not to be found in a popular american newspaper?

Excerpts from "Yesterday, today, and tomorrow," By Binyavanga Wainaina, in the January 16 Mail and Guardian (the "skill" referred to in the second-to-last paragraph is things like musical-instrument playing):

“You lie down, skin peeled and naked, according to the policy of your government, and its international advisors, and expose yourself to global overheating. Legs spread and your nutrients draining, you are asked, quite politely, to wait for the thrust of foreign investment and the caress of money markets. Even on the day your city burns, and drought makes you beg for food, Paris Hilton manages to make her way to the forefront of your consciousness; suntanned, legs wide, teeth gleaming like the Nobel prize for globally successful people.

A dollar for your day lands in your lap, and you think: I am cold today. Let me go inside this shop and buy one giant fake silver US dollar medallion. International Monetary Physics has told you that the reflection from this light blinging around your chest as you sit naked, will provide some heat.

Life is banned, the community hall closed. You are asked to shut down all brain activity that does not have to do with the market that is coming in 2030, when the road arrives.

Primary school is a giant slot machine. You thrust you children inside, like coins, 10-million of them, and there is room in high school for 10,000. Ten of them will see the Promised Land by becoming members of Parliament, the highest earning people in your country. I was once like you, said one last year. Just stay there in the sun.

To belong to a civilization is to take all your nation’s bodies and ready them for the open market. The open market comes in at a profit of 3% a year, rises to 6%. Then every 10 years or so, five years of progress is wiped out. This is the only way to live. While all of this is happening, you may occasionally need to eat our Swedish-designed supernutritious soyadriedfishpowdered milk gruel, out of a tube, while you wait for the annual 3% to trickle down. Your cut is disbursed by your elected officials, every five years during election time, when a panga is given to you, a fist of shillings and you are told, by the same guy who told you to life down naked, that you are oppressed, and you need to act. Ha. This you know.

You live in Kenya, or South Africa—the lands of the future tense…

Life is not about waiting to produce things to consume, and life is not lived in the future tense; and those who lie about this are waiting for a terrible Armageddon. You have heard that in some places this sort of skill, built upon from the local pasts of people, from skills from other places, is taught in schools and community centres. Because it is a human thing to do. Those places have refused to give up their present tense, for a future civilization. If both are not possible, it is not worth our time, they say. They are not just waiting to become international consumers.

Those countries do this, because to care for the present tense has been said to be a good thing for sanity, for dignity. It has been said, too, that this sort of thing separates animals from human beings.”