FEELINGS AND BILL CLINTON

"Shhhh . . . what you are about to read is politically incorrest. Tafadhali, repeat only in whispers."

Nothig Worthwhile Can Be Built On A False Foundation.

Feelings about throwaway socks or throwaway anything -- they come, taking over. We get them about cheap imitations when we can have the real thing. It's like hating cell-phones because every little throwaway dreg of society that we see on the street or at a bus-stop or sitting on a bus or getting off a bus has a cell-phone plastered to his or her ear, as if saying, "Look how important I am. Everywhere I go, someone wants to talk to me." Saw two of these throwaway dregs sitting side by side on a bus talking to each other on cell-phones. Makes you wanna spit.

Or it's the feeling we get when some school drop-out behind the cash register at some fast-food joint blurts -- without even looking at you -- "Thanks, have a nice day, come again -- next." You wanna snap: "Stick it, you dummy!"

You're walking along a dirt street in a shanty town of dilapidated huts of old, soiled white stucco walls and corrugated tin or straw roofs in East Afrika. A black child of five or six years of age in an unbuttoned dirty blue shirt, exposing his swollen belly, stands near the dirt street in front of one of the huts. He hs no trousers on and looks unwashed. You give him a smile and a wave, and he smiles and waves.

You get a feeling about him, a filling of pity that his worthless culture has brought him into this poverty. But you also feel joy that in spite of the weakness of his culture, it will give him a foundation in an Afrikan identity. He won't be just a CARBON COPY, a cheap imitation of the English, or Spanish or French or Portuguese as the "blacks" in the Americas. You doubt that he'll speak English, but didn't the English rule in his country for many years? And wasn't English the language of instruction in the schools of his country?

You stop. "Unasema Kiingereza, kijana?" ("Do you speak English, young man?") you ask in Swahili.

Still smiling he shakes his head.

"Jina lako nani?" ("What's your name?").

With a broader smile he almost shouts, "Bill Clinton."