Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Sometimes, in this bleak and depressing world we live in, it’s hard to find evidence that there’s justice. You can’t blame people for being skeptical about a benevolent force that’s guiding the universe in a positive direction. The conduct of daily life serves as a constant source of fuel for crises of faith.

But sometimes, every so often, something happens that gives you pause. Something that makes you believe that maybe, just maybe the forces of goodness and light can triumph over everything that is evil and wrong. Sometimes, the universe plays out like it should.

Sometimes the Eagles of Boston College vanquish the hated terriers of boston university for the Beanpot Championship.

It’s a great day to be an Eagle!

Meeting the girl of my dreams? Landing that writing gig at the New Yorker? Closing out Game 7 of the World Series? Silly readers, none of those moments, were they to happen, would even come close to being in the same ballpark of being able to be even remotely compared to this:

Sonic 4? A side scroller? That picks up right after the action of Sonic and Knuckles? Yes, please!

You people might not understand how significant an event this is. I’ve been a Sega guy my whole life. I never owned a Nintendo, but I did own a Sega CD and a Dreamcast. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is, in this blogger’s myopic opinion, the single greatest achievement in the history of video games. I played that game until my thumbs were raw and bloody. The Sonic games of my late adolescence, early teens, late teens, early 20s, and mid 20s have been, to say the least, uninspiring. But this? This Sonic 4? This thing looks like it was handed down by God Herself. I’m beside myself with excitement.

Why didn’t they just spin the boot at the beginning of the chug, long before the threat of the vortex bubble was ever an issue?

The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me

1) Brand New, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (2006)

After a month and a half of this endeavor, you might have come to the conclusion that there’s a lot of crap on this list. I love every album on the list dearly, but I’m self-aware enough to admit that I wouldn’t go to a wine and cheese party and try to wax philosophic about the subtler nuances of Taking Back Sunday.

As I said in this week’s vital interpolation, and this should have come as a surprise to no one, taste in music is subjective. And so while I chafe slightly at the judgment of sundry music snobs looking down their nose at the music I like, it usually rolls of my back quickly when I realize that everyone likes crap in some form or other, including the snobs. I try to avoid proclaiming that the stuff I like is any better or worse than the stuff you like, because really, who are any of us to judge?

All of this is to say, were I to find myself at a wine and cheese party and someone broached the topic of the best albums of the Zeroes, I would probably wait around patiently, noshing on my smoked gouda-on-a-table-water-cracker before politely interjecting, “Yes, This Is It was a very good album, but did you listen to The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me?”

Devil and God puts me in mind of the great paradox that we all find ourselves in w/r/t our favorite bands. On the one hand, there’s a reason you love them, so you want to hear the same, consistent sound. Of course, the band that stays consistent opens itself to accusations of being a one-trick pony, a trite and hackneyed joke. On the other hand, we like our bands to grow and develop. But if a band strays too much from the winning formula, well, “howling fantods” isn’t a strong enough term to describe our reaction. (I can’t count how many different people listed “old Blink-182″ as a favorite band in their AIM profile after Enema of the State came out.) So, in review, we want our bands to keep the same sound that made us fall in love with them, but also to develop and advance musically. Got it?

I think this desire for our favorite bands to grow (if it’s not something I completely invented) is kind of like a security blanket. We get to cling to the bands of our youth, but it’s not pathetic, because look, they’re actually a better band than they were when I started listening to them. If our bands don’t grow with us, it’s like a betrayal. We’re forced to look into the eyes of our own mortality and admit that there are some things that have to be left in the toybox. Take it from me: I just spent a month littering the tubes with however many words about emo records from eight years ago.

When Devil and God came out at the end of 2006, Brand New fans were almost at the end of their ropes. It had been more than three years since the release of their sophomore effort, the excellent Deja Entendu. Which would be fine, were it not for the band’s notoriously reclusive nature. There were no dates, no news, no nothing until early 2006, when nine untitled demos recorded for the new album leaked onto the Internet. (Incidentally, shortly thereafter I found myself sitting at a bar in Providence, Rhode Island, after the first show Brand New had played in almost two years, with lead guitarist Vin Accardi. [This is like, the only name-dropping story I have, so please indulge me. And Linda, please corroborate this in comments.] He said that one of the tech guys in the studio had had those demos [which took on the moniker Fight Off Your Demons, after the band's new URL, and is a pretty damn good album in its own right] on an iPod, which he proceeded to accidentally leave in a pizza parlor, where it was somehow picked up by some enterprising fan who proceeded to put them on the Internet. It seemed like a far-fetched story, to say the least.)

