the street on which he'd picked the woman up and parked at the house opposite the address he'd started from.  The driver helped the woman out of the car and carried her suitcase to the door, which opened to let the woman inside.  But the woman was no woman.  She was the disguise of Dr François Duvalier, former Minister of Public Health under ex-President Dumarsais Estimé, now dead after 3 years of forced exile.  This was Duvalier's second relocation since the summer when he'd moved from his own residence to the house next door.  The objective was to keep his whereabouts a secret to the forces supporting the current Haitian president, Paul Magloire a military officer who had participated in the coup that ousted Estimé 4 years before.  Magloire, losing grip on his office after a series of scandals exposed him as a kleptocrat and suspicious of rivals, had it in for Duvalier-- in an effort to pressure him to leave the country, he had seen to it that his employers, an American health mission had had him dismissed.  But Duvalier had no intention of obliging the usurper's wishes for him.

François Duvalier was a young boy in Port-au-Prince when US President Woodrow Wilson in an effort to insinuate the US into the affairs of his Caribbean neighbor to the south sent Marines to occupy Haiti in 1915.  By the time Franklin Roosevelt ended the occupation in 1934 in the spirit of his Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America, Duvalier was an intern, having nearly achieved his childhood dream of becoming trained as a doctor of medicine at the elite Lycée Pétion.  The occupation had radicalized him as it had so many others of his generation.  It inspired him while still a student to delve into the writings of Jean Price-Mars who advanced the notion of noirisme, defining the modern Haitian's struggle to restore the wisdom and strength of the peoples of Africa whence their forebears had been torn, first by the Spaniards for whom Columbus discovered the Island in 1492 and then by the French against whom the slaves had fought and won back their freedom in 1804. So preoccupied with noirism was Duvalier as an undergraduate that with fellow Lycée students Lorimer Denis and Louis Diaquoi, he had founded a journal and literary movement in 1932 called Les Griots after West African bards. The writings extolled the virtues of blackness, Pan-Africanism and negritude, and urged revolution against Haiti's other racial category, the minority of light-skinned mulattoes, descendants of Haiti's European colonizers and African slaves who by sheer virtue of the European mixed into their blood had been granted elite privilege over the oppressed black majority since the dawn of Haiti's often sad and bloody history. Duvalier's writings developed what journalist Elizabeth Abbott described as "a fanatical following."

The special object of Duvalier's fascination was vodou, the Haitian version of West African spiritual practices brought to the island with the first slaves in 1505 as filtered through the Catholicism of the Spanish and French masters they overthrew, a practice that was frowned upon by the official Catholic church and driven underground by the US Marine occupation of the island from 1915 to 1934.  In brief, as Anthropologist Julia Pfeifer has described it:

Haitian vodou is based on a belief in a unique supreme being as creator of the universe. Contrary to the Christian god, the supreme being is believed to be a distant god.  This god is supposed to have transferred some of its power to a pantheon of deities, called loa.  A serviteur always serves the loa, not the supreme being.  Therefore, Haitian Vodou is a religion with a monotheistic head and a polytheistic body.  

Vodou is less a doctrine or set of moral principles than a system of ritualized interactions with the spiritual world, particularly through experience of loa (or lwa), spiritual entities something akin to gods or saints.  The loa are encountered through ceremonies conducted at a usually remote often dirt floored temple called a peristil by either a houngan or male priest, or a mambo, the female counterpart.  After days of preparation, the drumming begins and a conch is blown to beckon practitioners, known as serviteurs, to a ceremony.  Offerings are made, including perhaps a sacrificed chicken or goat, ritual drawings called vévé specific to each loa are drawn on the floor of the peristil in cornmeal.  Drums are played and the practitioners dance until any one of them signals through contortions that they have entered a trance state in which they become a "horse" mounted by the loa.  At this point, the loa speaks through the horse, offering counsel and instruction, and granting serviteurs access to the hidden mysteries.

The loa associated with Duvalier was Papa Gede, alternately known in other aspects as Gede Nibo and Baron Samedi, lord of death and guide of the recently deceased to the afterlife. Often represented with a top hat, his face half white and half black, a handsome man of taste and power, perhaps a Senator usually smoking a cigar, with a cane or sometimes, as at a funeral, an umbrella as a reminder that death like rain falls on us all.  As a doctor who specialized originally in the treatment of yaws, the deforming and necrotic bacterial infection to which children were especially susceptible, and who in his position with a US sponsored health mission to Haiti had had a great hand in eradicating it from the island by prompt treatment with penicillin, Duvalier first acquired the nickname Papa Doc, in reference to Papa Gede's power to protect children from being taken before their time.

Duvalier's hero (and as observed by Estimé's sometime love interest, Katherine Dunham, American dancer, anthropologist, and eyewitness to events in Haiti at the time, Duvalier's better) was Dumarsais Estimé.   Estimé shared with Duvalier both a hatred for the mulatto elite, and an obsession with mulatto women.  Both had mulatto wives (and therefore children).  With Duvalier's help, Estimé had himself wrested the presidency from an earlier military coup that had also been instigated by the mulatto Magloire.  Estimé had been popularly elected. During his term he initiated reforms, nationalized industries.  He named Duvalier secretary of labor and then Public Health Minister. But in spite of  Estimé's broad popularity with the people, he had enemies in high places, and found himself in exile in 1950, restlessly on the move for 3 years, from Port-au-Prince to Havana to Paris and finally to New York where he died in 1953.

Now, after 4 years of relative prosperity in Haiti that coincided with postwar boom in the first world, Magloire's future was uncertain, and Duvalier with his friends, including Clément Barbot another former official in Estimé's government displaced by Magloire's coup, were planning for Haiti's next phase.  Magloire's corruption caught up with him and he was forced into exile before the end of his term.  A series of provisional governments assumed presidential duties during the long campaign.  Duvalier campaigned on a populist noirist platform that harkened to the Estimé administration, whose abrupt ouster was still deeply resented by the black majority that had elected him.  Most notably Duvalier campaigned on a promise to give women the vote.  In noirist fashion he openly criticised his opponent Louis Déjoie (and closest rival following the forced ejection from Haiti by motorboat of the former frontrunner, Daniel Fignolé), as a corrupt mulatto who would be a repeat of Magloire.  After many months, the election was finally held September 22, 1957.  In an election not without fraud and intimidation from both sides, Duvalier won with more than 70% of the nearly million votes cast.  He was inaugurated October 22.  Thereafter, he would consider 22 his lucky number.

Almost immediately upon his inauguration, Duvalier set about rewriting the constitution to consolidate power,  and to reshape the government in a way that let him use civic promotions and appointments to begin making good on his promise to restore a measure of power and wealth to the black majority from the tiny mulatto elite.  It was also during this period that first glimpses of the repressive sadist Duvalier would become apparent.  Before the end of the year, dozens of opponents and critics were thrown into Fort Dimanche prison.  There were incidents of murder, brutality and intimidation.  In January 1958, Yvonne Hakime-Rimpel, editor and publisher of the feminist magazine L'Escale and early critic of the autocratic measures of Duvalier awoke one night to a group of nine men in her bedroom, members of a hooded vigilante group known as the cagoulards  who had been called into duty during the campaign by Duvalier for purposes of intimidation, who after terrorizing her husband and young daughters, took her from her house by car to a remote field where the men in turn raped her.  A voice she recognized as Duvalier's ordered the men to finish her off.  One of them -- whether to save her life or to see that she remained alive in terror she was never sure-- fired at the ground next to her, and she was finally left in a ditch for dead.  The effort succeeded in silencing her.

