Since my life has straddled racial lines people from their various quarters of the racial divide have often asked me such questions as, ‘Why can’t we all just get along’, ‘will there ever be a time when racial animosity loses currency’, and most recently, ‘how come the president is not bringing us together’.

Let me answer the last first. From my reading of history the much touted task of the ‘Commander and Chief’ is to build solidarity among his subjects, but only when his nation is on the rise. However, once his nation—as all nations do—begins to decline it is incumbent upon the ruling class to encourage division among those they rule, lest the ignorant masses figure out that their masters are quickly driving their nation to ruin, and hence rise and replace them with another set of ruthless reprobates.

So to imagine that it is the task of the Commander and Chief of a waning mercantile empire to encourage union and brotherhood among his slaves is foolish. His task—or the task of his minions, as he is naught but a figurehead—is to play one faction off against the other. His minions include a duplicitous press, gossipy media and a disingenuous academia.

We have recently been gifted with a shining example of this imperious schismatic duplicity in the form of the recent NFL wife-beating scandals. Even in this the NFL is fulfilling its diversionary social role as a pressure valve for popular angst, for on no single day since muscular twerp Ray Rice leveled his maniacal spousal unit in an Atlantic City elevator, has media coverage—watered down as it is—of increased U.S. military involvement in various overseas locations drawn anywhere near the attention or passion of this pimp slap gone wrong.

I understand that most of my readers are white right wing rural/suburban gun owners, who tend to be critical of the high levels of violence and low levels of civility in black left wing urban ghettos. For you men let me paint this picture for you.

Yesterday, at Ravens Stadium, 7,000 to 8,000 Ray Rice jerseys were exchanged by fans who were overwhelmingly white and female. Blacks are holding onto their jerseys like flags of defiance. I work with a 10-man mixed-race group of football fans—all men. Football and other sports are the only subjects that these men find common ground on.

Music?

Whites like rock or country and blacks like rap or Motown.

Women?

Blacks like big butts and whites like big boobs.

But football, everybody can agree that some knucklehead on the offensive line has outlived his usefulness, and if they disagree it is about his numbers not his perceived privileged or underprivileged upbringing or race.

What we have here with this NFL drama is white women driving a wedge into that one place where men of all races come together for at least the duration of their coffee break.

Now let me put it to you from the viewpoint of a white supremacist friend of mine who is the basis for a fictional character featured in my novel The World is our Widow, and hence a chance for me to permit this reclusive soul to vent about the ideas that move him. What would Randy Sterling Bracken—virulent founder of the fictional ‘Aryan Rock’ gang—say to those members of right wing white America concerning the current NFL scandal overshadowing U.S. military operations and even the televised beheadings of Americans?

“Seriously Brother, if you care more about some negro jock cuffing his mulattress mate than you do about sending your son to lose an arm on behalf of some towel head dictator and the corporate suits he’s in league with, then we no longer share a common ground.”

For those who care I have predicted a global Islamist victory over corporate America by 2100 A.D. Furthermore, for any American historian of the future who might be hiding out in a techno-monastery in Alaska or Antarctica writing about the Decline and Fall of the West, put me on record as observing that the symbolic fall of the West—the metaphor that best reflects the moral frailty of Postmodern America in the face of a mortal foe—is best marked at the midpoint of September, 2014, when the slapping of a debased woman by an athlete caused more public outrage than the ritual execution of two of our men at the hands of an enemy that grows stronger by the day.

We are not alone in history. At a similar point in the decline of Imperial Rome the ‘mob’ and the ‘senate’ were more concerned with the fact that a senator’s wife had run off to be the plaything of a gladiator, than they were with barbarians infiltrating the Empire, the fact that charioteers were more honored than battlefield heroes, or that the turbaned warriors of the East were rolling back Trajan’s hard won frontier.

In 2015 I plan on writing a novel, serialized on this site, titled Under the Crescent, about an occupied Islamist America in 2098. The narrative crux I am mulling over is this: who would an Islamist American regime with limited resources prioritize as the prime target for persecution and eradication, godless ghetto gang bangers, secular suburbanites, or rural Christians?

Have a nice week, and do not worry; when 1:00 p.m. rolls around again this coming Sunday this complex world will once again be reduced to its primal and easily understood essence.