Jed Faidley had been zoning out at the monthly Town of Weston Corners Rotary Club luncheon, thinking about a recent bounce in his 401K, when he was taken. Left behind in a crumple was the navy, polished cotton suit that his dear wife had only the day before helped him pick out. His professionally pressed, white shirt lay flat inside the jacket, the red tie flopped over like a mangled corpse at an accident scene. Diamond cufflinks rolled from the sleeves to the carpet like fallen teeth.
Jed did not find himself naked in The Rapture, however. He was plucked from his earthly life and deposited into darkest Africa, clad in the last Boy Scout uniform he had worn in his youth. His ankles were thick bones covered in mottled skin, pale and white below the too-short pants. His buttery gut spilled over the moss green belt, the woven fabric unforgiving against his fat. The collar pressed his soft jowls outward, but a habit from youth remained, and he did not unbutton it.
At first, believing this was a dream, he swaggered around in the firelight with a hand in one strained, gaping pocket, whistling. He wiggled his sausage-encased butt at the fire, surveyed the scene to see whether a treasure of jewels might be in this dream, waited for some exotic beauties to stride purposefully out of the darkness.
Slowly, he became aware of eyes staring at him from beyond the light. Bared teeth, salivation, in every direction. Reality -- foreign smells, sights, sounds -- dawned into the core of his being. He knew he wasn't dreaming when urine seeped down the length of his short pants and cooled so uncomfortably that he would hardly be able to run. He began to jump and yelp, scamper like a terrified little girl from a snake. But everywhere, he met a wall of black-skinned nakedness.
Yet it came to pass, the assault was only on his dignity. For those had not been teeth bared in hunger at him. What he thought was drool, were tears -- great watery streams of gut-wracking amusement.
The Natives, and God, were laughing.
* * *
"I have said many times, publicly, that I do think [Obama] has a different worldview, and I think it's in part molded out of a very different experience ... Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings, and you know, our communities were filled with rotary clubs, not madrassas."
* For anyone who may not know, Barack Obama was not born in Kenya.
