Places Like Haiti Are Ahead of the Curve (October 16, 2011)
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Following is the text of a sermon I was invited to deliver at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colorado on October 16, 2011. I told the congregation that, although I admire my father a great deal, I’ve spent my entire adult life trying very hard to avoid turning into him, and that the occasion of delivering an actual sermon from an actual church pulpit represents the failure of that aspiration. – Ethan Casey
Today’s Gospel reading is one of the famous ones. It’s one of those Bible passages that are at least vaguely familiar even to non-Bible readers because, in its King James Version translation, it contributed a proverbial phrase to the English language: render unto Caesar. The phrase is so familiar that it risks being glib. But like any Bible story, and particularly like any words of Jesus, it’s susceptible to exegesis and even, I would venture, deliberately ambiguous.
My father, who is an Episcopal priest retired from this diocese, tells me that Jesus was actually telling a joke at the Pharisees’ expense. The joke is that the image on the coin is of the allegedly “august son of the divine Augustus,” and that righteous Jews should not be carrying around images of gods in their pockets. So Jesus busted the Pharisees in front of the gathered bystanders, who no doubt had a good laugh. The joke has long been lost in translation. But the passage supports the claim that Jesus was the first Jewish comedian, because if there’s anything comedians are in the business of doing, it’s exposing hypocrisy. Think of the greatest Jewish comedian of our own time, Jon Stewart. Not that I’m comparing Jon Stewart to Jesus or anything.
But I want to explore some of the implications of a more conventional understanding of the passage, which is that it has to do with the tension between church and state. That tension is a matter of chronic worry in this country, of course. But it’s also central to Haiti, where the tragic story of Jean-Bertrand Aristide brought it into stark relief. The thing about Jesus is that he didn’t want to be Caesar, any more than Jon Stewart would want to be President of the United States. More to the point that I’d like to explore today, Jesus didn’t want to be Governor of Judea either, nor do I think he would have wanted to be President of Haiti. Aristide, on the other hand, did want to be President of Haiti. Did he ever.
I’ve spent much of the past twenty years trying to figure out what the deal is with Aristide. Aristide was a young Roman Catholic priest who rose to prominence in Haiti in the chaotic late 1980s by telling the Haitian poor what many of them wanted to hear, which also happened to be true, which was that the rich are rich because the poor are poor, and that that’s not okay. But – disobeying his superiors in the Church – in 1990 he ran for president and won overwhelmingly. At the time, in the heady wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Americans who otherwise probably would have used devious means to prevent his election were looking the other way. Much of Aristide’s career since then has been a case study in the truth of the saying “Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.”
You might know much of the rest of the story: Aristide was overthrown by a coup in 1991, “restored” – I put that word inside quotation marks – by a U.S. invasion ordered by President Clinton in 1994, then ousted again ten years later by another coup, which clearly was not only approved but orchestrated by the Bush administration. I allege this very explicitly, for two reasons. First of all, it’s demonstrably true, and it’s a bad thing. A very bad thing, in fact. Wrong, inexcusable, one of many things we Americans should be ashamed of. But, second, I allege it in order to get it out of the way, because the truth of the U.S. government’s bad behavior is, in some ways, irrelevant to Aristide’s original blunder – his original sin, if you will – which was to have run for president in the first place.
For many years, Aristide was a cause celebre of the American left. His head cheerleader was a journalist named Amy Wilentz, who wrote for the magazine The Nation and, whenever Haiti was prominent in the news headlines, also for influential mainstream publications up to and including The New Yorker and The New York Times. To a large extent, Amy Wilentz set the terms of the conversation about Aristide and Haiti in the 1990s and beyond, at least among Americans who consider themselves progressive. And the terms Wilentz laid down amounted essentially to the claim that, if only the bad imperialist Americans and right-wing Haitians would admit that they’re wrong and let Aristide pursue his mandate, then there would be democracy and justice and progress in Haiti.
I’m all for democracy and justice and progress in Haiti and everywhere else. But, unlike Amy Wilentz, I don’t claim that wishing should make it so. Okay, sure, wishing should make it so, but it doesn’t. Consider Wilentz’s words in an article in The Nation in August 1994, arguing against the U.S. invasion that, at that point, was not only inevitable but the only way to put an end to the brutal international embargo that had already killed tens of thousands of poor Haitians, but which had done nothing to persuade the military junta to yield power. “Let’s hope,” wrote Wilentz, “for the transformation that would come about” – that would come about – “when this regime is toppled from within, under pressure from the outside, and not for the cosmetic quick fix of intervention.”