Long story short, Brand New’s third album was much-anticipated, and I bought it the minute it came out. I can’t lie: I was underwhelmed! It was too dark. It was too much of a departure from the band’s emo roots. I took to heart criticisms like those leveled in Rolling Stone’s dismissal of the album: “But the selling—and sticking—point is still dark drama, with shadowy, shimmery textures, agonized choruses and frontman Jesse Lacey yowling away and dropping ponderous poetry like a guy with his heart on his sleeve and a couple of philosophy books on his shelf.” I had the reaction of a self-loathing pop punk fan: it was inconceivable that an emo band I liked could produce a serious piece of art.

I’ve been beating this quote into the ground, but it’s always been true: the songs you grow to like never stick at first. The more I listened, the more every track grew on me, to the point where I would just listen to the whole thing all the way through. That’s right: there’s no skippable song. Not only was the music masterful; that could have been expected, based on the leap Brand New made between Your Favorite Weapon and Deja Entendu. Not only were the words poetry; Jesse Lacey is a crafter of lyrical miracles. No one disputes this. I guess I just wasn’t prepared to encounter an actual thought-provoking album, where I would find myself thinking about the songs long after I stopped listening. Is it so bad for a songwriter to have his “heart on his sleeve and a couple of philosophy books on his shelf”? That’s a couple more philosophy books than most people have!

So, what happens when an emo band grows up? They find God, in a manner of speaking. (You couldn’t tell from the title of the album?) Yes, Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s favorite album of the decade is also the most existentially dreadful one on the list. It’s refreshing, in its way. I understand that not a lot of people are going to the Billboard charts for their theology, but on the other end, there’s not a whole lot of critical thought regarding religion going on in popular music these days. It’s like Kanye says: “They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus. / That means guns, sex, lies, video tapes, / But if I talk about God my record won’t get played.”

I won’t dissect entire album’s various religious messages, just what I think is the main one: redemption, and its possibility or lack thereof. In the second track, “Millstone” (that’s an allusion to Mark 9:42, for those scoring at home: “And if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck”), we get the first seed of doubt: “I used to pray like God was listening,” Lacey laments, before a uh, fine point is put on things in “Jesus.” The song is one side of a conversation between our protagonist and Our Lord and Savior himself, asking all the usual questions: “Well Jesus Christ I’m alone again. / So what did you do those three days you were dead? / ‘Cause this problem’s gonna last more than the weekend. / Well Jesus Christ I’m not scared to die. / I’m a little bit scared of what comes after: / Do I get the gold chariot? / Do I float through the ceiling? / Do I divide and pull apart?”

At the end, we get to Lacey’s view of the relationship between Christ and ourselves: “And I know you think that I’m someone you can trust, / But I’m scared I’ll get scared / And I swear I’ll try to nail you back up . . . / But we’ve all got wood and nails. / We don’t turn out hate in factories.” Say what you will about how crummy Christianity has been and continues to be, but I think we can all agree that Jesus was a pretty righteous dude. To imply that after 2,000 odd years, we would still be compelled to fear and punish that kind of goodness, and further, that the spark of hatred and violence doesn’t come from the outside, but rather burns in every man’s heart, says a lot about Jesse Lacey’s low opinion of humanity in general. Is he right? Do each of us have wood and nails?

Clearly, mankind is still in need of redemption, but you won’t find a ton of it in The Devil and God. (To wit, in “You Won’t Know,” for instance, we learn that “They say in Heaven there’s no husbands and wives. / On the day that I show up they’ll be completely out of their forgiveness supplies.” Oh well, right?) Fortunately, we hear from JC himself later on in the album, which leads me to my

Signature track: Limousine

“Limousine” is a song about a young girl named Katie Flynn who was killed in a drunk driving accident on Long Island in 2005. It’s a terrible enough story, some of the details of which are recounted here, to inspire a complete stranger to write a haunting, powerful song about it. There’s an interpretation of “Limousine,” which I’ll run with here, that says the song features the voices of the three principles in Katie’s story. The first long, chant-like portion of the song is supposed to be her mother. The second, a prayer from her killer. And finally, Katie speaks in the muted portion behind the frenetic climax of “Limousine,” reflecting on the life she’ll never get to actually live: “I’ll never have to buy adjacent plots of earth. / We’ll never have to rot together underneath the earth. / I’ll never have to lose my baby in the crowd. / I should be laughing right now.”

