Americans Unsure Who is Evil in Haiti

ll 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.

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You homos sure are convincing. Well, you can lay off with the grand descriptions of homo lifestyle, because I'm once again one of you!

Well, not a homeowner, if that's the specific meaning of "homo." But a home-liver, on the insider, a deep-inside homo. And it's all thanks to my new friends, the Russians.

Not all the Russians, mind you, but one Russian. You know me, good people, knowing one is like knowing all of them. Sure, I was instantly distrustful of her when I heard that thick Russkie accent, but when I saw her face, I was a daydream believer, just like the Brass Monkeys say. It was a little odd how I heard her voice before I saw her face, but that's one of the things you have to acclimate to when you live on the street and sleep under last week's Wall Street Journal, which I might note was covered in what smelled like human urine. There was a dry copy of the Village Voice nearby, but I hadn't lost that much dignity yet, good people.

Yes, Felchyana's face has the beauty and charm of a bookie. And if you don't think that's a compliment, you've never dealt with the gorgeous female bookies I have, friends. She is a beauty like that in a Renoir painting. Or Michelangelo. Which one had the chubby women completely buck naked? I suppose they all did. She's beautiful like those women, but all bones, no meat. I'm sure a few good meals will take care of that.

I discovered I had been sleeping outside her building in the alleyway for quite a few days. I was not my normal self after days of merciless living, which is to say my unsettling and disturbing visage wasn't even washed and shaven when she found me huddling up to a cold dumpster for warmth, which it refused to provide. Did she scream? Did she recoil in horror? Yes, understandably so. But she did come back, trying to hide her fear and disgust, and offered me a cup of warm soup.

Boy, that soup was the balm, as the hipsters say. Chicken noodle soup. I normally don't like noodles of chickens, preferring the established parts like wings and chestal regions. Living on the street will lower your standards significantly, as they say. This does not mean I'm taking their advice to have sex for money, especially not from three guys who can't even find one girl for an orgy, but "they" are a whole other story. You meet a new class of people when you have no house.

To make this story less ingratiatingly long, Felchyana shared her soup and opened her home to me. When she found out I had a job, she asked what the commune was. When I told her, she said it should be burnt and sent to hell. But she likes me so much and recognizes the hard-working industrial nature of Rok Finger and said she would allow me to stay in her home while I get back on my feet. I'm not sure how I like the sound of that last part, I'm really start to like traveling by skateboard. But I suppose we all make concessions when we're down and out.

Don't tell anybody, but I'm quite smitten with Felchyana as a woman, too, as well as a homo. She is pretty as the sun, but doesn't hurt my eyes in the same way. Her smile is like a flower blooming, her spit like pollen, or some kind of spitting lizard. She is sweet like the nectar of a gay metaphor. I wouldn't kick her out from under a newspaper for eating crackers, I'll say that much. Perhaps it is best to leave it at that, since she has said something about being married. Alas, it is not to be, but what isn't to be that actually is? Not much, I can tell you.

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A little bird recently asked me what it felt like to do 50. I answered that question with this question: What does it feel like to eat a bacon cheeseburger through a straw, dickface? That was right before I hit the little bird in the mouth with an encyclopedia. Actually, that analogy doesn't work unless I mention that the little bird was Boner Cunningham. You probably already guessed that from the encyclopedia he's always carrying around so people will think he can read. But no matter who the little bird was, nobody suggests Omar Bricks shops for chicks at the geriatric ward. Not if he wants to keep his teeth.

Only later when Griswald Dreck asked me the same question and I almost hit him with a framed picture of Dame Edna did I realize what they were both talking about. Really? I've written 50 Polio columns? Holy shit! A quick count of the notches carved into the edge of my desk confirmed it. Damn. Damn times fifty.

It seems like just yesterday that I was scouring the net, looking for columns I could pass off as my own. Come to think of it, that was yesterday. But I tried that shit back when I started working at the commune, too, and it didn't work any better then. Turns out everybody's heard of that old bag who writes Dear Arbys.

Though the official record may show 50 Polio columns published, the actual number written is probably double that. It may seem natural as shit now, but early on it took this Omar Bricks a while to find his "voice." As a matter of fact, the first ten My Friend Polios in a row were all rejected for one reason or another. The first few were because the commune already had a movie reviewer, and they didn't like the way I compared everything to Jaws. To which I still say you can kiss my ass. I still think Working Girl is like Jaws in an office building. Whatever.

My next attempt was rejected because they said you can't just write a column about how you deserve a blowjob. Apparently Rok Finger had already milked that tit dry years ago. I tried another column using the voice of this hilarious Latino character I had created but the commune bigwigs thought our apparently huge Hispanic readership would be alienated by the antics of Frankie Hotpants. I think the real problem was I was typing in an accent, and the milkfed silver spooners around here couldn't make out a word of it, so naturally they assumed I was using the column to take potshots at them in Latinese. Which I was, but they had no way of knowing that. Pricks.

After that I tried my hand at a "reality" column, just typing up everything that was happening around me as I wrote the thing. That turned out to be easy as shit to write, but made me enemies around the office faster than an Amy Grant concert tee shirt. Like the new guy was supposed to know everybody here was so secretive about their cock fighting and underground jai-alai tournaments.

My big breakthrough finally came one day in the parking garage when I was welding a giant metal dick to the hood of Red Bagel's car. Sure, I'd known it would be a hilarious gag for weeks, as I made arrangements to get the tools and had some kid in a high school metalshop class make the dick. But in the actual moment of pulling it off, by the pale glow of that arc-welder, I realized that this was the shit My Friend Polio should be all about. And a column was born.

Of course, that actual column never ran. Bagel immediately sacked the guy who he thought dick-welded his Camry, and I figured best let sleeping dogs lie dead on that one. But it didn't matter, the seed had been sewn. Or whatever the hell you do with seeds, it was planted and shit. At that point, nobody could have predicted what would come in the next 50 My Friend Polios, unless they were following me around all the time and taking notes. Then I guess they would have had a pretty good idea.

Bricks out.

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