Magloire's plottings over the years had taught Duvalier to be distrustful of the army.  In 1958 he recruited from the cagoulards a civilian militia officially called Volontaires de la Sécurité National that would become his secret police. Suspected of being behind several sudden disappearances they soon came to be known unofficially as Tontons Macoute,  named for Uncle Knapsack, a figure of folklore who came into homes by night to gather bad children into his knapsack for breakfast.   The one constant of the Macoute uniform was a pair of dark glasses to hide the eyes, and for those who could afford them blue jeans and a cowboy hat.  Duvalier appointed his co-plotter Clément Barbot head of the force, and a young fanatic supporter of his election, Rosalie Bousquet who became notorious by her married name of Madame Max Adolphe as the Macoute's commandant.  Barbot and Madame Max were called to their work.  The Macoute's modus operandi was  destroying the mental health of rivals by threatening and not infrequently killing their family members.

The US response to what was obviously becoming a problem in the Haitian capital was schizophrenic, on the one hand supporting movements to oust Duvalier that had grown among the exile community, on the other supplying massive amounts of aid.   Nothing came of the plans for insurgency.  The aid, along with revenue collected from capriciously introduced taxation went not to the national treasury but to the vaults of the private Haitian Commerce Bank, headed by Duvalier loyalist and sometime Macoute, Clémard Joseph Charles whose efforts at bribing the military to keep at bay their tendency to interfere in elections during Duvalier's presidential campaign had greatly helped to smooth his way to the presidency.

Nearby, earth shattering changes were taking place.  On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro, partly inspired by Toussaint Louverture who had commanded the guerrilla army that had liberated Haiti's slaves from France in 1804, experienced the culmination of his revolution in Cuba, installing himself as leader.  Duvalier's ally in the region, Fulgencio Batista, the dictator who had brought Casinos to Havana and great wealth to the foreign playboys and gangsters who operated them -- and to himself-- while delivering misery to his own people, was gone.   Fidel himself was non-ideological.  He professed to believe only in the Cuban people, but his two primary alternates, his brother Raul and the Argentinian lawyer and revolutionary-at-large Ernesto Guevara, known better by the Argentine slang for "guy", Che, were openly Marxist in their leanings.  To begin to redress the inequities of Batista's incumbency, Fidel's intent was to adopt a policy of agrarian reform modeled after that recently attempted in Guatemala by Jacobo Árbenz before a CIA backed coup removed the democratically elected Árbenz from office in 1954.  First, the Castro government needed to rid Cuba of potential opponents which they achieved with a series of public trials and executions. The nod to due process was unusual for the region to say the least.  Within Eisenhower's Washington, the Dulles brothers at State and the CIA began concocting plots to rid Cuba of its exciting and immensely popular leader. Duvalier was deemed a less pressing problem. He may have been an out of control maniac but at least he was not a communist.

On May 24, 1959, Duvalier suffered a massive heart attack and was in a coma for  nine hours.  Some thought the neurological damage done during this episode might explain his subsequent behavior.  Always an acolyte of vodou since his Griots days, following his heart attack, his interest in the darkest aspects of it became, in the description of Katherine Dunham, "pathological."  She was among many who described him in this period as becoming gray in color with substance visibly oozing from his pores.   He had become partial recently to a flamboyant streetcart vendor and sometime houngan named Zacharie Delva who he considered to have special vodou powers.  When he learned of the death of a foe (perhaps within the walls of notorious Fort Dimanche prison where he'd put so many to be forgotten), he and Delva would plot with the Tontons Macoute to abscond with the corpse, or with just the head, for rites designed to absorb its power.   In an effort to subdue the Catholic Church, always a threat and critic of his regime, Duvalier began a campaign to have foreign priests deported.  While a mass was held at Port-au-Prince's cathedral to pray for the expelled priests, the Tontons Macoute entered with nightsticks to beat and arrest worshippers.  To celebrate the expulsion, Delva held a vodou ceremony on the cathedral steps during which he drank the blood of three freshly sacrificed black pigs.

While Duvalier was ill and during his recovery period, Clément Barbot had assumed presidential duties.  When he was able to resume as president, Duvalier began to suspect that Barbot had taken advantage of his illness and he began to worry that his former comrade would come to betray him in an effort to gain power.  A distance grew between them.

Meanwhile, an election in the United States meant a new president of a new party in 1961, the young and glamorous Senator John Kennedy.  Kennedy chose for his Attorney General his own younger brother Robert Kennedy, but the younger Kennedy was in some respects something of a co-president.  Like the Dulles brothers before them, the Kennedy brothers, scions of the family of businessman and politician Joseph Kennedy, who made a fortune frequently in competition with the mob that Robert Kennedy would build his own reputation prosecuting, and who imbued the sons he groomed for greatness with pro capitalist enthusiasm  were both possessed of the disease of Communist Derangement Syndrome, and this caused them to make embarrassing blunders fresh out of the gate.

The most visible and painful of these was proceeding with the absurdly cockamamie secret plan hatched during the Eisenhower administration to stage an invasion of Cuba from the logistically disadvantageous Bay of Pigs, by a rag tag group of exiles in April 1961.  In spite of warnings from more seasoned advisors, the Kennedys, whose win in November had been narrow, wanted to prove themselves to doubters of their acumen and resolve in foreign affairs.  The ok was given. On April 15, a boat sailed for Cuba from Guatemala.  It made land two days later in the finger shaped Bay of Pigs and in the initial surprise,  appeared to have had an advantage, but in the difficult terrain, the situation turned.  Initial gains were reversed at Playa Larga. To compound problems, when Kennedy sensed correctly after three days that the tide had turned against the invaders, and having lost a plane in the pre-battle reconnaissance, the Navy hero did not have the nerve to follow up with Air power.  The result was that Castro's forces (with Castro himself directing things in person from nearby Palpite) soon gained the upper hand, ending the invasion with 1200 captured, 2 American planes shot down and 2 American supply ships lost.  Castro achieved hero status when it was revealed that the new US president was behind the attacks.  Most significantly, the incident forced Castro's hand in terms of seeking alignment.  All of his overtures to the US since assuming power had been met with indifference if not outright hostility when it was clear that Castro sought American recognition on his own terms.  Castro observed that Latin American countries that went their own way like Guatemala were squashed by the US at the soonest opportunity.  Countries that courted the US tended to be corrupt and were only humored when they neglected their own people in favor of right-wing American business interests.  Originally inclined to go it alone, Castro learned from the Bay of Pigs incident that the US could not be trusted.  Better to keep the designs of the uncomfortably close neighbor in check with a match in terms of power and might, and even better if the ally were not in the neighborhood, breathing down his neck. Not yet a Communist, but more of a survivalist, Castro reached out to the Soviet Union.

The humiliation experienced by the Kennedys at Bay of Pigs at first intensified their thirst for redemption through glory, causing them to entertain a variety of schemes. No idea was too foolish. As Journalist Alex Von Tunzelmann notes:

In addition to inventing several cigar-based death traps, including soaking the tobacco leaves in botulinum toxin, the CIA fixated on another of Fidel’s hobbies—diving. There was a poison diving suit, impregnated with fungus spores that would cause a skin disorder. There was a poison aqualung, with the mouthpiece of its breathing apparatus rerouted to release tuberculosis bacilli into his mouth. The head of the CIA’s Cuban task force, Desmond FitzGerald, wondered if they could make an exploding seashell for the Cuban leader to pick up. At this, reality briefly intruded. One of the CIA agents in the room asked how they would make Fidel choose the right shell: “Put a flashing neon sign on it and have it play Beethoven’s Fifth?”

The epitome of the derangement may have been the extent to which Robert Kennedy, famously aggressive in going after the mob in Congress had been willing to go in pursuing CIA plots to use the expertise of mob hitmen against Castro. The fervor for glory was not limited to Cuba.  One possibly CIA approved plot had succeeded in the Dominican Republic -- the successful assassination of the brutal long time dictator Rafael Trujillo in May 1961, a plot that had been brewing since Trujillo's surrogates had made an attempt on Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt's life the year before.