(I encourage you to watch the band play this song live. That link is from a show I actually went to a few months ago. It’s eerie and moving stuff, and probably the closest thing I’ve seen to a collective spiritual experience at a rock show.)

I’m most concerned with that middle part, though: “Dear Beauty Supreme, / Yeah you were right about me. / But can I get myself back from underneath this guilt that will crush me? / And in the choir I saw our sad messiah. / He was bored and tired of my laments. / Said, ‘I’d die for you one time but never again.’” Never again. Ouch. A lot of us consider God or Jesus or whoever as an all-forgiving, all-redeeming presence, and there are certainly arguments for that way of thinking. Taken rationally, though (and I know that’s a lot to ask of religion [I don't mean that as a dig!]), the question Lacey is asking here is, what more can we ask of Christ? If dying for us isn’t enough to get humanity on the right track, what else is there that a savior can do? Of course, it’s catechismical common sense that the whole redemption thing is a two-way street: God will take care of you if you do your part. Lacey takes a bit of a more pessimistic position: if you were hoping for a higher power to look out for you, you might be out of luck.

At first blush, this is a tremendous downer. And I’ll offer my amateur, theological know-nothing interpretation of Jesse Lacey’s lyrics, but I won’t speak for whatever kind of faith the man has in his heart. He may very well believe that there’s no hope for us at all, and considering that the types of tragedies that took the life of Katie Flynn are happening every day all over the world, it’s understandable that he would think that’s the case. I take a more affirmative message from “Limousine,” and from the whole album in general. I sort of kind of addressed this issue back in the day on this blog’s earlier iteration, w/r/t Barack Obama’s election, and the perfectibility of our union, but there’s a message there that applies to the conduct of our lives in general: “Thou mayest rule over sin.” Or thou mayest not. It’s up to you. If God isn’t listening, and if Christ died for us one time but never again, then that means that if we’re to be redeemed, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. Making ourselves, and our world, better is our own responsibility, and no one else’s. And if it turns out that God is there, we’ll have done right by him. Feather on.

In the world of blogging, there are certain perils. One of them is having a great idea for a post that you feel really good about, only to write half of it and leave it languishing in your drafts folder. It’ll be there when you have time to finish it, right?

The peril, of course, in missing your shot. One day, you’ll be tooling around your Google Reader, only to come across a blog post that makes every single point you had been trying to make, and a few more that you would have made if you had actually finished your own damn post in the first place, although probably not as eloquently, so it’s probably for the best.

In that spirit, here’s Eric from Pitchers and Poets on expanding the Baseball Hall of Fame.

. . . but I think it’s time to hand the reins over to our dolphin overlords and pray for mercy.

While our elected leaders have trouble even counting to the number 60, these half-fish/half-mammal killing machines have devised a hunting system so intricate that I had to watch the damn video twice to figure out how it worked. And if you’re reading this, dolphin masters (and I have no doubt they’ve already mastered all of the world’s languages), please don’t lump me in with the rest of those devils who have polluted your oceans and ensnared your brethren in tuna nets. I’ll name names!

It used to be that I read this satirical Onion article and laughed. Now, I can only marvel at its prescience, and weep for humanity’s fate.

This might be a bit of a spoiler for old friends of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, so if the end of this list being a surprise is important to you, feel free to skip this post. I can’t imagine that anyone out there in Internet land actually cares the much, but I figured I would alert anyone that does.

Basically, Brand New’s Your Favorite Weapon isn’t Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s Favorite Album of the Decade, and I thought it would be nice to explain why. Since, as those aforementioned old friends of DD&U can attest, Your Favorite Weapon not only got me into the whole emo/pop punk scene, but it’s probably the seminal album of my late-teen/young adult life.

