Parallel universes

A week ago I planned to write about one of the most intriguing guests I met during my time at the DDS lodges. On the day there would be an attack at the property where I live in Maun, out in Savute Paul Berg was telling me jokes --he spent two years as a stand-up comic -- and piquing my interest in his profession as a forensics psychologist. The trials for the Unabomber, the Oklahoma City defendants, Rodney King after the riots in Los Angeles: he told me was involved in those cases.

Do you remember the line uttered by Rodney King in 1992, Paul asked: "Can we all get along?"

I told him I did, absolutely; I regarded it as a defining line of the '90s. It was the statement that brought race relations into stark relief in the aftermath of the LA police officers' beating a suspect senseless. A passerby captured the brutality on videotape which aired on national television and enraged a city.

"I wrote that," he said of King's famous plea.

It strikes me as cruel irony that I was focused on thinking about the Rodney King trial and in particular his iconic statement on the day intruders beat and stabbed my landlords. I wish someone in this village would speak such a line, ghost-written or not, and mean it.