Jim Hopkins: What you can't change you can reinvent

You're a fomo, Hone; a foul mouth.

Not a white fomo or a black fomo, though you say you are both. But you're just a fomo, Ho. A bog standard, dime a dozen, no colour, no class, swaggering shock jock fomo.

See, Hone. There's all sorts of slurs you can caste without dishing out the DNA. You don't need to play the race turd. Bull**** doesn't have to be white - and seldom is.

So, fresh from your entry into Paris, 69 years after another chap for whom race was a central preoccupation, you could have asked Buddy Mikaere if he really believed all that Marie Antoinette bull****?

You didn't need to attack an entire race and gender, Hone. Especially since doing so implicated part of yourself as well. One dead French queen would have sufficed. She's the very epitome of tyranny, a flippant flibbertigibbet renowned for her "let them eat kai-ke" attitudes.

Then again, presumably, you'd had a bit of kai-ke yourself, Hone. In Brussels, along with the sprouts and the champers at that candlelit supper where you got everything sorted so you could skive off next day.

And there's the nub of the matter, sir. You played hooky, Hone. When the European Parliament's International Co-Prosperity Ethnic Affairs Committee held its all-important meeting, the co-chair wasn't there. The fomo went Awol. Sloped off to gay Paree for a bit of "ooo, la, la" and a quick squiz at the Mona Lisa.

How those flamin' Frenchies can lie straight in their beds with a piece of ripped-off Italian art hanging in their Louvre is something no student of historic injustice can satisfactorily explain.

Then again, "Hell is other people" as Jean Paul Sartre would have quipped had you bumped into him on the Left Brain of the Seine. And "Apre moi le deluge" too, though heaven knows who said that.

But it's been a deluge since you came home, Hone. And people have been hell as well, piling great, steaming heaps of "puritanical bull****" upon you.

It's not fair, Hone. "Il est non dans," as your Parisian chums would say - 'It's not on.'

Because you are above criticism, sir. You're a victim. Colonialism has ruined you. (And made you, too, if what you say about your forebears is correct, but let's not dilute your rage with anything so trivial as biology.) Suffice to say, colonialism (to give it its indigenous name) has ruined you and people don't understand. No wonder you're a fomo.

But chin up, sir. Some of us understand. We feel your pain. Merely contemplating your recent ordeal makes us shudder. Surfing in Hawaii, meetings in Brussels, lunch on the Champs Elysees - truly, there is no depth to which the white man will not sink in his hunger to oppress.

Kia ora, Hone. Thank you for sharing your victimhood and your anger. It's sad people don't realise your excursion was both a cry for help and a howl of rage.

Because, for you, the best way to show us redneck bigots how angry you really are about those all white mofos "raping our lands and ripping us off for centuries" was to have a weekend in Paris.

Way to go, dude! That'll teach da man! You're saying, loud and clear, frank and fomo so no mofo can miss the point, "You stole my land. I'm going to an art gallery." Whoooa! That's not so much an eye for an eye as an Eiffel for an Eiffel. Bad history = a good holiday; an equation Voltaire would surely endorse.

"Apre moi le detour". Fair enough, Hone. Given the pain we've caused you, it's the least we could do. Except we must go further. Holiday snapshots fade, Hone. A more permanent remedy is required.

Now, based on your comments to Mr Mikaere, the nub of your outrage is retrospective. Yours is an historic grievance. You're saying, in essence, "Somebody I didn't know did something awful to somebody else I didn't know a long time ago when I wasn't there. And that makes me angry."

Understandably so, Hone. Some of us would very much like to give those damned Vikings who torched the library at Lindisfarne a flea in their ear as well.

Trouble is, we can't. They're dead. All history is dead, Hone. It's over. The awful thing about history is that you can't change it. But, the wonderful thing about history is you can invent it. And reinvent it. And keep on inventing it. There isn't one history, Hone, there's a thousand.

Clearly, the history you've created is making you a very unhappy Hone. It could even be causing constipation. So make another history, sir. Your ancestors played for both teams, so to speak.

You're Polypean, Euronesian, whichever you prefer. And, like many others in Outer Roa, proof our predecessors spent as much time in the bedroom as on the battlefield.

So your body is a template, Hone - a template for the nation. To all those closet racists who say, "Some of my friends are Maori," you can reply, "And some of my best genes are pakeha." Bridges can be built, Hone. Bull**** can be harmony's compost. You can invent an entirely new history, based on shagging, not shooting.

And we'd all be so grateful, we'd shout you another trip to Paris! Provided you pay your own way back.