The Price of Mud

Somebody please tell me this isn't really happening, because i don't know how much more guilt i can Zen into oblivion every time i consume a piece of fresh fruit. Haitians are now eating mud cakes as a dietary staple. ("Bad Haitians! How dare you make me feel wretched for living in a land of affordable produce plenty!") Guardian reporter Rory Carroll uses the term misery index when discussing the state of impoverishment in Haiti, a nice economist-friendly indicator to tell us where on the scale of getting fucked by global capitalism a population finds itself. i'd like to think this is his own phrase, yet i fear that it's probably taken from some World Bank report used to justify the continuing strangulation of a functioning society in Haiti and who knows where else: we're past the First World -Fourth World framework now, it's all misery without much company. Does one hope to move up or down the misery index? i've been thinking about this all morning and still can't be sure.

Adding to the insanity of this situation, Carroll writes:

Trucked in from a clay-rich area outside the capital, Port-au-Prince, the mud is costlier but cakes still sell for 1.3p each, about the only item immune from inflation. "We need to raise our prices but it's their last resort and people won't tolerate it," lamented Baptiste, the Cité Soleil baker.

Yes, you read that correctly, mud bakers want to raise their prices... i suppose to cover the ever-rising fuel costs related to trucking the clay into the city. This so sickening and disheartening, i am virtually stupified, speechless. Time to take out our pencil-margined copies of Fanon once again and consider the circular nature of oppression and despair. If i weren't so busy this week, i'd track down the 1970's film Burn! with Marlon Brando, just for a little shot of dominant paradigm subversion - but without the popcorn, that would be too cynical under the circumstances.