The Moustache of Wisdom and Frank Rich are off today. MoDo says “Oh, No! Kevin’s Back!.” She says if it’s Christmas, it must be time for her conservative brother to take over her column and turn it a blazing shade of red. Given that this is MoDo and she’s prone to writing fantasies I have no earthly idea if she has a brother… Mr. Kristof, in “Anybody Seen Pati?”, says a missing mother of four is a reminder that the most grievous victims of the global economic crisis aren’t just Americans. Here’s MoDo (or maybe her brother):
As my brother Kevin headed off to Christmas Eve Mass in the Maryland suburbs, I asked him how he thought the first year of Barack Obama had gone.
He didn’t have to pray long over that one. “Fine,” he replied, “if you like unmitigated disasters like the Hindenburg and the Redskins season.”
If it’s Christmas, it must be time for my conservative brother to take over my column and turn it a blazing shade of red.
So without further ado, here is Kevin unplugged, offering a perspective from “the real America,” as one of his favorite Republican philosophers, Sarah Palin, likes to put it:
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Who could have guessed on Nov. 4, 2008, that the mood this Christmas would be so festive? Yet a feeling of optimism pervades as we watch the old Christmas movies and marvel at the winter wonderland on the Mall illuminated by our national Christmas tree. (No offense to that ardent Catholic Nancy Pelosi, who would prefer “holiday tree.”)
The Republicans, of course, got exactly what they deserved in 2006 and 2008 mainly because they acted like Democrats. Deficit spending and sex scandals are not a good recipe for success.
But by forcing through a government takeover of health care, the auto industry and the banks, the president and his Congressional henchmen have brought us in a time machine to Russia 1917. These massive changes have been done in secret and along bullying, straight party-line votes.
It is stunning to watch rich lawmakers driving their own expensive cars off the cliff and signing on to such a socialist agenda. In dismissing the tea parties and pushing through plans the American people obviously don’t want, they have made the fatal disconnect between the representatives and the represented.
President Obama continues life in the H.O.V. lane, fawned over by the press and the crowned heads of Europe. In between apologies, the president should have reminded those pompous blowhards that without our interference, they would all be speaking German.
My dad was a D.C. policeman, and I would like to apologize (not “recalibrate”) to the Cambridge police for the president’s assumption that they “acted stupidly.” You would think that Mr. Obama would have afforded the police the same consideration he gave to the mass-murdering Muslim Army major when he said: “I would caution against jumping to conclusions.”
The Fort Hood massacre was a direct result of Army policy too concerned with political correctness and “celebrating diversity.” It was a terrorist attack by any definition and the government still cannot say it.
President Obama should remember that Icarus tried to fly to the sun because, as he said, “it is the only thing in the universe that can match my brilliance.” How did that work out?
Here are some reflections for 2009:
To President Obama: Thank you for saving the Republican Party and for teaching all of us that too much of anything is a bad thing.
To Bill Clinton: You did too much work on Northern Ireland for the Nobel committee. Next time, do nothing.
To Harry and Nancy: “The Twilight Zone” once had an episode where the town got the exact opposite of what it wanted. Farewell, Harry!
To John McCain: Thank you for your chivalry in banning Palin attack dogs — including my sister — from the campaign plane.
To Sarah Palin: Keep up the good work. Anyone who annoys Keith Olbermann that much is a friend to all of us.
To Glenn Beck: Thanks for being the only journalist interested in stories that used to win Pulitzer Prizes.
To Al Franken: So, 250 years of Senate tradition trashed. Stuart Smalley would have done better.
To Desirée Rogers: Get back to the gate. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson can’t get in.
To the Salahis: Thank you for showing us that shame has no bottom.
To Valerie Jarrett: So much for the Olympic Village in Chicago. Whoops.
To Chris Dodd: The only thing lower than your polls is your mortgage interest rate.
To Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen: The military should be more interested in the men and women who serve than in celebrating diversity.
To the Democratic senators: Go last next time; the bribes are much bigger.
To Sheldon Whitehouse: You, senator, are an idiot.
To Dick Cheney: You, sir, are a patriot. Thanks for firing back.
To President Bush: Thank you for your dignity. Did you really start the plague in the 14th century? Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
To Hillary: Who knew how much you would be missed?
To Al Gore: A global warming conference in the middle of a Copenhagen blizzard is not a good visual.
