The African Bush

Is there a more inappropriate individual walking the earth today to ‘deliver a message’ to Kenyan leaders about overcoming the tribalism and violence that’s gripped their country than W? The guy who’s made a career out of appealing to the worst biped habits of caring only about one’s own group and telling all the rest to piss off up a rope?

If our ‘group’ today is a national rather than an ethnic entity, it’s no thanks to W’s party, which has spent 40 years building its power on NASCAR-dad chauvinism and coded appeals to insular whites resistant to equality. When the civil rights movement broke the color bar, the Republicans quickly moved into the vacuum, starting with Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ and culminating in the notorious launch of Saint Ronald’s presidential bid from Philadelphia, Mississippi, a few miles from the site of a Klan assassination.

Bush, the absurd Condi Rice and all the rest of them assure us constantly that the only thing that matters on God’s green earth is our security, and if that means thousands die elsewhere, too bad. We pick up people and ship them to Guantánamo, guilty and innocent alike, throw them around and let them rot, but that’s okay because ‘The American People’ need to be safe at all costs.

These guys are chastizing African chiefs about tribal demagoguery?

Since we’re all different colors here, it’s easy to miss how racist the Bushite discourse is. If Bush were a Kenyan politician, he’d be the worst partisan of Luo or Kikuyu supremacy, a ‘big man’ whipping up the village crowds in the local language and appealing to their sense of group victimhood, real or imagined. When the resulting violence hurt his people, he’d redouble the rhetoric, then use the chaos to cut deals and assure his slice of the patronage.

Seeing the Serbians spewing racist hatred in reaction to Kosovo’s upcoming independence is yet another reminder that the default posture of our species is blind, in-group fury, especially under stressful conditions. We need the supra-ethnic visions of a Gandhi or a King to bring us back to our senses; without that, so-called civilization breaks down in a jiffy.