There was about a two-year period while I was in college for which Your Favorite Weapon provides an almost perfect archaeology. At one point or another, each track held profound meaning for me. Jude Law and a Semester Abroad. Sudden Death in Carolina. Failure By Design. Soco Amaretto Lime. And, of course, Seventy Times 7. There was something in all of these songs that I deeply identified with. I won’t bore you with the details, but feel free to listen through and try to piece together a psychological profile.

You might ask, precious reader, how I could leave off the list an album that came the closest an album can come to changing my life? It may sound anticlimactic, but that part of my life is over. I’ve made my peace with the cast of characters who gave that part of my life, and hence the album, the meaning that it had. I wish I could give you a better explanation than the water has flowed under the bridge, but thems the facts. I’ve grown up, and mellowed out. Your Favorite Weapon has become less a description of my life than a relic.

This post, characteristic of the music it’s describing, is tending toward melodrama, which leads to the larger point I wanted to make. See, I still listen to Your Favorite Weapon. Consistently. I love it. So if I feel like I’ve grown up, how come I still find myself drawn to this type of music?

The biggest knock against emo/pop punk bands like old-school Brand New, Dashboard Confessional, Taking Back Sunday, and their ilk is that the music is flamboyantly maudlin at best, and dangerously self-indulgent and immature at worst. There are too many gravely important things going on in the world, too many people with actual real-life problems, to take seriously some indie-acoustic troubadour on stage complaining about how another girl broke his precious little heart. People who have criticized my taste in music have almost all, to a man, brought up this navel-gazing conceit. That shit might fly for high school girls, but not for grown-ups.

There’s a way in which I shouldn’t even really have to mount a defense. I like this music. I just do. Taste in art in general, and music in particular, is one of the most subjective things there is. This is why I try not to be too critical of what I might think is someone’s bad taste in music, because they might think the same thing about me, and would I be able to conceive of an adequate and persuasive argument if that were the case? Probably not!

But I do think the critique about emo music being self-indulgent is salient and worth at least going a little deeper into. It’s a true fact that if your best friend dating your ex-girlfriend, or your girlfriend cheating on you is your biggest problem, then you’ve probably got a not so bad life, relatively speaking. Which is true! The emo critic goes on, though, to imply that the emo fan shouldn’t waste his time with such whiny dreck. Or, at least, that he has bad taste for wasting his time with such whiny dreck. And, if the criticism goes to its conclusion, the emo fan has a warped set of priorities because he likes music about guys lamenting their broken hearts while there’s actual, real suffering going on in the world. I’m not setting up a strawman here; I’ve heard this kind of thing!

The way I see it, I can afford to identify with and find meaning in this type of music, and I count my blessings every day for that fact. See, I’m a grown man: I’m not so naive as to believe that my problems, and the problems that are the fodder of emo songs, are the worst things ever. Listening to emo and pop punk music, far from being an exercise in woe-is-me self-indulgence, actually offers me perspective as to how good I’ve actually got it. It makes me thankful for the opportunities I’ve been afforded, and appreciative of people who have faced obstacles that I’ll never have to. As I said, if the worst that can happen so far is I have a spat with a pal, then things must be going alright.

Am I overthinking this? Of course I am! It’s just emo music, guys. And for those of you who think all of this is BS and want to continue to poke fun at my lame tastes, check out Emocapella, George Washington University’s all-emo acapella group. I assure you that they’re everything you could possibly imagine.

If you haven’t already heard, Scott Brown, the Republican candidate for Senator from Massachusetts, just won the special election to replace the late Ted Kennedy. You heard that right. Massachusetts, which hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since 1972, just voted for a Republican to replace Ted Kennedy. Of the Kennedy family.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun can surmise how I feel about all this. And if you want to read some informed commentary about the implications of this vote for the country, you can check it out here, here, here, here, and here. Suffice it to say, this is a big deal.

And look, I’ll probably be fine tomorrow, and if not then, then the next day. But right now, I have a hard time having any faith in the Democratic party. Which is nuts, right? They still control 59 seats in the Senate, which is a bigger majority than either party has enjoyed in years. This should be a drop in the bucket. But let’s not talk about how arcane and despotic procedural rules in the Senate mandate a 60-vote supermajority to get anything done, except to say that James Madison and Alexander Hamilton are no doubt joining Senator Kennedy in grave-spinning tonight.

