All over the United States the average viewer is being treated to the site of black people running through the streets, burning flags, and throwing shrapnel as well as shooting guns, in the midst of full-blown rebellion. Unfortunately, this isn’t in America, it’s in Haiti, and Americans everywhere nervously wonder: Who exactly is the bad guy and whose side am I supposed to be on?

It’s a fair question, as the White House has yet to make an announcement on where they stand on the Haiti situation, pending a review of the situation by a panel heading south, which should have an answer this coming week. Of course, angry black people are something the Bush administration traditionally stands against, and this is no exception; but the real question for them is, can President Jean-Bertrand Aristide keep the population down and the bucks flowing to America for a few more terms? Or is it time to scrap him and install a new puppet government?

That’s right, the p-word: Puppet. The unofficial word is a claymation Gumby would have more spine for standing up to the U.S. than Aristide. Now the U.S. seeks damage control as Aristide finds himself the victim of a coup yet again. The wonderful “liberal” administration of Bill Clinton helped put Aristide back in power after his earlier ousting in 1994, and he was certainly a good lapdog after that. Clinton defended the action as restoring the rightfully-elected Haitian president to power, but nobody in the country bothered asking how he was elected or by whom. In recent years Haitian voter turnout has peaked at about 5%—even for Americans, that’s pretty low turnout.

For those Americans with your average high school education, Haiti may seem like a mystery. It is one of Caribbean island nations not communist and therefore of little interest to U.S. diplomats. It is populated almost entirely by black people, but it’s not the one Bob Marley is from, and it’s not a popular resort. It suffers from extreme poverty and high occurrences of AIDS and HIV, and the last time you saw it on TV may have been when a boatload of refugees were drowning in an effort to reach the continental United States, unless they were being turned back by U.S. coast guard.

There are positive things about Haiti, though, like its friendliness to American investors. When it’s not in the midst of revolution, which is admittedly quite often, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere with a per capita income of $250; less than half of its population is literate and 80% of its people live in poverty, which means low, low wages for investors. The U.S.-friendly puppet government, put in place and held there by military force, means no minimum wage and bizarre laws that lower tariffs on imports and punish exports—a country with a high yield of agricultural products can’t even produce rice for its own people, since it is cheaper to import it from American agricultural concerns, thanks to commerce legislation.

For the Bush administration, it’s obviously good business to enforce “trickle down” economics and protect investments there by reinstalling a U.S.-friendly government by whatever means possible, even militarily, but since it’s an election year and the American people are already getting a little sour about our efforts to protect business concerns in the Middle East, the stance our country is going to take on recent Haitian uprisings isn’t quite square yet. But if it can be done without lowering anyone’s approval rating, you can bet Haitian rebels and their underclass associates, maybe even Aristide himself, will soon join the Octagon of Evil, or whatever shape evil’s taking these days.