Bellegarde-Smith counts what the Goudougoudou destroyed, then counts where the money went. About a third of every American relief dollar paid for troops nobody in Haiti had invited, roughly three cents reached the elected Haitian government, and the remainder passed to some eleven thousand non-governmental organisations, a concentration he says hollows out the state they claim to be assisting. The rest of the essay tracks the stories told about the disaster. Pat Robertson's pact with the devil, David Brooks and Lawrence Harrison on Vodou as an obstacle to progress, and a line about savagery he follows back to an 1888 New York Times report all belong, in his reading, to one continuous colonial commentary. Cuban doctors long resident in Haiti were reported as Spanish. Children were flown out by missionaries who understood rescue as removal from language and religion, a habit he lines up with the marine occupation of 1915.