Having spent a couple of years working at the tragically self-scuttled “prospective search” company PubSub, where we were among the first to gather comprehensive real-time statistics about blogs, I occasionally poke around a bit myself to see who is linking to whom — and in particular, to me. In a visit to Technorati a few minutes ago, I saw that waka waka waka had been linked to, back on December 2nd, by a writer named “Sini”, at a blog called Jusiper. Here is the text of the post, in its entirety:
I suppose this is the adult version of fratboys who party to “Trenchtown Rock”: a Republican, warloving Fela fan.
Presumably the best time to do a line is right after they kill Fela’s mama.
I don’t know anything about “fratboys” who particularly enjoy Jamaican music; presumably there are some, as appreciation of good music transcends social and political allegiances. I do feel rather misunderstood, however.
I have no idea how the author divined that I am a Republican. As it happens I am not, and I have often mounted the waka waka waka pulpit to castigate the current chief executive in the severest terms for his swagger, his smugness, his ostentatious piety, his incurious and binary mind, and for the catastrophic bungling and ineptitude that have been the hallmark of his stewardship of our nation’s affairs. Perhaps Sini stumbled across an unfavorable reference in these pages to John Kerry, the lugubrious, thatch-crowned Ent whom the splintered and rudderless Democrats wheeled out as their champion in the most recent Presidential spectacle; my overt contempt for that vain, bloviating prig might have suggested, I suppose, to the casual and biased reader that I keep my shoes under the GOP bed, but that is certainly not the case. Nor, for that matter, have I ever belonged to a fraternity.
To be called “warloving” would smart a bit, were the source of the blow rooted more firmly in reality. To acknowledge sorrowfully that human society still imposes upon itself, in its primitive state of ethical and cultural development, conditions in which war becomes the lesser evil, is not to love war, any more than one might love, at a much more trivial scale, root-canal surgery, or an emergency trachaeotomy.
Finally, I see no reason, none at all, to suggest that I would have celebrated, by doing “a line” or otherwise, the murder of Fela Kuti’s mother. That is simply a gratuitous insult, and I would quite graciously accept an apology, though I do not expect one to be forthcoming. Fela’s mother was cold-bloodedly murdered — flung from a window — by the brutal henchmen of Nigerian dictator Olusegun Obasanjo, who is exactly the sort of tyrannical despot that I have used this space again and again to rail against: rather the same sort as Saddam Hussein, who used to enjoy viewing video footage of his political opponents being lowered, feet-first, into industrial plastic-shredding machines.