The successful operation so close to home unnerved Duvalier and made him suspicious of the young American president, but with anti-Duvalier forces in exile famously more concerned with plotting against each other for life in Haiti after Duvalier than with cooperating with each other against Duvalier himself, nothing could get off the ground; the United States had learned to bide its time and tolerate Duvalier in the meantime.  Incentive to stay within tolerable lines came in the form of millions of dollars in aid filling the coffers of Clémard Charles's Commerce Bank. In order to turn on the American aid tap, Duvalier and many others learned, you needed only to raise the spectre of communism haunting the Americas with the US.  With Havana's casinos closed, Port-au-Prince seemed to some as worth consideration for the next gambling mecca in the hemisphere.  Duvalier instructed his ministers to encourage it, but the dictator's erratic behavior made Haiti too large a gamble even for the mob.

While the Bay of Pigs fiasco was unfolding in Cuba, Duvalier suddenly dissolved the government and announced an election.  Since the Haitian constitution forbade a president from succeeding himself, his name was not on the ballot.  Indeed, the reason for the sudden election was unclear.  The only candidates on the ballot were Duvalier loyalists.  On the day of the election, turnout was so low that officials scouted for anyone who could be counted, even among foreigners and non-residents and rounded them up to cast their ballots.  In spite of the low turnout, the results were announced a week later: over a million in favor of the Duvalier government and another term for Duvalier; 0 against.  While the world scorned the election as an excessive display of the megalomania of a disturbed dictator, Duvalier humbly accepted "the will of the people."

Now at the height of paranoia, all of Duvalier's efforts turned to retaining power.  He had elevated the flamboyant houngan Zacharie Delva to a status akin to a personal Rasputin.  Under Delva's spell, Duvalier had become especially suspicious of his former ally, the brutal head of the Tontons Macoute, Clément Barbot who Duvalier feared had never lost the taste for power that he'd experienced when he'd assumed presidential duties while Duvalier convalesced from his heart attack in 1959.  Duvalier had Barbot arrested and thrown into Fort Dimanche prison where he languished for 18 months before Duvalier relented and had him released, a broken man.

Duvalier's antics, instability and open hostility to American aims had earned him a place on Kennedy's short list for regime change.  While those plans would take time, the one thing Kennedy could do now to exert pressure on Duvalier was eliminate aid.  In October 1962, the world learned that the Soviet Union had been stockpiling nuclear weapons in installations in Cuba.  During the tense standoff between the US and the USSR, in an effort to restore good graces with Kennedy, Duvalier let Washington know that Haiti, 40 miles from Cuba at its closest point was at its disposal if a base was needed for operation.  The US took him up on his offer and dispatched troops to Port-au-Prince without communicating the plan to anyone in Haiti.  When a startled minister reported to Duvalier that American soldiers were walking on the lawn under his window, Duvalier panicked assuming they had come to assassinate him.  Only when he had crammed his family with hastily packed suitcases into a getaway car did he learn that the Americans were in Haiti on his invitation.

Not that the US did not have its hands in several efforts to disrupt the status quo in Haiti.  Kennedy was resolute on doing what he could to oust Duvalier and install a more stable government that could be leveraged in the ultimate goal of removing Castro from Cuba.  But messages were mixed.  In the spring of 1963, a group of Haitian Army officers, believing they would receive American arms and support, embarked on a coup, but when they learned that they were mistaken about the American's level of commitment, their plans to loot munitions from Haiti's armory for the mission were intercepted and they were exposed.  Most of the officers fled but Col Charles Tournier was captured, and when brutal bloody torture did not yield the names of his co-conspirators, shot.  For several days, Macoute were instructed to find as many former officers as they could and have them killed on the pretext that they had access to guns and could have been involved in the plot.

Shaken at the exposure of the army plot, Duvalier thought Haiti could use an occasion to remind itself of his benevolence.  He declared a Month of Gratitude -- gratitude of the Haitian people for himself-- from April 22 to May 22 of 1963 (purposely setting the beginning and end dates as the number he considered the most auspicious for him ever since his election and inauguration on September 22 and October 22 of 1957).  During the month, rallies were to be held at which officials were expected to give speeches in praise of Duvalier-- words supplied by the president's office if they were not forthcoming on their own.  The declaration removed all doubt as to whether Duvalier would vacate the presidency as the constitution required on May 15.  The festivities were interrupted mere days in however by an incident that would go down in infamy in the Duvalier years.  On the morning of April 26, a limousine driving Duvalier's 14 year old daughter Simone and 11 year old son Jean-Claude was ambushed by a sniper as it pulled up to the children's school in an apparent attempted kidnapping.  In the gunfire, the chauffeur and two Macoute body guards were killed.  The children managed to make it safely inside the school.  Duvalier was livid when he found out.  He at once incorrectly surmised that the shooter must have been a former lieutenant and famed sharpshooter François Benoit, and ordered him brought in for punishment.  Benoit, somehow got wind of the plan and rather than risk failure in convincing Duvalier's thugs of his innocence, escaped. When the Macoutes discovered him missing, standing in as proxies for Duvalier's fury, they machine gunned Benoit's family and for good measure on the president's orders went on a rampage killing anyone they could find with a first or last name of Benoit.  Duvalier could not quite bring himself to believe the truth at first, that the perpetrator of the attack was his old friend, fellow anti-Magloire plotter and disgraced former head of the Tontons Macoute, Clément Barbot. But when a rumor spread that Barbot had escaped by transforming himself into a black dog, Duvalier ordered all black dogs in Haiti shot.  Barbot eluded the Macoutes until July when he was found in Cazeau, plotting another attack, where his hut was torched with gasoline and he was machine gunned with his fellow plotters as he fled.

Kennedy had already cut off aid to Haiti since 1962.  At news of the escalating terror, he ordered American warships to Port-au-Prince Harbor.  "They cannot touch me," Duvalier said. "I am already an immaterial being."  When international observers from the Organization of American States flew in, Duvalier whipped up a drunken carnival of peasants from the countryside as a display of the contentment of his people.  He addressed the committee only in Creole, insulting them to their faces.  His increasingly erratic behavior had American experts convinced the end was near for his incumbency, but at a news conference for the foreign press at which an air of finality hung over the proceedings, Duvalier appeared late, then casually waved off suggestions that anything was wrong in Haiti, abruptly ending the press conference saying, "I would like to stay longer with you  but I'm very busy today."  Graham Greene, whose novel The Comedians describes this period of Duvalier's era, expressed disbelief that Duvalier's outrageous brutality did not get him killed.

But if Kennedy was eyeing a future without Duvalier, Duvalier was brooding that something had to be done about Kennedy.  Sending hit squads to Cuba and the Dominican Republic without care for international law. Toppling democracies to suit the elite, the people be damned.  Running his own country with friends, cronies, his own brother, was he any different from Trujillo or Castro?  Wasn't the US among the last of the modern nations to abolish slavery?  Weren't American blacks among the most oppressed, impoverished, threatened group of people in the world?  What was going on in American prisons?  What about the millions of poor in America's cities and Appalachia?  What made the US different from any other country in terms of international crimes of war and oppression of its own people?  Democracy?  Weren't there stories about missing ballot boxes in West Virginia and dead people voting for Kennedy in Chicago?  Who was Kennedy to pass judgment on Duvalier?  Was it his Whiteness? Wasn't Kennedy with his privileged life the American equivalent of the mulatto?  Weren't all American presidents?

Duvalier seethed with a desire to give Kennedy a taste of his medicine. In October 1963, a rumor went around that Duvalier, with the  houngan Delva officiating, conducted a ceremony in which he stabbed a vodou doll of Kennedy in the neck 2,222 times, and pleaded for aid from Papa Gede in carrying out the deed.

