“He’s the first black man in the White House” wrote Caitlin Moran of Barack Obama in Friday’s Times
Yes, well, we know what she means, but she’s wrong, umpteen times over
There have been many, many black men (& women) in the White House – in the servants' hall, where they belong Ironic font needed here –Ed
Also in Friday’s Times Sarah Vine wrote that “the next generation of young men may well grow up believing that women don’t have any hair on their body at all.”
In other words, they will need footnotes to explain the story of John Ruskin’s (allegedly) disastrous wedding night
As someone who grew up in the deeply Freudian mid-20th century I think this obsession with depilation is merely an expression of repressed paedophilia [irony again - Ed]
To make the connection between these two points, I was intrigued to see that the photographs of the President swatting a fly showed quite clearly that he has hairy wrists!!!
In the days when it seemed obvious, even to some evolutionists, that black people were less evolved, lower down the evolutionary tree, closer to the apes, other scientists countered with “the lack of body hair … the texture of the hair of the head etc are all consistent with a more advanced stage of evolution in the Negro than in the white man”
The quotation comes from Racial Myths by Juan Comas, one of a series The Race Question in Modern Science published by UNESCO (6th impression 1965, when Obama was 4 years old
So, the President’s having hairy wrists must represent a regression, an expression of his inferior white genes [That's enough irony – Ed]
To round off this post, here is a poem by Claude McKay, a Jamaican who emigrated to the US, became part of the Harlem Renaissance, but died in poverty
The White House
Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage & the grace
To bear my anger proudly & unbent.
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
A chafing savage, down the decent street;
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
Oh I must search for wisdom every hour,
Deep in my wrathful bosom sore & raw,
And find in it the superhuman power
To hold me to the letter of the law!
Oh I must keep my heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate
Claude McKay
The poem just leaves those 3 words – THE WHITE HOUSE – with their triple associations, hanging, reverberating almost, in the air, inside your head
Well, the glass door has been shattered now, with courage & grace in spades
