Friedrich --

John Derbyshire is dryly amusing on Amiri Baraka in today's National Review Online, achieving his effects by pretending to take Baraka's poem seriously as poetry, here.

Sample passage:

Mere historical truth is of course beneath the notice of a poetic genius like Amiri Baraka. If you actually try answering some of his questions, in fact, you get into some very confusing terrain. "Who killed the most Africans?" Other Africans, without any doubt. Tribal warfare has been endemic in Africa since remote antiquity, except for the few brief decades when European colonizers suppressed it. "Who bought the slaves, who sold them?" Same answer, mostly. Every single pre-colonial African society was slave-owning, and some post-colonial ones have resumed the tradition. "Who killed Malcolm?" Some black radicals he'd fallen out with.

Best,

Michael