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I listened to a comedy routine by comedian Chris Rock the other night. Comedy of this type is social therapy. If you get beyond the language punctuations, comedians such as Chris present some elements of life as lived with such clarity that you have no option but to laugh or be burned in the searing heat of truths hitting home, no room for political correctness here! Last evening among other things he launched fireballs of race issues on his, I hope, expectant audience. What Chris wished to highlight and challenge was the internalised,consensual, universally accepted belief that human life form is pyramidal and evolutionary and at the top of that evolutionary tree is the Caucasian male and female, and conversely at the base of the structure is the black male and female. This is a concept so internalised that as many blacks of all shades believing it as do whites. As a result their lives are often lived out as a self fulfilling prophecy of failure.

I know that there are many of us, black, white and all shades in between who use our rational minds to point out the flaws in this warped train of thought but the truth is that for the majority, the truth does not matter. Even those who believe that humanity, though diverse, is equally human or inhumane find themselves conforming to the mass mind set. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in their different ways challenged the collective psyche of the American people in the 60's bringing some alignment to the notion of civil rights for all US citizens but like a rogue satellite, the cause of racial elitism is ever on the verge of braking loose and flying out of orbit leaving devastation in the back draft. It influences internal and external political policies. How eager would Mr Bush have been to launch a preemptive strike an any of Europe's capitals, no matter what the perceived grievance; America was dragged kicking and screaming into the second World War despite Hitler's obvious aggression towards neighbouring states.

The case of Ali Ismail Abbas sums up the warped logic of the Iraqi war. In 2003, an active 12 year old boy, living in poor conditions in his homeland, with his family of seven plus, in a matter of minutes found his family entirely wiped out and both his arms torn from the rest of his torso. This all achieved by the flying, resolving, restorative, righteous explosion of an American launched bomb. Did this child's family need to die to ? Are artificial, European constructed prosthesis's superior to the humerus,

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