Last year, British writer Doris Lessing, displaying some of that brilliance for which she won the Nobel Prize, declared that Americans are “very naïve people,” and Barack Obama “would probably not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would kill him.”

Well, a terrible story in the news today just about gives Lessing’s charge a whiff of credibility. Dube Egwuatu, a 36-year-old black man wearing an Obama t-shirt was buying a cell phone when a white man approached him shouting, “I f***ing hate n*****s.” The antagonist followed the Obama supporter back to his car and shot him three times with a ball-bearing pistol. Luckily, Egwuatu survived. The gunman is still at large.

But this story does not fit so neatly into Lessing’s view of race and violence in America. You see, Dube Egwuatu was shot in Lessing’s own London, England-home of the enlightened and civil Obama fans who scratch their heads at America’s preoccupation with war and firearms. Of course, it only takes one sociopath to commit one vile act, and locale doesn’t have much influence on the distribution of lunacy. But that’s kind of the point. There are sick and hateful people everywhere on the planet. However, in terms of widespread justice and equality, tolerance and pluralism, the world has never seen the likes of modern-day America. As the rest of the world tries to figure out how to absorb the demographic reality of globalization, the U.S., in the centuries-old habit of synthesizing all the cultures of the globe, celebrates the nomination of a European-African American for President. The Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, recently explained why few Americans writers win the Nobel Prize:

Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world, not the United States. The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.

I guess we will just have to stand around and marvel at the boundless genius of prognosticators like Doris Lessing.