Paternal Warmth

Fifteen sons and daughters of Ham have been burned or suffocated to death as a result of the Christian States of America's continuing crusade to educate Haitians into a proper understanding of their ordained place in the world. An orphanage on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince caught fire, apparently as a result of efficiency savings by the Church of Bible Understanding, a non-profit Christian group which has consistently defied the Haitian bureaucracy and which the Almighty recently rewarded with a non-profit surplus three times the size of its charitable expenses.

Haiti, of course, is no stranger to efficiency savings. As the location of history's most successful slave revolt, Haiti has been a unique threat to the USA since the eighteenth century, and has frequently been considered to pose an existential peril on a par with Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. Largely as a result of repeated benign interventions, little priority is given to such luxuries as ambulances and bottled oxygen; and thanks to a couple of centuries of enforced democratisation, the Haitian authorities lack the means to enforce the kind of repressive safety regulations that are even now inconveniencing Grenfell-positive landlords in Britain.