Mysterious forces prevailed.  A conduit for the spirit mission existed in Haiti at that time.  Recently Duvalier had been approached on more than one occasion by his banker Clémard Joseph Charles, of the Commerce Bank. He had wanted a word with the president about a proposed business venture with an American national, a friend of US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy's aunt, Edith Bouvier.  Duvalier's ears must have perked up at the news of this connection to his nemesis Jack Kennedy.  The business partner's name was George de Mohrenschildt.
*****
Umbrella Man:

Part 1: Ayiti

Part 2: Bèl Gason

Part 3: The Émigré

Part 4: The Opening

Epilogue & Selected Bibliography

Umbrella Man - Part 1: Ayiti

In December of 1492, on his first voyage to the Americas, Christopher Columbus set foot on the island of Hispaniola for the first time in what is now Haiti.  Columbus sailed on; the Spaniards who remained behind on Hispaniola immediately set about enslaving and ultimately extinguishing the native Taino population, setting the brutal tone of human exploitation that would be emulated by many others in the New World for generations.

Within little more than a dozen years of the arrival of Columbus, the first captured Africans were brought in shackles to the island as slaves in 1505 by Columbus's son Diego to replenish the dwindling population of Taino.  The practice continued in spite of the fact that on protest from a cleric who had witnessed it first hand, Spain had made forced labor illegal; but then the law existed only on paper.  By 1700, when after years of contention, France had won the western third of the island by treaty from Spain and re-dubbed it Saint Domingue, there were 2000 slaves in the territory.  After 100 years of French colonization, there were nearly 500,000 -- approximately half of all slaves in the Caribbean.  The forced labor of enslaved Africans fueled the Island's coffee and sugar production making it one of the economic powerhouses of the new world.

To sustain this supremacy, treatment of slaves was necessarily brutal.  Slaves were crammed by the dozens into small, windowless huts by night, roused at dawn for backbreaking work until dusk.  By royal decree, owners were only required to give slaves what amounted to 3 days worth of food per week, but even this meager regulation was not enforced and so was frequently flouted.  The little time slaves had to themselves had to be taken up with using what little they had to cultivate food to supplement what they got from their enslavers.  As historian C.L.R. James noted:

The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings. To cow them into the necessary docility and acceptance necessitated a regime of calculated brutality and terrorism, and it is this that explains the unusual spectacle of property owners apparently careless of preserving their property: they had first to ensure their own safety.

In spite of this, the common rationalization for the practice of slavery was that Africans were better off in the Americas than they had been in the lands they were ripped from-- always an easier lie to tell themselves than a truth to be lived up to.  Aside from escape to the hills which happened often enough, it was only through hard labor, saving of resources through deprivation and luck that a slave could occasionally gain freedom recognized by colonial society, but this freedom did not extend to the full rights enjoyed at the level of even the poorest whites.  As with the Europeans, life in Saint Domingue was equally stratified for those of African birth and descent.  As a result of white plantation owners sexually enslaving the African born women, a caste system evolved in which those of mixed race, called mulattoes, were granted privileges and statuses denied those of darker skin.

In contrast to the British Colonies of North America which preferred to replenish the population of slaves through birth, the French began toward the latter part of the 18th century to rely increasingly on expanded annual importation of slaves as a means of increasing sugar and coffee production.  The practice was to literally beat and work slaves to death or incapacity and replace them with new captives from Africa when there was no more work left in them.  As a consequence, for far longer than in the British colonies, slaves in Saint Domingue had fresh memories of the cultures they were torn from -- mostly those of equatorial Western Africa from the Guinea coast to Dahomey in present day Benin.  In this environment, the spiritual practices of the Africans captured and sold into slavery were transplanted to the island and grew into a form of ritual and devotion known variably today as vodou, vadou, vodun or voodoo, described by one of its 20th century scholars and practitioners, the polymath Dr François Duvalier in this way:

Vodou, elaborated on the soil of Africa whose anguished mystery it reflects, also expresses overwhelmingly the conscience of a race as it confronts the enigmas of this world.

In addition, the memory of freedom was fresh and a passion for it remained kindled in the slave population.   The island had been the site of the first recorded slave rebellion in the Americas, begun in 1519 and lasting until the Spanish quashed it in 1530.  Nearly 300 years later, in 1791, inspired by the Revolution in France, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (also spelled L'Ouverture), a dark-skinned self-educated former slave who had been freed in 1776 and who had gained military experience by siding with the Spanish in conflicts against the French, became the leader of a revolt in Saint Domingue, the object of which was first and foremost the abolition of slavery on the island.  The first stirrings of the revolution were within the population of Freedmen and mulattoes, then numbering somewhat more than 25,000 to the 40,000 whites in the colony.  With a successful uprising of slaves in the North that grew out of a vodou ceremony, the battle was joined.  Through mostly guerrilla tactics that would be emulated usually without credit in future revolutions across the globe, the tide turned inexorably in favor of the slaves and their champions.

Gaining an upper hand in the conflict, Toussaint Louverture sought to convince Napoleon Bonaparte of his desire for the colony to remain French but free; but Napoleon, shocked at the uncompromising nature of Toussaint Louverture's proposed constitution which envisioned enlightenment styled freedom for all men, ignored his entreaties and instead sent 20,000 troops to quell the rebellion once and for all.  Toussaint Louverture and his army held them off for months until he was able to negotiate a treaty for a cease fire and retire from his rank to his farm, after a career in which his army of slaves and ex-slaves had defeated Spain, France and England in battle.  He did not live to see the end of the revolution in Haiti however. Arrested in 1802 ostensibly for allowing a break in the cease fire-- possibly betrayed by his lieutenant Jean-Jacques Dessalines-- he was taken in chains to France where he was tried for treason, convicted and sent to prison in the Alps where he soon died of maltreatment in the frigid conditions.

Meanwhile, in Saint Domingue, things took an uglier turn.  In 1803, Toussaint Louverture's lieutenant, Dessalines who had switched sides in a show of complicity in his former superior's arrest, switched sides once again.  In response, Napoleon sent additional troops and placed in charge the white supremacist and genocidal General Donatien de Rochambeau.  Dessalines was done with Europeans. He responded in kind with increasing cruelty of his own.  In retaliation for the capturing and hanging of 500 blacks, Dessalines had his troops capture and kill 500 whites and mount their heads on pikes around Port-au-Prince.  The fighting intensified to the point that both sides were reported by observers as having been driven "a little mad." Sensing defeat, demoralized at his army's inability to conquer what he considered an inferior foe, Rochambeau lost interest in the battle, and fell into debauchery.  Dessalines took Port-au-Prince to the cheers of sympathetic whites, whom Dessalines thanked in a ceremony and then promptly had seized and hanged in revenge for French cruelty.

On January 1, 1804, with France in retreat, Dessalines declared the colony independent, re-naming it for the Taino name for the Island, Ayiti, or in the French spelling: Haïti.  There followed a massacre of many of the remaining French and destruction of their plantations.  As many as 5000 were estimated to have been killed that year.  In 1805, Alexandre Pétion, a mulatto, a revolutionary hero and the first president (as well as the first to illegally declare himself President for Life), banned foreign ownership of land or enterprise in the new republic.

Nervous about the reverberations of black freedom with American slaves, the only recently independent US itself refused to recognize Haiti's independence until 1862.  Instead, Congress banned trade with Haiti in 1806, turning now to Cuba, still a white Spanish colony benefitting from the labor of black slaves, for its dependence on sugar.  Although Thomas Jefferson had entertained the thought of US annexation of Cuba and John Adams had gone as far as expressing the US's interest in it to Spain, the official American position came to be more explicitly opposition to interference with respect to independence movements in the Americas as expressed in what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, which the president elaborated in a State of the Union address in 1823.  In the speech,  Monroe announced that further colonial efforts against any independent states in the Americas by any European power would be regarded as "the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States."  A test of the doctrine came in 1826 when France undertook to threaten a renewal of hostilities with Haiti, sending ships to Port-au-Prince harbor to demonstrate their intent unless Haiti promised to pay reparations of 150 million francs for France's loss of property (meaning slaves) in the revolution 20 years before.  The US ignored Haiti's protests, and Haiti, already busy with its occupation of its briefly independent island neighbor Spanish Hispaniola, and with its economy in ruins from the loss of the US market, was forced to borrow the 30 million of its first payment to France from French banks.  (With the price of reparations set at 10 times Haiti's annual revenue and interest at 20%, the reparations and loans were not repaid until 1947.)