To Max Baucus, Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards: Party on, dudes.
To John Ensign, Mark Sanford and David Vitter: Don’t party on, dudes.
Either MoDo doesn’t have a brother or stupid runs in her family. Here’s Mr. Kristof, writing from Tegucigalpa, Honduras:
If anybody knows Pati Castillo in Houston, please tell her to phone home.
Pati is a 30-year-old Honduran whose children and other family members live in a gang-ridden slum here in the Honduran capital. Her mother, tearing up, says that nobody has heard from Pati in two months. Pati’s cellphone number never answers.
This family’s troubles offer a reminder that the most grievous victims of the global economic crisis — triggered in large part by American banking excesses — aren’t just Americans. They include residents of slums and villages in places like Haiti, Honduras and El Salvador — people who had nothing to do with derivatives or subprime mortgages.
The United Nations calculates that because of the economic crisis and continuing high food prices, the number of people going hungry around the world has risen to about one billion. Often, they include the 13 members of Pati’s family here.
The family members, including Pati’s four children, live in a one-room home on a steep hillside in the El Pastel slum. When I arrived a week ago, gang members were selling drugs on the street. And when I left, a boy was sniffing glue outside. Gang members have set up checkpoints and demand payment of a “war tax” to pass.
(A local priest, the Rev. Augustín Vásquez, escorted me in and glared his way through one gang checkpoint. “You ask money from a priest?” he asked indignantly. And he charged on through. Final score: God, 1; gangsters, 0.)
Pati’s mother, Iris, has a job at a music school that brings in about $100 a month, after commuting expenses. But that isn’t enough to keep everyone fed and clothed. So three years ago, Pati decided to sacrifice for her children’s future: She set out across Central America and Mexico for the United States.
After what her mother described as a brutal journey, Pati reached Houston. She found a job as a waitress in a restaurant there and shared a cheap apartment with several other Central American women. Every month, her mom said, she sent home $200 through Western Union.
With this regular windfall, the Castillo family began to live a better life — and overextended themselves. They bought a stove and refrigerator on an installment plan, assuming that Pati’s money transfers would continue indefinitely. “That was a big mistake,” Iris admits ruefully.
Then the economic crisis hit, and jobs began to disappear worldwide. Honduran, Salvadoran and Mexican garment factories that export to the American markets were crushed. Remittances, which amounted to about 22 percent of the Honduran economy, tumbled.
Pati lost her job in June. As an illegal immigrant, she found it impossible to find a new one, so she stopped wiring money home. “My daughter decided she will probably have to come back by herself,” Iris explained.
The last anybody heard from Pati was two months ago. Maybe she couldn’t afford her cellphone anymore; maybe she is en route back home; or maybe desperation pushed her to try something unsavory and to take risks — although her mom doesn’t believe that. “She’s well brought up,” Iris said. “I don’t think that she would do anything bad.”
In the meantime, the Castillos are adjusting to a two-thirds drop in family income. They are bracing themselves for their stove and refrigerator to be repossessed, and they have cut back sharply on food. The adults and older kids get just beans and rice; only Pati’s baby niece gets milk; and the younger children get a few eggs for protein.
“Sometimes the kids go hungry, but I work as hard as I can to prevent that,” Iris said grimly.
Father Vásquez confirmed the Castillos’ story and said it is common since the fall in remittances and the collapse in the economy (in Honduras’s case, greatly aggravated by political instability after a coup last summer). “The recession in the U.S. is felt at a grass-roots level here,” he said. “I see a lot of kids who don’t get breakfast now before going to school.” Many children cope, he said, by sniffing glue.
Similar dramas are playing out in slums and villages around the world. In Haiti, I’ve seen a school nearly emptied of children because remittances stopped coming from relatives in Miami.
“One-sixth of the people on earth are hungry,” said Josette Sheeran, director of the United Nations World Food Program. “We’re seeing epidemics of child malnutrition.”
Ms. Sheeran notes that evidence has mounted that babies who are malnourished in their first two years of life are likely to suffer lifelong intellectual impairments that later feeding can never overcome.
Yet just as global needs are surging, the crisis is causing a faltering in the commitment to help.
So, Pati, wherever you are, good luck finding a job — and call home. Your family, and so many others, need comfort and help.