My buddy is fond of saying that the voters get what they deserve. I’m not really sure what else to say. After eight years of allowing George Bush to enmesh us in two wars, let financial institutions leverage themselves beyond all logical comprehension based on the seemingly unassailable notion that housing prices would keep going up forever and hence miring us in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, enact unfunded mandates (No Child Left Behind), pass deficit-crippling entitlements (the prescription drug benefit), and drag our country’s good name through the mud (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay), the voters of my beloved Commonwealth of Massachusetts were ready to send a message to the Democratic party that, you know what? You guys had all of a year to turn the ship around, and you only sorta kinda started to succeed. We’re ready to put the guys that ran the ship aground in the first place back in charge. Whatever. At the most fundamental level, I’m a believer in representative democracy. I think that the people that just elected Scott Brown are wrong, but this is the system by which we hold our elected leaders accountable. This was clearly an accountability moment for the Democratic party, and they only have themselves to blame.

Paul Krugman wrote about this in a column in the New York Times on Monday, and I’m about to quote liberally from it.

It’s instructive to compare Mr. Obama’s rhetorical stance on the economy with that of Ronald Reagan. It’s often forgotten now, but unemployment actually soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Reagan, however, had a ready answer for critics: everything going wrong was the result of the failed policies of the past. In effect, Reagan spent his first few years in office continuing to run against Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Obama could have done the same — with, I’d argue, considerably more justice. He could have pointed out, repeatedly, that the continuing troubles of America’s economy are the result of a financial crisis that developed under the Bush administration, and was at least in part the result of the Bush administration’s refusal to regulate the banks.

But he didn’t. Maybe he still dreams of bridging the partisan divide; maybe he fears the ire of pundits who consider blaming your predecessor for current problems uncouth — if you’re a Democrat. (It’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.) Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama has allowed the public to forget, with remarkable speed, that the economy’s troubles didn’t start on his watch.

When it comes to low-information voters, narrative is the most important thing. I’m a junkie, so I read about politics every day. I represent a tremendously small fraction of the electorate. I know many, many smart, capable, respectable people who just don’t keep up with politics. Plus, there are scores of just blithering idiots who still happen to vote. For these people, overarching narratives are key. And the sad truth is, the narrative was stacked against Democrats in this election. Massachusetts voted for Barack Obama by a 62 to 36 margin in 2008. Did his brand, objectively, become so odious in a year since his inauguration? Or did the perception change. Deep down, you know the answer.

Which is why I find the scapegoating of the Coakley campaign to be insidious. She was a lousy candidate, for sure. But guess what? Irregardless of Scott Brown’s “People’s Seat” talk, Martha Coakley is a Democrat. In Massachusetts. It’s unseemly to say that a certain party takes a certain seat for granted. But please be honest with yourself. This is Massachusetts we’re talking about here. A Kelly’s roast beef sandwich should be able to get elected if it has a (D) next to its name. So I don’t want to hear anything about Coakley taking her win for granted.

The fact is, she should have been able to take it for granted. The national Democratic Party had as much skin in this game as Coakley herself. We’re talking about President Obama’s agenda here, to say nothing of the votes that various fringe Democrats stuck their necks out for in the hopes of the health care bill passing. So to hear about backbiting and infighting taking place before the polls even closed is sincerely disheartening.

There are two possible scenarios. Either the national party and the White House gave Martha Coakley all the support she needed, and they failed miserably. That would be pretty bad. What would be worse is if they barely gave her any help at all. That would represent a level of arrogance, gall, and incompetence that’s almost unforgivable. Either way, to lay the blame at the feet of Martha Coakley, who had the opportunity to become the first female senator that Massachusetts has ever elected, is to focus on all the wrong sort of details.

I’m reminded of the sad tale of Trey Junkin. Many of you are no doubt perplexed that I’m about to make a long-snapper analogy, but the Giants fans among Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s readership should know exactly what I’m talking about. It was the wild card round of the 2002 playoffs, and the Giants were facing the 49ers. The Giants were able to jump to a seemingly insurmountable 38–14 lead with four minutes left in the third quarter. Only one team had ever come back from a bigger deficit in the playoffs: the Buffalo Bills trailed the Houston Oilers 34–3 in 1993, only to come back and win 41–38. You can see where this is going.

