Yesterday I wore the pith helmet into Bantuistan and discovered that it was an amazingly functional hot weather hat, that it keeps the sun out of eyes and off the neck and permits the heat from the wearer’s brain to escape through a top vent.
An uneventful four-mile walk into the nation’s most dangerous city, with the ghetto hawk thundering overhead and the A-10s out of Martins’ Air Base flying lower than normal, imparting a thrill to the pedestrian ape. A Bantu Yute was speeding along the backstreet ahead of me on his dirt bike, making me smile.
Once at Sensei Steve’s the whine of the dirt bike irritated the old American and he launched into a laudatory monologue on a young black woman named Candice Owen, who he would vote for if she ran for president. We then sat and watched a 20-minute talk by this young mixed-race cutie with straightened hair, in which she points out that white criminals are much more likely to be killed by cops than black criminals as a percentage of the population and also that twice as many unarmed white men are killed by cops as unarmed black men. Onward she qualifies these numbers in terms of relative criminality in the two populations with an off-the-cuff acumen that marks her as an exception among her sisters. Her main point is that the celebration of criminality among her people was disturbing and she wished it to stop.
Steve then mentioned that she was his favorite you tube commentator and wanted to know what I thought.
I said, “She said the same thing we think and for which we would be punished if we said the same thing. The only reason why she is still on YouTube is because of her double-privilege. She is a doll. I think she should be sitting on your lap and reading Kipling to you rather than wasting herself on politics.”
The big man looked at me with an expression that said, “Thanks for reminding me that you’re insane.”
Then we planned the Saturday night session of World In Flames, an iconic WWII board game, which takes up an entire room on multiple tables with walls hung with combat results charts.