Bad news if you read Combat! blog primarily to comment on that Levi’s commercial post: today is Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which means we once again get to decide whether we respect national holidays around here, or what. Fortunately, this one is easy. King Day is a particular favorite of mine, in part because, unlike most other federal holidays, it does not involves a bunch of people getting killed. Columbus Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, President’s Day, Easter—if everything you knew about history came from our roster of holidays, you would think that the only way to get anything done was to explode or smallpox or crucify everyone. Martin Luther King proved that you can get a lot done with just words and ideas, plus snappy presentation. Granted, he used that principle to free a people, whereas around here we use it to snipe at Sarah Palin and make dick jokes, but it’s basically the same thing. In honor of King Day, we plan to spend the morning redesigning Combat! blog, so that if we ever do actually exert a positive influence on anything we will at least look like we weren’t laid out in two hours by a half-drunk man with no graphic design expertise. I mean, that will still be true, but we’ll hide it better. In the meantime, happy Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., CPA day.

If you’re a human being who can still experience what our pre-Facebook ancestors once called empathy, you probably felt briefly sorry for the people of Haiti, whose country was struck by a terrible earthquake on Tuesday. Then you tuned into The 700 Club and saw Pat Robertson explain that the earthquake was Haiti’s fault because they made a pact with the devil. For those of you who do not live with your elderly grandparents, I quote: “Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.'”

You know that’s true, because Robertson is an ordained minister and also he said “true story” at the end. We don’t have to feel sorry for the people of Haiti, because it turns out that, like the developmentally disabled and people who have lost their jobs, the whole thing is their fault. The Haitian people have been free from slavery for almost 200 years, so they can’t really say that the devil hasn’t held up his end of the deal. On the other hand, Haiti is beset by endemic poverty, has one of the highest AIDS exposure rates of any nation in the western hemisphere, and is right next door to the Dominican Republic—which means constant merengue music no matter what time it is. Diabolic servitude or not, they’ve clearly had a hard time of it. Haiti made a classic error: they forged a blood pact with the dark lord Mephistopheles, which was great, but they forgot to be specific. When you’re dealing with the devil, it’s critically important that everything be specified. Because once he says, “Okay, it’s a deal,” that’s it.

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The news of the world has been sort of a downer lately, what with the Ugandan pogroms and Islamic revolutions and nutsack bombers and all. At times like this, we can take comfort in knowing that we live in America, where individual freedom and religious neutrality and non-exploding nutsacks rule the day. The United States is the planet’s longest-running democracy, founded on the enlightenment principles of reason, individual liberty and generous-if-occasionally-roughhouse tolerance, and we still enjoy the highest standard of living in the world. Coincidence? I think not. It’s our values that make us strong, and our commitment to rational inquiry and logical discourse that separates us from countries where they get all their science from one  2000 year-old book and make their women walk around with bags over their heads and nobody has a damn car. We have cars, and our women expose their underwear at the mall. It’s what makes America great, or at least what makes us rule. Of course, if you ask a large segment the country why we’re so awesome, they’ll say it’s our special relationship with God. They’re the nascent theocracy that believes we have always been a Christian nation, that our strength comes from our strictures and not our rights, and that any sentiment that can’t be read off the back of Toby Keith’s truck is probably the elitist babble of the overeducated. They are, in this sense, the Bizarro America, running around in a Superman outfit with the S backwards and fighting for what the rest of us consider crime. Maybe there are as many of them as there have always been, or maybe they’re on the rise. They certainly seem to have been particularly active lately, and this Friday’s link roundup is devoted to their weird, inverted vision for the country. So stand up, solder a can of beer closed again and do whatever the opposite of enjoyment is to the stories of their efforts. Outrage—that’s what the opposite of enjoyment is. Funny how it feels so similar lately.

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