Elsewhere in  Latin America, Simon Bolivar and others, with often unacknowledged support from Haiti, were bringing revolution and independence to former colonies of Spain and Portugal across the region:   Chile, Colombia and Mexico (1810); Paraguay and Venezuela (1811);  Argentina (1816); Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua,  and Peru (1821);  Brazil (1822); Bolivia and Uruguay (1825).

"Meanwhile on Hispaniola," according to author Alex Von Tunzelmann:

... the complicated tensions between French speakers and Spanish speakers, rich and poor, former freeman and former slave, had only intensified. Strict race lines had crept back into society, and were defined by the precise proportions of black and white in seven generations of a person’s ancestry. Foreigners could rarely detect the all-important differences between a noir, a sacatra, a griffe, a marabou, a mulâtre, a quarteron, a métis, a mamelouc, a quarteronné, and a sang-mêlé. Partly, this was because they were not always detectable by sight: as the black leader Jean-Jacques Acaau observed, “Nèg riche se mulat, mulat pauvre se nèg”—a rich black was a mulatto, and a poor mulatto was a black

The Dominican Republic succeeded in gaining independence from Haiti in 1844 after 22 years of unification on Hispaniola.  To quell Haiti's continued incursions, it welcomed the protection of its former colonizer, Spain.

Although the US continued to express interest in annexing Cuba, ninety miles away at its closest shore, neither Spain nor Cubans were receptive.  Spurning offers of American military assistance out of suspicion of US designs on the island, Cuba briefly liberated itself from Spain in 1868, uniting whites and blacks in the cause and abolishing slavery in the process; but after 10 years, Spain won it back.  Slavery was restored.  It would take two more attempts and American intervention in the Spanish-American War before independence was won in 1902.  A likely accidental explosion of the American ship USS Maine in Havana's harbor in 1898 was the official excuse for the US's insinuation into the war-- a convenient "injustice" that could be blamed on Spain, and a more sellable rationale to the American public than the protection of American tycoon's business interests in Cuba.  In negotiations with Spain to conclude the war, the US promptly began a military occupation of the fledgling country, and gained Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the process. Americans amended the Cuban constitution with the Platt Amendment, basically giving the US the right to intervene in Cuban affairs at its own discretion, and would not relinquish control until it was adopted, giving the US the opening to establish permanent military installations at Guantánamo Bay and Bahia Honda. American troops would return repeatedly to Cuba proper in any event.  In 1906, following a disputed election, American Charles Magoon, recently governor of Panama was installed as governor of Cuba.

Throughout this period of de-colonization, American banks speculated on the cause of liberation from European powers in the hemisphere, increasing debt in the region, enriching American concerns and advantaging generally lighter skinned and right wing minorities in the process.  Theodore Roosevelt  who won the US presidency packaged as Spanish-American war hero made US intentions in the Americas explicit with his "Big Stick" policy.  In 1903, the US backed independence of Panama from the South American state of Colombia as a means of gaining control over the economically strategic isthmus, and assumed and completed the largely abandoned French project of building the Panama Canal (1903) monopolizing the only temperate shipping route between Atlantic and  Pacific.

In 1912, Roosevelt's successor William Howard Taft had painted a vivid picture of American designs on the Hemisphere: “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole.” Not often was it put in such stark terms, let alone expressed out loud.

In 1915, the American controlled Bank of Haiti cut off loans to the Haitian government, and in the ensuing crisis-- and in contradiction of President Woodrow Wilson's declaration that US meddling in the hemisphere was at an end-- the US intervened installing General Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam as president.  Supporters of Sam's rival Rosalvo Bobo staged an insurrection, at which Sam ordered a massacre as he'd promised to do at the first shot from the resistance.  Over 120 were executed, including a 14 year old insurgent with a particular viciousness.  When Bobo's insurgents stormed the prison to rescue their comrades, they found blood and body parts strewn for their edification.  Revenge came quickly. The insurgents surprised Sam in the presidential palace, violently forced him to the courtyard and thew him over the gates where he was hacked to death by machetes and torn apart by a waiting mob.  This was all Wilson needed to order a full occupation by the Marines.  The tension between a historically free black populace and American soldiers mostly from the Jim Crow south ostensibly at the service of their Haitian hosts exacerbated the misery.  Having looted the  National Bank, the reputation of the Americans preceded them wherever they went in Haiti.   The public displays of drunkenness and debauchery on the part of the Americans were an unwelcome site in the generally conservative culture.

To further crystallize American intentions in foreign policy around the world, Bolsheviks finally toppled imperialist Russia in 1917 and installed Lenin as head of the Soviet Union.  The response in capitalist America was panic.  The nightmare of American capitalists investing abroad was an international movement of workers.  Was the turmoil that the US had helped to instill in the regions of the hemisphere to the South contributing to a cauldron of conditions ripe for the spread of communism to the Americas?  To see that this didn't happen, American meddling in Latin American affairs was ramped up to a fever pitch.  If anyone is looking for evidence that the objectives of American military and intelligence services are the interests of American capitalists and not the cause of freedom and security for the American citizens whose taxes raise their revenue, let alone of the peoples whose lands they interfere in, one need only look at the formerly secret history of US involvement in Latin America.

In Haiti, American activity frequently had an effect opposite what was intended.  When guerilla attacks were made against the Americans in 1919, the Marines quashed it, killing its already legendary leader, Charlemagne Péralte.  Hoping to use Péralte as an example to his followers and other would be insurgents, they let his body be stripped down to what resembled a loin cloth to show his wounds and had him photographed  on a board that was carried in the streets.  Believing the local religion vodou to be a catalyst for rebellion Marines began a campaign against it, raiding ceremonies,  destroying altars and reliquary and stomping the ceremonial cornstarch ritual designs called vévé used to summon the loas or gods.  Those found to be practicing the religion were harassed,  dispersed and sometimes imprisoned in an effort to destroy the religion.  It only drove it underground.  And the image of the martyred Charlemagne Péralte in death, his arms outstretched, Christlike, by rigor mortis, only became an iconic symbol for the resistance.

So the occupation went.  There may have been order but Haiti slid deeper into poverty and despair.  By the end of the next decade, Hoover questioned the wisdom of the American occupation of Haiti, but it took Franklin Roosevelt to end it, which he did in 1934 in the spirit of a Good Neighbor policy of rapprochement with Latin American governments.  The Americans officially backed off, but not before the intellectual elite of Haiti had been radicalized.  Inspired by Harlem Renaissance and by renewed interest in the Africa of their ancestors, Haitian intellectuals became scholars and practitioners of vodou, and otherwise a cultural and political force in the country.  One such movement, Les Griots, named after a West African caste of bards, was started by an unassuming bespectacled medical student from Port-au-Prince named François Duvalier.

In the Dominican Republic meanwhile, Rafael Trujillo became president in 1930, backed by the US as a necessary evil to keep communism at bay. He started his career as a petty criminal, and put his skills of intimidation to use in the national guard where he impressed his US Marine trainers with his aptitude for torture.  He quickly rose through the ranks becoming chief of police in Santo Domingo when the force was nationalized, and ultimately General of the Army.  But he always considered himself a Marine.  When the presidency opened up, it seemed a logical move.  Trujillo's henchmen saw to it that anti-Trujillo participation in the election was kept to a minimum; he sailed to victory.  The job suited him.

The Massacre River between Haiti and the Dominican Republic at the town of Dajabón had been a popular illegal entry point for Haitians seeking seasonal employment in the sugar fields, but their presence in the labor force as vital as it was to the industry roused the xenophobia of many Dominicans.  Trujillo's response was in character.  As Alex Von Tunzelmann relates:

In September 1937, Trujillo’s soldiers began an unusual operation around Dajabón. Dressed as peasants and armed with handfuls of parsley, they would approach black people and ask, “What’s this?” The Spanish word perejil, meaning “parsley,” is difficult for Creole-speaking Haitians to pronounce. If a person answered in a Creole accent, “pelegil,” the soldier would whip out a machete or bayonet, and hack the presumed Haitian to death.

