"White Superiority" or What?

Above is a quite astonishing picture of the way that J. Brewer, the governor of Arizona, chose to greet B. Obama, the President of all these United States, moments after he had stepped out of Air Force One on a visit the other day to her state. A true midget when compared to him in every respect, she is nevertheless angrily shaking her finger in his face. Obviously she is grabbing this rare opportunity to give him a piece of her mind in person.

And just as obviously she seems to be blissfully unaware that in large parts of the American culture, such a gesture incites an almost irresistible desire to suddenly grab that deeply insulting finger and jerk it out of its socket.

Brewer said that they were discussing his non-appreciation of her statement in a book she had just published, where she said that he had been condescending toward her during a half-hour that he gave her of his valuable time during an earlier visit of hers to the White House. But I think she had other motives for her ire and her finger-shaking, including the very obvious fact that he had not at all come to Arizona to see her.

This would not occur to the majority of Americans, but I am one of those who are absolutely certain that she would never have resorted to berating Mr. Obama in that or any other manner if he had not had the kind of skin color and hair that is so ingrained in her as being completely indicative of his native inferiority to her, no matter what his station in life.

Once upon a time the famous Scottish biographer, James Boswell, told his hero, Samuel Johnson, the famous English intellectual of the 18th century, that, contrary to Johnson's prejudices, Scotland has many delightful and scenic aspects, to which Johnson replied something on the order of: "Sir, I don't doubt that Scotland has many delightful aspects, of which the greatest is the high road back to England."

Similarly Arizona has many noble features, including the Hopis, the Navajos, and the Grand Canyon. But no one in their right mind would go to that state to see Ms. Brewer, who ranks high in an unusually large slew of governors of the worst kind, all of them not coincidentally Republicans, along with another Arizonan and undeniably the country's worst sheriff, a guy named Arpaio.

Yet I think that in one respect Obama was at fault here as well. In his place I would never have stood anywhere near that close to such a person, or actually anybody, even if she did appear to be a woman. And I don't care how noisy it may have been there at the airfield. -- he never needed to hear anything she had to say in any case.