For Shame, Mr. Robertson

Pat Robertson has a history of blaming the victims; as I recall, he said that the 9/11 attacks were caused by "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians" - not to mention the ACLU and People for the American Way. Funny, I thought it was because Osama bin Laden was pissed about American troops in Saudi Arabia.

Today, though, he chooses to blame the recent disastrous earthquake in Haiti on a "pact with the devil" that the Haitians made two hundred years ago, to get out from under "the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever." This, he says, is why Haiti has always been poor, and why it has just been devastated by a 7.0 earthquake. The Devil did it.

As a historian and a scientist (amateur but quite serious in both), I hardly know where to start. Let's start with the history. Robertson has the wrong damn Napoleon; he has no idea what the history even is. Napoleon III ascended the throne of France in December 1852, 49 years after Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti a free republic (Jan. 1, 1804). The "Napoleon" in charge at the time of Haitian independence was Napoleon III's uncle, the original and only "Napoleon."

Now the science. Haiti is located at the junction of two tectonic plates, the North American plate and the Caribbean plate. There isn't as much action there as there is along the West Coast, because the Caribbean plate is relatively small compared to the North American plate; but it's a strike-slip fault, just like the San Andreas Fault. It hadn't had any serious movement since the 18th century, but we understand why this happened, and the Devil had nothing to do with it. Haiti was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But Pat Robertson chooses to inform the world, during a broadcast asking for disaster relief, that the Haitians sold their souls to the devil in exchange for freedom from the French. They need to have "a great turning to God," he says. Somewhere in the afterlife, if there is an afterlife, I hope he meets the spirits of the men who bought Haitian independence with their blood. I'd like to hear what Toussaint L'Ouverture has to say to this.

In the meantime, I guess we have to put up with him; he owns his own television network, so we can't shut him up. But I want everyone who calls himself a Christian to look at Haiti, listen to Pat Robertson on the subject, and ask seriously: is this the man I want speaking for me? And if it isn't, why haven't we heard from you, reproaching him?

Remembering the Loma Prieta Earthquake

Today is the 20th anniversary of the earthquake that leveled the Marina District, knocked a hole in the Bay Bridge, and destroyed the Cypress Structure, killing 42 people unlucky enough to be driving on it.  I looked for my diary for the period (yes, I keep a diary), only to find absolutely no entries between August 1989 and April 1990!  This is what happens when you use a diary to rant about things that bother you; when you're reasonably happy, you don't write in it!  So this entire account is from memory, and I won't swear to any of it.

At 5:04 PM on October 17, 1989, I was at work at the Bank of America's data center in Concord, California, in my window cube on the 2nd floor of Building C.  This wasn't a bad place to be - Building C is only 4 stories high and broader than it is tall, so it's pretty stable.  My friends in Building D (6 stories high and mounted on rollers because at that date it had production mainframes on the 5th floor) told me they had a pretty wild ride.  Still, you couldn't miss it when the place started to rock, and I immediately dived under the desk in my cube.  The quake lasted 15 seconds - when the floor is rocking under you, that's a long time.  I had time to look up at the tangle of electrical wires on the underside of my desk, wonder if I ought to be under there, look at the wall of windows right across the aisle, and conclude that yes, I should be under the desk.

Next, of course, BART shut down.  BART, for the non-local readers, is Bay Area Rapid Transit, the local light rail system, and much of it runs on elevated tracks.  It actually wasn't damaged; but management shut it down until they could inspect it.  Since I had ridden BART to work that morning, I now had no way to get home. 

I didn't really try to get home right away; those of us still in the office spent some time gibbering at each other and phoning people to see if they were all right. 

We also wanted to know the status of the mainframe computers - at that time I worked on the team that supported a secondary set of mainframes (VM, for the technically curious) that the Bank of America used for back-office work, including everybody's email.  (Remember, this is 1989.)  Those machines were in the San Francisco data center, and we were worried about them, because if they crashed, it could take hours to get them safely back up and running.  Fortunately the San Francisco data center (also on rollers) came through the earthquake in fine shape, and the automatic diesel backup generators kicked in when the power failed, just the way they should, and gave the operators time to shut the systems down orderly.  Just time.  The diesels ran out of fuel 10 minutes after the systems came down.  After that, the fuel gauges were checked more often.

Eventually I decided to see if I could cadge a ride home, since the Caldecott Tunnel seemed to be undamaged.  I rode home with a woman I didn't know very well, who lived a mile or so from me in the Oakland hills.  I still remember that ride.  I was in much more danger in that car that I had been from the earthquake, because my driver was out of control.  She kept taking her hands off the wheel to put her palms to her cheeks and shriek, every time the radio reported another development.  It didn't help that she tuned the radio to KPFA, which was broadcasting every disaster it could hear of, in a hysterical tone that I thought was rather irresponsible; they clearly gave the impression that all of downtown Berkeley was on fire, although I found later that it was only one building.  I remember wondering if I should tell her to pull over and let me drive, except that we were on a freeway, and it wasn't clear she wouldn't just stop in the lane.  I was profoundly grateful when she dropped me off.

That's about it.  Our house was undamaged.  My husband was fine - he was walking across a parking lot to his vanpool when the quake hit.  That was the beginning of the time when you couldn't drive directly from Oakland to San Francisco - you had to go down to San Mateo or up to Richmond.  I got out of the habit of going to San Francisco during that period, and I've never really gotten it back.  The destruction of the Cypress Structure bothered me more than the rest, because I have a collection of relatives who, when I was a child, lived in Alameda and San Leandro; and when we drove to visit them, we took the Cypress Structure.  We'd all moved on and I didn't drive that route any more, but that could easily have been my whole family on that lower deck.  Scary thoughts.