Bully's Blog

After a friend pointed out that New Orleans and Haiti are big on voodoo, I read this insightful piece from Rich Bledsoe. It is reproduced here with his permission:

I may have said this before, but it is very illuminating, and given the circumstance in Haiti, is worth saying again. Ray Bakke is the man that my doctoral program was initially built around, and he is the most traveled man I know, and one of the most interestingly, vastly read. In the last regard, he always reminded me of Rushdoony. You could hardly believe all of the arcane books that he had at finger tip in his memory that he had read on this or that subject. He used to lecture while walking down the street in some foreign city with you, and you did not want to miss a word.

He said somewhere, on one of my trips with him, that Haiti and New Orleans had some commonalities. Both were French colonies that were colonized after the French Revolution (unlike say, Canada). Bakke said that in multitudes of countries that had been colonies, the subsequent infrastructure, educational system, hospital and medical development, and leadership development, were all begun by the missionaries. French colonies had none of these developments, because there were no French missionaries. Fascinating insight, and I have never heard anyone else say such a thing.

It is perfectly clear that if Katrina had hit almost any other city in America (say Houston), it would have been cleaned up and recovered in three or four years.

If Bakke is right (and it is perectly coherent to me), it says a lot about a little yeast in a country and a few mustard seeds. What is invisible at the time makes all the difference in 150 years.