The Cape Crusader
So here I am in beautiful Cape Town, the legislative capital of South Africa, on the very day that Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that The United States was expelling the ambassador from this country. He is now officially a persona non grata. The man, Ebrahim Rasool, had just committed a grievous sin. Rubio said he was “a race-baiting politician” who hated the United States and President Trump. As a panelist at a symposium, Rasool had, in fact, called Trump a white supremacist who was seeking to spread white supremacy globally.
The nerve of that guy!
Reportedly, the president received the insulting news while flogging his Haitian manservant.
Look, I agree that diplomats should generally strive to be diplomatic. But there is also value, even among diplomats, in speaking the truth. Donald Trump is the man who just a few days ago invited White South African farmers — ONLY White South African farmers — to come to the United States, where he promised they’d be fast tracked for citizenship. He was in deepest sympathy and emotional solidarity with them because the government had recently passed a real-estate law to counteract the lingering effects of 50 years of apartheid segregation, a revolting system from which his bro-in-arms Elon Musk benefitted enormously.
I have heard that Donald Trump delivered this noble offer to White South Africans shortly after trading his Nigerian-born butler for a Tesla Cybertruck. I could be wrong.
Anyway, what the hell does this Rasool guy know about white supremacy? All he’s got going for him on that score is that when he was nine years old, and considered “Coloured” because he is of many mixed races, the White-led government of South Africa forcefully evicted his family from their home in a pleasant suburban area that had suddenly become restricted, and gave it to a proper White family. The Rasools had to move to a new neighborhood the government designated. Here’s what it looks like:
At this point I must digress with an important ontological anecdote. I would like to remind you that this is a classy Substack newsletter.
Eliza, my five year old granddaughter who I am visiting, just now asked me: “Does everybody blink”?
“Yes," I said, “everybody.”
She was silent for a moment. Turning something over in her head.
“Does everybody blink at the same time?”
Whoa. This raised a couple of profound questions!
What if everyone on Earth DID blink at the same time? It would mean that once every four seconds or so, THE ENTIRE WORLD goes momentarily blind simultaneously? Couldn’t some evildoer figure out how to harness this for dastardly purposes of his own?
And what would that even mean? Could it mean that there is a fifth fundamental force of nature, after gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces? Something with the power to coordinate a twitch globally? Or might it be metaphysical, and if it was, might it finally scientifically suggest the existence of … God?
I told Eliza I’d get back to her on that.
—
Cape Town is gorgeous. It is also, in some ways, really remote. After we arrived at the airport, we went to a kiosk that sells sim cards. I was making small talk with the clerk, a Black man, and said something somewhat mildly disparaging about Donald Trump. It was deliberate. I felt that as a tourist I needed to explain that all Americans are not like that turd.
The clerk said:
“What?”
I said a lot of people really don’t like or trust the guy.
He blinked twice. I did not. Clearly, Eliza’s theory was wrong.
He seemed to be trying to gauge whether I was putting him on.
“I did not know that” he said, pleasantly. “From social media, it seems like everyone in America likes Trump.”
Ah.
He didn’t tell me what he thought of Trump. He didn’t seem to want to. He is in the hospitality business.
—
On our second night in Cape Town we dined at Oranjezicht, a gigantic artisanal food market filled cheek to jowl with shoppers, a thousand people, maybe more, milling around. The crowd were tourists, mostly, from an assortment of countries, but not exactly what you would call “multicultural.” They seemed to be White and European, almost exclusively, in this majority black, brown and African city. All young and beautiful, except for me. Beaucoup languages. The food was succulent and inventive. I had a whole spiny lobster — served on a stick for some reason, like a lollipop. It was fun.
The whole place was fun. It had a sophisticated self-awareness, a sense of joy and subversion. One sign advertised “Inauthentic Street Food.”
We sat at long tables and ate convivially with others. At one point, a family we had gotten to know left to search for food and two young beautiful women asked if the seats were available, and we couldn’t really say no — seats were scarce and had to be hunted down —so they sat. They were willowy, too, so there was still room. Then two more. Also slender. Also blonde.
“Herrenvolk,” Rachel whispered to me. Rachel is German-American; she shares her surname with one of Hitler’s generals. She meant no offense. She was just making an observation.
Then two more. By now the table had been taken over, before we could figure out how to save it for the others.
“Lebensraum,” Rachel whispered to me.
It was true. There was a Teutonic flavor to the food court, at least where we were. Eventually we asked the ladies, and, yes, they were German. They spoke perfect English. They were very pleasant and cheerful. Everything was great.
Rachel nodded toward the next table. A bunch of handsome young, fit blond men. One of them had generous lips and a bit of a hulking demeanor. He looked impassive and just a little bit … scary.
It all was a just little bit scary.
—
When we were done with dinner, it was dusk, and we left to walk back to our car. The streets had darkened. The people in them had darkened, many of them children, alone.
They understood the polyglot crowd, the many languages, so they communicated in a universal one. They sat in the street, their palms together, as in prayer, and looked up at you, imploringly. They were good at it.
Many of the adults held signs. Some were bizarre. One, held by a large man, read: “I will kill Vladimir Putin and torture Julius Malema for 50 Rand.” Julius Malema is a South African communist politician. 50 Rand is worth about three American dollars.
One man limped horribly as he kept crossing himself — was his disability real or strategic? A woman held an infant to her chest and kept chanting “Hungry. Please help us.”
Back in the car, we stayed silent for a while.
“It’s not that different from D.C.,” Rachel said.
There’s something else here beneath the surface, I thought. I could be wrong. But it seemed to me there is greater fear and greater anger.
I found myself thinking about Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.
—
Okay, that’s it. Sorry.
Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll.
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Imagine, hypothetically — as unlikely as you think this would be — that after four years of a Donald Trump presidency, the man has stayed essentially the same: A braggart, a boor, a bully, a bigot and a bastard. But for whatever reason, the economy is healthy, international relations are relatively tranquil, domestic crime and social unrest is down — that in the main, none of the dire predictions have come true.
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And lastly, QUESTIONS and OBSERVATIONS:
I had to vote no because anything good that happens to come out at the end is likely to be in spite of, and outside of his actual control of, everything he did in his first term and is doing now.
No, because Trump has already corroded our society so badly that any turnaround could not possibly happen in four years. And is enabling the next generation (Vance, Hegseth, et al.) to be so only with deep ideological underpinnings (rather than just plain narcissism).