The Best Exercise

Rev'd Up, By Lynne Duke, The Washington Post, 9 October 2006

Archbishop Desmond Tutu looks back, definitely not in anger.

New York - The cleric is laughing. He laughs a lot. He can't help it. Desmond Tutu is tickled by his life, his faith, his God, so the giggles just bubble out, cresting sometimes in a hilariously showy cackle. The former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, the David to the old Goliath that was apartheid, Tutu can be seized with this joy at just about any time.

He might be talking about weighty issues like the moral imperative, our inherent sense of right and wrong, and how "everyone has an instinct for freedom because God has imbued each one of us with a gift of freedom," and here comes that infectious giggle.

Or he's cracking up as he tells of the "uncanniness" of being at Madame Tussauds' some years ago and wondering, as he watched a workman carrying the waxen Tutu, "What am I doing under his armpit?" Or he's expounding on the limits of racial reconciliation in his home land, South Africa, and how some whites reacted to him as would an "arrogant, racist, superior being who says, 'What gives you the right to be such a cheeky native?' " And then he's cackling full out, rocking side to side in his chair.
www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100906D.shtml