San Francisco led 39–38 when New York was about to attempt a 41–yard field goal with seconds left on the clock. But Junkin, who came out of retirement for the sole purpose to long snap for the Giants in this game, botched the snap, leading to an incomplete pass from the kicker as time expired. Game over, Giants lose.

Trey Junkin is a presence of folkloric proportions in the annals of Giants history, but until I just looked up that link up there, I couldn’t remember the name of the kicker who, because it was a third down play, could have spiked the botched snap and bought the Giants another opportunity for points. (Matt Allen, btw.)

Point being, everybody remembers the very memorable Trey Junkin fuckup, but far fewer probably remember the guy that could have made that fuckup moot. And barely anyone cares to pore through the game and look at the myriad different defensive stops that could have been made, offensive plays that could have been executed, or schemes that could have been drawn up that could have prevented San Francisco from scoring just two additional points. Junkin is a convenient patsy, so he gets remembered. Martha Coakley is going to be the Trey Junkin of this election. She bears responsibility at the end of this election, but there are a host of factors that went completely and utterly wrong in order to put her in a position to lose. Whatever.

There’s a special election in Massachusetts tomorrow to fill the Senate seat held by the late Ted Kennedy. As per this blog’s tradition, I’m encouraging all of my Massachusetts readers to get out there and vote tomorrow. It’s an incredibly important election. I’d love nothing more than to tell my more Republican-inclined readers to just stay home and stay dry, but that wouldn’t be very sporting of me, would it?

I’ll be voting for the Democrat, Martha Coakley, and if being represented by someone that opposes perpetual war, believes that people shouldn’t be sentenced to die for want of health insurance, supports women’s reproductive rights, and supports marriage equality is important to you, I suggest you do the same.

I had a job doing layout and ad design for the Boston Haitian Reporter during my senior year of college. It was a small outfit (I also did layout and ad design for sister publications the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston Irish Reporter), but it was valued by Boston’s Haitian immigrants. (Apparently, the Boston area has the third largest Haitian community in America. Who knew?) It was an exciting time to be around, because the first elections since the 2004 rebellion that ousted then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were taking place in the beginning of 2006, so there was a lot of news coming out of Haiti that was of great interest to immigrants here in Boston.

I learned a lot at that job, in particular about just how difficult it is to run an election in a country so gripped by poverty, corruption, and violence. And, in general, just how gripped by poverty, corruption, and violence Haiti really is. Eighty percent of its people live in poverty. The literacy rate is around 53 percent. It ranks 149th among 182 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index. It’s cruel and counterproductive to have a pissing match about which country is the worst on earth, but Haiti is certainly in the argument.

It seems like it’s been that way forever. Which is why this latest tragedy to befall Haiti seems so cosmically cruel. Natural disasters on this scale are always bad, of course, but Haiti is a country that was uniquely postured to be affected in an outsize way should a terrible disaster occur. And outsize is probably the most delicate way to put it, with the death toll still indeterminate but with estimates in the tens of thousands, most of the capital city of Port Au Prince in ruins, and barely a semblance of law and order in the streets. You can’t read a description of the devastation without imagining hell on earth. And this was a place that could have been classified as hell on earth already.

It’s all just incredibly sad, especially given Haiti’s history. In 1804, Haiti became only the second state in the Western hemisphere to throw off the yoke of colonial oppression. (Guess which was the first.) That’s a fact which, at least in my limited and tangential experience, Haitians (rightfully) wear like a badge of honor. These people are our sisters and brothers in revolution and independence. And I won’t get into how Western meddling has tipped the scales against the people of Haiti for years.

Suffice it to say, they need our help. My friend Sam, who researches this type of thing far more than I do, recommends giving to Partners in Health, which apparently has a lot of people already on the ground and a fair amount of infrastructure in place (or as much infrastructure as a nonprofit can have in a disaster area.) I’m going to throw a few bucks their way. I won’t twist any arms, but every little bit helps. And if you want to express your own self-determination, the Globe has set up a good fact sheet about various global and local nonprofits that are helping out. And as usual, if prayer is your sort of thing, say some words to the close and holy darkness for the people who have been affected by this disaster.