ARTICLE
BY MARC J. DEFANT
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED THE RADICAL LEFT’S FLIRTATION with demagoguery in the 1990s when I was asked to teach in an interdisciplinary program that brought professors together from a bevy of different fields. During one of the lectures, a professor matter-offactly brought up Voodoo religion in Haiti and its belief in the walking dead. She seemed to be insinuating that zombies strolled around the Caribbean islands. I naively thought, as the token professor of science in the room, that it might be apropos to make sure the class understood that there were no actual dead bodies traipsing in places like Port-au- Prince, thinking that my colleague would agree. Au contraire! The professor denounced me for cultural bias and insisted that there were the walking dead. Who was I to challenge Haitian belief systems?