Along with those who at Trujillo's instruction were beaten or tortured to death or thrown bound into the Massacre River to drown, more than 17,000 (and perhaps as many as 35,000) Haitians were killed over the next four months in what came to be known as the Parsley Massacre.  Even in the US the optics of the operation had been bad.  At Haiti's urging, the Americans got Trujillo who waged a PR battle in American newspapers to proclaim his innocence to agree to reparations of the modest sum of $750,000.  Only $250,000 was ever paid and only in bribes to Haitian politicians.  Nevertheless, Trujillo's public relations were such that within 2 years, the American Congressman Hamilton Fish who had led the protests against Trujillo for the Massacre was lavishly celebrated in Santo Domingo, for which he was inspired to toast his host by declaring, “General, you have created a golden age for your country.”  Before long, Santo Domingo was renamed Ciudad Trujillo.

Forty miles away from Hispaniola, Fulgencio Batista was rising through the ranks of the Cuban military, participating in a presidential coup in 1933 known as the Revolt of the Sergeants.  He promptly appointed himself head of all of the military and as such, Army Chief of Staff, a position from which he was able to control a series of puppet presidents.  He himself won the presidential election of 1940 on a populist campaign.  His strong-arm tactics and indifference to the poverty of the majority of Cubans did not endear him to the masses, but he was not Communist and welcomed international capital and that suited the US.  It also suited the mob. In 1946, Meyer Lansky  began building the Riviera Hotel in Havana as a means of laundering money from his operations in Miami. It would be the first of many casinos that soon made Cuba an international playground for the rich, famous and powerful -- Frank Sinatra and up and coming politician and scion Jack Kennedy were among its patrons-- throughout the 40s and 50s.  The glamour and excesses of Havana nightlife which was making Americans and other foreigners rich stood in stark contrast to the squalor of life outside the tourist centers.

The success of the mob in Cuba inspired them to look elsewhere.  In Haiti, at least, the election of noiriste Dumarsais Estimé as president in 1946 meant that conditions were not amenable to foreign investment.  A principled politician, Estimé represented the fulfillment of noirist aspirations.  He nationalized the banana industry, supported rural co-operatives, advocated for a minimum wage for Haiti's work force, and promoted the cause of education for all.  Perhaps most earth shattering of all he sought to end the long-standing common cultural practice of families having what Haitians referred to as 'Ti Mounes (Little ones), or child servants.  His socialist policies made creditors nervous.  The US called for repayment of loans.  In turn, Estimé had Americans ejected from the Bank of Haiti's board and called upon Haitians to sacrifice in order to repay Haiti's debt.  The nationalized banana industry suffered a series of setbacks with outdated equipment and more decisively a drought that did it in.  Estimé's support began to fade.  With Trujillo aggressively backing those in the Haitian military seeking a coup, Estimé abandoned hope of extending his presidency for a second term.  He resigned in 1950 and exiled himself to Paris.  He was succeeded by Paul Magloire, one of three leaders of the coup Estimé had defeated in 1946 and the same group that had ousted him in 1950.

Magloire put an end to Estimé's initiatives in Haiti, but the spirit of Estimé's reformations was reborn elsewhere in the hemisphere with the election of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1951.  A colonel in the military, he was the second democratically elected president in Guatemala's history.  Like Estimé, Árbenz had won on the promise of agrarian reform and land redistribution by buying parcels back from international landholders at government established prices. He also expanded voting rights, and supported the creation of political parties, free speech and the rights of workers to organize.  For this he aroused the attentions of the recently established CIA (at the prompting of the Guatemala based United Fruit Company and of right wing factions in Guatemala), who began to back a group led by Castillo Armas to actively overthrow the president.  That Guatemala turned to Soviet-sphered Czechoslovakia for arms to defend itself  in 1953 as much as confirmed Árbenz's ideology to CIA director Allen Dulles and his brother Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.  The newly inaugurated Eisenhower administration shockingly ordered a blockade against Guatemala. CIA propaganda spread disinformation within the country that Armas's victory was immanent.  In this atmosphere, Árbenz lost control of the government and fled, eventually to Mexico.  In Guatemala, the departure set in motion a series of events that culminated in the civil war of the 1960's in which over 200,000 died. Elsewhere in the hemisphere, news of the CIA's role in the toppling of Guatemala's democratically elected government radicalized a new generation of revolutionaries, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

In this atmosphere, the CIA was eager to cultivate its assets in the Caribbean.  Batista in Cuba and Trujillo in Santo Domingo were safe for the time being.  In Haiti, Paul Magloire, enjoying an echo from good economic times in the US, presided over a period of relative quiet in which some of the charm of Cuba's glamour seemed to have rubbed off.  Port-au-Prince became increasingly a destination for jet setters, culminating in the 150th anniversary of the Haitian Revolution in the town of Independence in 1954.  But Magloire was a low grade kleptocrat who alienated the black majority of the country by favoring the Mulatto minority,  and at stirrings of calls for his ouster, he responded in autocratic fashion by arresting opponents, silencing journalists and making life difficult for political rivals.  Finally, when Hurricane Hazel devastated Haiti in the fall of 1954 and relief funds were discovered to be missing, it spelled the end of Magloire's era.  Within 2 years, he was exiled from the country.  An election was held.  Among the contestants was an unassuming physician, vodou scholar and practitioner who had served as Minister of Public Health and Labor under Dumarsais Estimé.  His name was François Duvalier.
*****
Umbrella Man:

Part 1: Ayiti

Part 2: Bèl Gason

Part 3: The Émigré

Part 4: The Opening

Epilogue & Selected Bibliography

Nihilism and Anxiety

On one side of the table on HBO's Real Time Friday night, Bill Maher was using the excuse of guest NYU "Moral psychologist" (there's a profession no one asked for) Jonathan Haidt's plugging of his new book The Coddling of the American Mind* (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff), to get extremely worked up about coddled millenials as the main problem with the left.  On the other side of the table and opposite end of the political spectrum, short-termed Trump Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci had moments before been calmly insisting that Trump's supporters see the exact same outrage in Trump's behavior and thought balloons as the left does and are excited by it.  Maher was so worked up about both Trump and the millenials that he didn't realize he was making Scaramucci's point for him. (Not an unusual position for Maher to be in lately.  But he still makes great television.)

Political correctness is an obvious concern of Maher who thumbed his nose at it with the name of his first show on network television 25 years ago, Politically Incorrect.  It's been a primary topic for him ever since.  Rarely does he admit that the right has elements just as PC as any on the left, although he did manage a petulant "I know they do" when another guest pointed it out to him.

For Maher and Haidt, the 'coddling' of the millenials is of grave concern to the health of the republic.  Crediting his co-author with the notion to study a sociological phenomenon and the literature search to back it up, Haidt painted an unflattering portrait of millenials as anxious, triggered, skill-less, underemployed, overmedicated, self-mutilating, undersexed snowflakes. Maher provided a steady supply of amens along with anecdotes and theories of his own as a counterpoint to the professor's learned voice of authority, revealing a bit too much of his own personal animus to the youngest adults and their parents in the process.  He's turning into a bit of an old man where the new generation is concerned.  You might say he's triggered by them.  <smiley face>  For Maher, there's a connection between Trigger warnings-- a major topic of interest in Haidt's book apparently-- and political correctness, a topic that Haidt has written about in the past.    Haidt gained renown originally with a book on the non-intersecting morals of liberals and of conservatives, making the case for them for those inclined to organize tribally that these are 2 different species of animal.  In my experience of Haidt over the years, I've found the topics that occupy his professional attention to be a bit perversely concerned with the pathology of young people's politics and social consciousness.  Those who wrote, studied and taught in colleges and universities were once accurately termed "educators" but education does not seem to be the apt description for Haidt's curious predilections of study.  "Public intellectual" is the term many of his class prefer for themselves and it's accurate in a "green paint" kind of way, but I prefer the term "data strategist."  What do they do with the data when it can't be twisted to their agendas?  (I have always had this notion I can't get out of my head that there exists a class of liberal who make good careers and build solid reputations-- usually in journalism and academia-- on besmirching the left as a way of proving their own cred if not outright pleasing their paymasters.)

