I’m the Rainbow Man.

There’s Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, but Chicago is looking more like a rerun of an old Amos n’ Andy show. Yeah, lotsa Kingfish there: King Louis Farrakhan, Senator Barack Obama, Rev. Jackson and the empress of daytime television, Oprah Winfrey – Sapphire with a Cleopatra, pyramid polish.

Sounds racist, doesn’t it? Like calling a black guy Rastus.

Racial stereotypes. Well, both Chicago and New York City are the Empire of the Color Blind. I just hope they’re not Turban Blind too!

One of America’s greatest expatriate Frenchmen, around the time of the "shot heard round the world" – Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), told George Washington point blank: "End slavery!" And if America had really meant what her founding fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence, I suppose our First President would have.

Washington, however, at least according to his biographer Joseph Ellis, had enough on his hands to turn down the offer Americans made, that he be an Emperor, and then, after fulfilling eight years in a job he never wanted in the first place, to make sure he was well remembered by history.

Another gentleman arrived on the scene almost 100 years later, one not mentioned enough in the history books. His name was Cassius Marcellus Clay. A southern slave-owner, he freed his Africans, became a fervent, almost fanatical Abolitionist, helped Abraham Lincoln form a Republican Party policy and was made the U.S. Ambassador to Russia during the Civil War.

According to Kindred, Clay wooed many a Russian lady, some of them married. The self-styled Russian Bear husbands, one of them at any rate, challenged Ambassador Clay to a duel. This happened in the middle of a meal, and once the obligatory glove had been slapped across his face, Clay, rather like his later namesake, stood and put his Grizzly Bear fist through the face of the offended Russian, sending him backwards and over a dinner table. Ambassador Clay then calmly returned to finish his dinner.

Cassius Clay, Jr. might have carried that Grizzly Bear tradition into the ring, but once he’d heard Farrakhan sing "a white man’s heaven is a black man’s hell," he was no longer even part white. He was all black and looking for an avenging, black father figure. He found it in Elijah Muhammad, the Messenger of the House of Islam. Admittedly Clay’s real father was hardly modelled after Jim Anderson, Sr. in Father Knows Best but, judging from the remarks he’s made throughout his son’s career, he was, like most fathers, biased but not out of his mind over his son’s success. Clay, Sr. knew all too well the price his son would have to pay for replacing his own true father’s authority with that of a racist Islamic Attila the Hun.

Once Islamicized, Ali pumped up his rhetoric fiercely and before you knew it, he was facing a true North American Grizzly Bear: Joe Frazier. In their first fight, Clay announced: "I am God! You know that, you bum! You are facing God Himself!"

Let’s first see how the fight ends. Well, Ali, hardly the butterfly/bee he claimed to be, had turned by then into a virtual Dancing Cobra, hovering like a python and striking like a Florida water moccasin. He used his forked tongue on Malcolm X, one moment calling the doomed man his friend and then saying he deserved to die for what he said – the venom in his words coupled with fists he’d turned into fangs, which "cut, cut, cut" – those being Ali’s own words of strategy with the Bear. Indeed, with a hand-speed heretofore never before recorded, those fists struck almost at the same time they sprang from their owner’s curled arm. The Grizzly Bear’s face was a mass of wounds by the time of the final rounds. Well, with the heart of a lion, Frazier stalked Clay, hunted for his opening and found it. With a Grizzly Hook, he put the Flying Reptile down! Down, down, down you go, snake!

Those last words are my own. I don’t have Frazier’s innate dignity. He is a man more wounded than wounding. Frazier clenched his fists in victory and left for the hospital. His wounds from the viper were that serious.

Then follows Ali’s struggle with the United States government over his refusal to serve in Vietnam. It’s a long, dismaying revelation of the Supreme Court’s favorite hiding place: technicalities.

For over 30 years, the Supreme Court has "knocked out" appeals against the Roe v. Wade Decision on technicalities. Louisiana just announced its intention to join South Dakota in a ban on abortion. So now, two states are challenging the Supreme Court’s reptilian skill at hiding under the rocks of technicalities.

Kindred says that Ali "took his reason." It’s a startling statement and written in passing. A Kamikaze faith like Ali’s can leave the reasonable person breathless. Yes, we are way beyond good and evil, into the "heart of darkness," and though thrilling at times, there’s a price to be paid. What did Ali’s life mean? Was it a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing? Is nihilism the only refuge for geniuses?

Some Post-Modern critics find moral ambivalence in everything! Whether Kindred finds the fiendish death of Malcolm X and the vitriolic venom of Ali’s response to it morally ambivalent, I’ve yet to discover, as I haven’t finished the book yet. Don’t worry, I’ll read its culminating description of Ali’s living the rest of his life under virtual Islamic house arrest. I’ll bet two years’ entertaining the troops in Vietnam look more inviting than the four decades of solitary consignment to a has-been status under the not-so-loving watch of Islamic guards.

It’s amazing to ponder the resolution Malcolm X gave his heartbreaking admiration for Muhammad Ali. He got it right, I suppose. In words more eloquent than my own, he knew the kid Cassius was a big, spoiled brat… but lovable. There’s nothing much beyond his pity. It takes great strength to forgive like that. My Lord did and no, I couldn’t. I’d call the fucker a piece of snake-shit dancing on the head of an Egyptian pyramid that’s about to be shoved up his ass.

God bless Joe Frazier.

Oh, myself as Rainbow Man? Malcolm X clearly saw the Rainbow of humanity when he toured Africa. He began to see his fellow human beings as what they really are: a Rainbow. In places like New York City, the Rainbow is thrown together more fiercely than anywhere else on earth.

We’ve had fierce growing pains in America: six revolutions which never destroyed us. We won the Revolutionary War, came out the good guys in the Civil War and in two World Wars, began the Industrial Revolution to see its final fruition in that greatest gift to individual freedom, the Computer Revolution. We are still enduring the Sexual Revolution, its fullest explosion on the Internet – what those Americans won’t do for a better orgasm in their pursuit of happiness – and we’re still standing, barely. Our fifth revolution, that Civil Rights invasion which lasted almost half a century and gave us a Woman’s Right to abort her child. We’re sucking wind now, I tell you.

Meanwhile the French and their idea of liberty, equality and fraternity gave the world a boys club of six Napoleonic monsters – Robespierre, Bonaparte, Napoleon III, Stalin, Hitler and Mao. The French Revolutionary Ethic took them through five aborted Republics, a disgraceful show in two World Wars, and a peculiar worship of Maoism that persists to this day. Those cursed French people gave the world the guillotine, raison d’état (that licence for euthanasia) and the RU486 abortion pill. Yo, let’s give it up for the Enlightenment!

The only post-Revolutionary genius they have shown – following their wine, cuisine and unbeatable gift for "farting higher than their ass" – is their unforgivable ingratitude and worship of nihilism.

Gratitude is for dogs, Josef Stalin once said. The unprincipled French would most certainly agree. They eat frog legs and forget that in the Book of Revelations it is indeed frogs that jump out of hiding from inside the bellies of the Dragon and his two Beasts.

If I could exclude the post-Revolutionary French from the Caucasian category of the Human Rainbow, I would. Once this Armageddon is over with and the Post-Modern Pinheads gathered in Paris for the Maoists to eat, I think the Human Rainbow will be fine for about one thousand years. At least that’s what is predicted in the Bible.