Thanks For the Unintended Shoutout, Pat Robertson

(P.S. I'm in the process of developing a lot of content here in the next few days so if an errant viewer stumbles upon here, there is plenty to occupy his or her time.)

Pat Robertson has alienated a lot of reasonable people in the last few days, due to comments he made during an episode of his still strangely watchable Christian news show The 700 Club. Here's a video showcasing the most relevant comments:

Good for the people calling him out. Surely, this is not only crazy talk but exactly the wrong type of observation to impart at a time of unimaginable crisis. But you may be confused as to what Robertson is referring to. He's actually questioning the motives behind the Haitian slave rebellion of the late 18th century, which is considered by many historians to be the first large-scale slave revolt of its kind. One of the principal characters in this drama was a vodoun priest named Dutty Boukman, who we will get to later.

Soon-to-be Dr. Robert Taber, a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida, wrote a special guest post for FiveThirtyEight called (somewhat misleadingly) "A Qualified Defense Of Pat Robertson." In it, he writes:

For religious conservatives in Haiti and abroad, the idea that the leaders of the slave revolt led and participated in a Voudou ceremony provides a troubling contrast to presentations of the United States’ founding fathers as devout Christians, one that explains their vastly different fortunes. Many view the U.S. invasions and the rule of the Duvaliers being as indications of the devil’s two hundred year lease on the country.

(The Duvaliers he is referring to are a family team of autocratic, murderous dictators--François "Papa Doc" Duvalier was president of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, and his son Jean-Claude ruled until being ousted in 1986.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a response to this piece, taking umbrage mainly with its title, arguing that the defense of Pat Robertson's comments is an offense in itself. Taber stood by his comments, claiming only that the story of Boukman and Co. making a pact with Satan is still an extremely resonant one among evangelical Christians and superstitious Haitians alike. Which is true, and I have no problem with the American public learning more about the devil pacts that have shaped the courses of so many nations. If I could have them teach it to my future kids in school, I would.

Anyway, Pat Robertson may have inadvertently bolstered my career as an English scholar. How is this? In September 2008, I took a Senior Seminar class for my English major focusing on postcolonial representations in restoration literature. One of my projects was to develop a Wikipedia page for a book I was writing a paper for, an insanely polemical leftist potboiler written by Guy Endore, titled Babouk. I could explain what the book is about, but I'd rather direct you to the Wikipedia page, which as I just said, was written by me (it has since been amended by others, of course). The important detail is that the main character Babouk, an African trickster and storyteller who is shipped to Haiti as a slave and becomes the voice of (explicitly liberal and anti-capitalist) resistance, is in fact a fictionalized version of Boukman. American public interest in Boukman, now, is as high as its ever been, and according to these online statistics, the number of page views for my little article has increased dramatically.

All of this is a long way of saying: Thank you, Pat Robertson. Your insensitive, yet oddly accurate religious ravings have inadvertently benefited exactly one (1) person. Now I know what Kurt Vonnegut meant when he said that he was the only person in the world to have ever benefited from the bombing in Dresden. Something like $3 for every dead body, I think he said.

BONUS/PLUG: Interested in reading my article on Babouk, which was accepted for publication this past summer? Are you curious about the Haitian slave rebellion, Edward Said's Orientalism, or developing alternative canons of literature? You can find it here (PDF; my own contribution starts on pg. 55). If you chance upon this blog and decide to read this thing in its entirety, you will be the first person to ever do so. I don't think even I've even read the whole thing; the whole thing is one benzedrine-fueled blur of madness...