Wilentz was in effect arguing that the deaths of more innocent people were necessary, for the sake of political progress. But her conditional verb tense betrayed just how irresponsibly ill founded her hope was. I wondered, and still wonder, why so many writers on the left feel compelled to imagine a nonviolent state or an absence of imperialism. Is it a kind of ideological Stockholm Syndrome? Or political back-seat driving? Either way, it’s an old trap. Ernest Hemingway saw the trap clearly when he wrote, in 1934: “Too many people still believe in the State, and war is the health of the state. You will see that finally it will become necessary for the health of the so-called communist state in Russia.”
And I don’t mean to compare Ernest Hemingway to Jesus either, but Jesus also saw the trap. The foundation of democracy as an ideology – ultimately, the lie of democracy – is that we the people can replace or become Caesar. I guess that seemed like a good idea at the time, back in the 18th century in the United States and France and Haiti, and more recently in Russia and Haiti and many other places. But long before any of the political sound and fury of the past two centuries, Jesus said: Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.
But what is Caesar’s, and what is God’s? A big question these days for all of us Americans is: Why should we render unto Caesar at all, if we can’t trust Caesar to make good use of our tax shekels? If, as Hemingway put it, war is the health of the state, why should we support it at all? Must there be a state? Apparently there must be, because there always has been in one form or another. That’s a hard truth, but a truth nonetheless.
And what if the state becomes oppressive or, maybe just as bad, negligent? My dad says that soon we’ll be seeing guys at intersections in Colorado Springs filling in potholes with shovels, then tapping on windshields asking for donations, just like in Port-au-Prince. The thing about that joke, though, is that it’s actually not all that funny. It’s too plausible to be funny.
A big question for our times, a question we Americans are on the verge of being forced to face en masse as a society as well as individually, is this: What can we do for and with each other, if necessary – as it may well soon be necessary – in the absence of the welfare state, or properly maintained infrastructure, or competent and equitable management of the national economy, or even assurance of minimal public order – the things Caesar is supposed to provide?
Our role models for addressing that question are the people of Haiti. One of the most enduring truths I’ve learned since first visiting Haiti nearly thirty years ago is that “places like Haiti” – to cite ironically the inexcusably dismissive phrase used by the right-wing New York Times columnist David Brooks – places like Haiti are not behind the times, but ahead of the curve. What do Haitians do for and with each other, in the absence of an effective government?
Here is what my Haitian friend Gerald Oriol Jr., an extraordinary human being who is far from being a leftist, told me last year:
People have to know that this is their country. That they have to fight and work for it. That they have to love their country. That they have no other country, and that they have to cherish every bit of it. And they have to learn to love their compatriots; they have to learn to love their natural environment. And you have to put them in work and volunteering activities as well. That way, from the very beginning, they will know that they are responsible for the country, they are responsible for progress in Haiti.
I asked Gerald if he thought that, if I returned to Haiti in ten years, I might see piles of earthquake rubble that were never cleared away, maybe with trees growing out of them.
“Well, it’s possible,” he said. “It depends on the choices that we make as a society. But I’m hopeful, and I certainly do not look forward in ten years to having this rubble around here. Let me tell you something, Ethan. The only people who are truly shocked right now are people like me” – people from the elite class. “But for the poor, things were so hard for them already that [the tent cities are] just another way to organize themselves. … Before, their activities weren’t so visible.”
Gerald and many other Haitians have learned from long experience not to rely on Caesar for the things that Caesar should and – if the world were a better place – would provide. He’s also learned, or decided, that sitting around griping about Caesar is a recipe for hopeless tedium and bitterness; he refuses to use Caesar as a scapegoat for the things that afflict his society. Gerald knows that if anyone is responsible for doing something about those things, he is.
War is the health of the state, said Hemingway. What is the health of the church?
Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.
Ethan Casey‘s book Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti will be published in March 2012. He is also the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He is currently planning a book of topical travel with the working title Home Free: An American Road Trip, for which he will travel around the United States during 2012. You can join his Facebook page or contact him directly.