As for Maher, who has shown himself to be a bit off the hinges when it comes to this topic in recent episodes, when he is not spiraling about Donald Trump (or pushing anti-Islamic fervor while plugging his ears about the context anti-Western violence is fomented in), he is fretting about how political correctness and trigger warnings are pushing people to the right.  His go-to place for examples of the problem all come from Twitter.  As a non-twitter or facebook user who is by osmosis no stranger to the trainwreck atmosphere on social media, take it from me.  It's not the left that's bugging you, dude.  It's Twitter.  The real world impact of Twitter controversies is a problem but you won't solve it by mistaking it for Excesses of the Left.   Where do you think the term "snowflake" snowballed, and by whom?

People forget: Political correctness has been with us a long time.  People were complaining about it when I was in school in the seventies.  It's an easy target!  Everybody hates it!  One person's morality is another person's political correctness.  The person who is triggered by social justice is just as fragile as the one who is triggered by cultural appropriation.  But People!  Bill!  Jonathan!  Very few people can't tolerate being triggered!  Most people-- even young people-- perhaps especially young people-- live for it!  It's ugly when people like Maher and others are disinvited from collegiate venues they'd been invited to on the basis that their speech is deemed odious by young loudmouths.  But how could it not be invigorating for the students who make it happen?  What's fragile about that?  In this polarized age, if you don't learn to develop tolerance to contrary ideas and be inoculated by them, you will be in pain for a very long time.  Most people will learn.  Barring speech I don't agree with is not how I would choose to confront it or what I would urge, but it's rarer than the deliberately incorrect would have you believe; it's a tactic evidenced on all ends of the spectrums of politics, class and age (and it's not new); and it is one way to deal to with it.  Sometimes it's called for. So why tar young people on the left with it?

Now that I've triggered myself, back to Scaramucci.  Before Jonathan Haidt was brought out to balance things, Bill Maher had been exciting himself on the topic of Donald Trump's prevarications and shit-stirring about the approaching Caravan of would-be refugees from the South.  As Maher turned red in his anger and became increasingly vigilant about letting anyone else, particularly Scaramucci speak, Scaramucci, the author of a new book called, Trump: The Blue Collar President, was as calmly attempting to make the point that at least one member of the audience got: Trump's base gets off on Bill Maher getting unhinged.  The crazier Trump gets, the more they like it because it's guaranteed to provoke an equal and opposite reaction from the left.  In an odd way, Scaramucci seemed to be saying, Trump's base anticipates the reaction and thereby almost mirrors it.  On some level, these hapless rubes grok the essence of what is wrong with Trump's intellect as gleaned through his utterances, and yet, coming from feelings of deep resentment toward the sensibilities of the class who are reviled by the nature of Trump's worldview, they are damned if they won't share it.  The importance of this point can not be stressed enough: there is no fixing this way of thinking.  This is the mind virus of nihilism pure and simple.  I don't know if Trump is masterfully manipulating the unmoored impulses of his audiences for personal gain-- it may be his one talent if so-- or if he's just one of them, who merely happens to be the most powerful person in the world at the moment.  It hardly matters.  From Trump to Brexit to Orbán in Hungary to Duterte in the Philippines to Bolsonaro in Brazil, this is the age of the nihilists and if you're not one of them, this is not your age.

This is not my age.

~~~~~~~~~~
* For a review by someone who actually read the book, go here.

They're coming to get you, Barbara

I am not an authority on Zombies.  But I do know one when I see one.  By one means or another, they have risen from the deathbed or the grave. Several have been spotted in this area.  They include:

• Indifference to Poverty: This Zombie was never truly dead but had been on life support for a while and there was even a war on it once. Once out of fashion, it's back,  stalking the streets again.
• Vote Suppression by Race: As soon as the Supreme Court struck down constitutionality of the Voting Rights act on the basis that it had done its job, the predictable states began discriminately dropping voters from the rolls, requiring IDs for voting, and otherwise enacting laws designed to effectively keep millions of African American adults from voting.
• Saying "Passed Away" instead of "Died" - I thought that that most ostentatiously euphemistic of euphemisms ('Mustn't upset grandmama!') had itself been killed in the social enlightenment. When did people start being publicly fussy and squeamish about death again?
• Scarcity:  Except in far corners of the globe, scarcity used to be under the control of corporations who manipulated it for profits, which we were assured was good for everyone.  Now overuse, overdemand and stark conditions on the planet contribute to an increase in decrease that seems to be acting on its own.  Oil is dwindling. Whole species of edible fish are disappearing.  Cotton crops are failing year after year.  Do you know what used to be as plentiful as grains of sand on the seashore but no longer is?  Sand.
• Disease:  Back from the dead are polio, mumps, rubella, leprosy and bubonic plague.  Some were never really dead, but others were revived by vigilant, ideological resistance to prevention.
•  Fascism: The Greatest Generation defeated it in 1945, but it has returned from the dead.

What can be done?  No one knows.  Zombies are "in" and no one knows how to make them "out" again.

Sermon

William Rimmer

Toward the end of Sapiens, the phenomenal history of the species by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari the account turns to the question of immortality (my bold italics):

How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms. Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes. A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely).

Let's hope the "cause for optimism" that Harari refers to is all the researchers'.  It's certainly not mine.

I spent the first 8 years of my life subject to Sunday school teachings of the protestant variety of Christianity-- the latter 4 of them in a particularly joyless and blanched sect of it.  When I was 9 my inquisitive mother experienced a severe de-conversion, which necessarily meant that my Christian education ceased.  To that point I had been thoroughly indoctrinated (with a child's darkly outlined coloring-book-and-crayon doctrine), to the point that I was occasionally caught trying to preach the gospel to Jewish friends.  Though I was chastised for it by my mother, I had been taught to seriously fear for their life, not in this world but in the next.

For myself, I was already convinced that if my immortality was in the hands of an authority, even if that authority was the squeaky clean holy nerd Jesus Christ, I was doomed.  The effect this had on me in those formative years was a panic about eternity.  That's the beauty of the concept of Hell.  In my brand of Christianity it wasn't a question of whether you were going to get immortality but where you were going to have to spend it.  By the doctrines of the faith, if one person lived a life of strict virtue, and another a life of wickedness, but you knew only one would make it to heaven, you could not say which since it all came down to one final judgment-- a judgment which could be swayed by a single sin;  possibly merely the sin of doubt.  In my case that meant that no matter how I spent my life, I risked at least (but with my luck, probably better than) a 50% chance of hell.

In my circumstances, I needed all the help I could get, which to that point had taken the form of weekly cod-liver oil flavored doses of Jesus preached at us in a baby voice by a cold and distant, personality-deprived mother of one of my fellow sheep, before I rejoined my parents for an interminable hour of agony in the "sanctuary" on hard wooden pews, frequently reminded not to squirm, while the monotoned, crew-cutted "pastor" (wow do I hate that word!) droned at the adults, punctuated by inscrutably paced stretches when the congregation was instructed to stand, grab a hymnal, turn to a random page and soldier through an invariably long and boring song-- usually so long that the initial excitement of finally getting off the pew was soon replaced by a desire to lie down under it. How could this sort of torture not help my case?  And when I was 9, my mother took it away from me.

As the book title goes: First you cry.  I pleaded with my mother to not screw up the only shot I had of avoiding hell.  I don't think she had any idea how full of the fear of hell I'd been filled by my Christian education.  But in the end, her status as caretaker won out.  I came to realize that the only thing going for church was its never-assured part in the case for the immortality of my soul.  Literally everything else about it sucked.  Our lives outside of church had already become pretty non-Christian.  Once I worked through the shock that perhaps the dichotomy between eternity in horrific hell versus bland, fun-less immortality in heaven was a false one, the panic subsided and was replaced by an indifference to the question of what happened after one's life on this planet came to an end.

I think this experience of mine overcoming concern about immortality may somehow underlie my shrug at news of the promise of actual a-mortality in this life for some.  I realize it's not the same category of perpetual life as what Jesus promises for a different kind of price, but isn't the attraction of it (for those who are attracted by it) the same?  If those who seek immortality are not hooked on life, they are afraid of death-- neither of which is a particularly laudable motivation.  As Harari's book argues, it's only been within the past 200 years that it had even occured to anyone that it might actually be possible to prolong life indefinitely by medicine.  For some possessed of money, ambition and in my opinion a severe lack of, if not imagination itself, certainly depth of imagination, the scientific quest for perpetual life joins a long list of other pursuits that haven't aged as well with me as skepticism has: AI, the singularity, interplanetary colonization.  Bad sci-fi.

This week we learned from a UN report  -- the work of 91 climate scientists-- that the planet has about 12 years left in which to avoid reaching the point of no return on Global Warming, beyond which the effects of it will result in even more volatile weather patterns, drought, food shortages, rising waters, changing coastlines, accelerated destruction of habitat, extinction of species and spreading of global misery and poverty.  Should we fail, those who survive for however long survival remains possible will be in Hell.

The response to the news has been predictably underwhelming from the American power elite.  Predictably, the media have chosen to remain focused on the cash cow of the antics of Trump.  For its part the Trump administration has once again gone the "Ignorance-Is-Strength" route with Trump first not knowing what body the study came from before confidently shrugging it off with the assertion that he could come up with reports that reach the opposite conclusion. (No shit!  You wouldn't be you if you couldn't!)  We've been well-trained by propaganda and experience to expect challenges to the future of humanity to be met by infuriating indifference on the part of our leaders.  Trump as usual takes it to the extreme.

While I find myself naturally in the camp of those who bypassed the combative early stages of grief and went right to acceptance and mourning, I was made aware by internet wanderings this week of what I suspect is going to be an increasingly common response, especially in capitalist America: Bring it on!  There's a certain mindset that sees opportunity in every calamity.  If you believe in science and hope for progress, the news is a challenge to optimism, if not an outright excuse for dread of the chaos to come.  If you believe in yourself and the free market and are bolstered in your confidence by your stockpile of weaponry that ought to give you an edge in the tightening competition for survival and believe that your struggles in this life are merely a prelude to eternity in paradise anyway, why wouldn't you face the news with eagerness?  What chance do pragmatists have of persuading those of such a mindset (and arsenal) to set aside their selfish concerns and join in the struggle to save the planet and the future of the species.  Talk till you're blue in the face. Nothing wins an intellectual argument like extreme violence.

Which raises the question of what happens to the quest for immortality in light of impending shortages of resources and manpower and increasing unforeseeable chaos on Earth in the coming decades.  For all of their wealth, access and power, couldn't the billionaire geniuses obsessed with a-mortality and with the only sort of means at their disposal that could possibly bring it about* have seen this coming and done something to prevent it?  And then it occurs to me: but they already have!  Of course they saw this coming.  That's why they've put their wagers onto a laundry list of shallow sci-fi schemes: interplanetary travel to get the hell out of dodge before the shit hits the fan; immortality and perpetual youth to keep themselves alive for as long as it takes to get out into space and onto viable new worlds; and as a backup plan, AI to get their consciousness uploaded to the singularity before anything unfixable happens to their mortal coil.  We can forget their participation.  As far as they're concerned the rest of us can go to hell!

These are the people you want to spend eternity with?

