Peter Linebaugh, "Spirits of Haiti"

"Bush: Blanc Blanc"
Peter Linebaugh


Following the opening of the Mark Lombardi exhibit of conspiratorial drawings at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco we repaired to North Beach for a grand dinner, our motley crew led by the inimitable Iain Boal, the geographer activist, convenor of Retort gatherings, and people's art critic who had just explained the drawings to us: the penciled constellations, or networks of high and low finance and how they were connected to the parcel of rogues of international power which were on view at the gallery. We raised our glasses to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the black republic.

All over the world people with the least historical sense were doing the same, because it was the disgraceful week following the coup d'état of democratic Haiti and the kidnapping of Jean Bertrand Aristide by the USA and its nefarious creatures among the private security forces, the CIA agents, the DEA thugs, the hitmen of the tontons macoute, or the Haitian Fraph: all those demons who used to only inhabit the gothic imagination or the voodoo nights of Zora Neale Hurston. Now, alas, they were summoned by Bush blanc blanc against the former liberation theologian, friend of the poor, and advocate of jubilee.


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