Clinton, while being crushed by a mob of 500,000 in Ghana on Monday I was standing on a balcony in the hills of Berkeley last month, the San Francisco skyline sparkling and deceptively handsome from across the bay. My old friend Casey Kelso was visiting from London and we were drinking vodka-tonics, talking about his years in Africa. When we threw rocks, the baboons threw rocks. Casey is a lifelong liberal, a former Peace Corps volunteer and Pacifica Radio reporter. That kept the baboons away from the fields, for a while.
Baboons are clever beasts, and they know when the game turns ugly.
Stone-throwing contests are one thing, but when you're a baboon and see your buddy nailed dead to a cross in a cornfield, you have a bit more respect for the goofy white guys. And if you're a liberal white guy who thinks sanitation and motorized water wells and a few school books will turn sub-Saharan Africa into a pleasant jungle version of Berkeley, a residency in Ghana or the Congo or Nigeria will break you. In America, we are not so comfortable with race. Probably never will be. It's hard enough getting along with the idiots of your own race, let alone all the other 500 nationalities of the United States.