~~~~~

* And let’s face it a-mortality may be the only way some of these sexually unappealing nerds can perpetuate their genes into the future indefinitely. Is a woman-less (and thus a necessarily rather than involuntarily celibate) future a motivation? 

Post mortem

For some reason, I don't blame Susan Sarandon for Brett Kavanaugh.  Humans love a scapegoat, but I think singling out the most visible Democratic Party apostate is a great way of making the wrong point.  I do think those of the far left who made a calculated decision in 2016 that a Trump win was well worth the risk in order to maintain the purity of their own political virtue (achieved by abstaining from voting for --or voting for a guaranteed losing alternative to-- the candidate who had, hands down, the only chance of defeating him*) protest a bit too much at the well of anger that has erupted against them from the pragmatic bloc who made up the majority of the popular vote in the last election.

The truth does hurt: In 2 years, Trump has gotten 2 picks for the Supreme Court (legal co-popes for very archaic reasons), and Brett Kavanaugh is the apotheosis of what the right has been seeking against the wishes of the majority of Americans for a very long time: a lock on the majority vote of judges on the court for decades to come.  They got this win because the system that elects justices underrepresents vast swaths of the population and overrepresents millions of deserted acres.  This is exactly what Hillary Clinton supporters were hoping to avoid.  The anger that is directed at the virtuous left is not because they made Hillary Clinton lose, dammit!  It's because they did nothing to keep Donald Trump from winning.  That is anger I can get behind.†   It's somewhat misplaced anger.  Trump had plenty of help without their indifference to the outcome.  But it's low hanging fruit, so I get the urge to take a swing at it.  It's an ugly pass that things have come to and people are entitled to their anger about how it came to be.

We shouldn't understate the poor quality of the alternative choice that Democrats offer to republicans.  We can't deny that Democrats are losing ground across the country because they seem to have lost their mojo at picking candidates who appeal to voters and at putting forth messages that set the electorate afire.  (They are also on the losing end of voter suppression, campaign financing, and aggressive gerrymandering by Republicans in battleground states-- practices that are very likely to continue to be contested or enshrined all the way to the Supreme Court-- Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court-- from time to time.)  But something does not jibe in the fact that although a majority of the country prefers socialist policies, the only viable alternative to the retrograde corporatocracy of the right aggressively pushes a centrist agenda that no one but a lobbyist could possibly want.

We also shouldn't overstate the impact of the court.  But Roe v Wade is most likely soon to be history.  If so, for the first time in nearly 50 years, availability of a medical choice will be limited in  States that turn back their laws in the not too distant future for those who need it who can't afford to travel to get the procedure in States that continue to make it available (not a hindrance to wealthy Republican's daughters of course).  And every state will then continue to have perpetual battles on their hands to keep the choice legal, as Republicans should not be expected to abandon a red meat issue merely because the decision will have been returned to the states.

This was not what the majority wanted.  This could have been avoided.

Term limits for Supreme Court Justices now.  Abandon the Electoral College now.  Redistribute the representation of voters in the Senate now.  (Or better yet, abolish it.)

The 38 million people of California got 2 votes in Saturday's floor vote for Kavanaugh.  The 38.8 million combined population of 22 rural states got 44 votes.  How is that democracy? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/11/if-youre-from-california-you-should-hate-the-senate/?utm_term=.9ae1415c5a50

*************'
*  How many of them made the same mistake Hillary Clinton appears to have made in believing she could not lose against the ridiculous, incompetent, vile, conniving jerk of reality TV?  Anyone who felt empowered to vote their conscience in 2016 only because the less evil outcome was assured was less a hero than the victim of a fatal miscalculation.

† If you see a lot of new anti-Hillary rhetoric out there on the web in response to discussions of who's to blame for Kavanaugh, remember 2 things: 1) it's never really gone away since November 2016; and b) its uptick now on the part of the virtuous left is a manifestation of hard-won cognitive dissonance.  The fact that Hillary Clinton is not virtuously radical is irrelevant to the fact that Donald Trump has no business picking Supreme Court justices and he's now picked two.