ROY EDROSO

At NRO (April 24), we find an author complaining that his hip-hop novel is being kept down by the Man. The piquant angle here is that the Man is black, and the author is white.

The novel is a satire, its author, professor Mark Goldblatt (Fashion Institute of Technology), helpfully explains, like Candide and All in the Family. Satire, the professor says, has a "Darwinian function" of deflating hypocrisy, and "it was the Darwinian function of satire that I had in mind when I wrote" Africa Speaks.

Goldblatt offers samples from the book. Here is one:

A salaam aleichem, in the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate, the one true God. Yo, yo, yo, I'd like to send a shout out to my people, to my kings and queens. You know what I'm saying? My kings and queens. Yo, and a special shout out to my soldiers, my niggas in arms, the One-Forty-Ninth Street Crew - vagina findas, no doubt. Crazy mad dawgs! I got nothing but love for you...

Laughing yet? Though the writing perhaps shows a "remarkable ear for idiom" (Publisher's Weekly), it does not demonstrate the signal attribute of satire that preserves Candide and All in the Family--or, for that matter, the rich black characters of John Kennedy Toole or Evelyn Waugh. That is, they were funny.

Perhaps Goldblatt was in too foul a mood to run his funny parts. He is outraged that his book is not readily available. Naturally he suspects foul play. "No new-and-noteworthy mentions," he laments. "No newspaper or magazine reviews. No bookstore shelf space. As far as I can tell, I'm being whiteballed."

At last--a joke!

And this book should be read, says Goldblatt--not because he is Goldblatt and the world must pay attention, but because black folk need to be straightened out, Darwinially. "If not for the French, who've retired all such trophies," says he, "African Americans would currently rank as the most hypocritical, most paranoid, most pretentious group of people on the planet."

Goldblatt asks his readers to "stamp their feet" for Africa Speaks at local bookstores. NRO readers are a good start, but may I suggest an alternate marketing strategy? The internet has been a boon to such as he. He might try distribution through that medium. Amazon, despite the general "whiteballing," carries the book, but one should hunt, as it were, where the ducks are. He might try these guys, or these. Such folks would be very receptive to the idea that blacks are degenerate, and Lord knows they're used to stamping their feet.

They might even think it's funny.