The Joker

This week saw the second inauguration of President Barack Obama of the USA.
Mr. Obama is much loved by Progressives everywhere, and is a big fan of Big Government, aka the Welfare Warfare State.
He is the first US President to be elected on account of the colour of his skin. Modern Progressives, like the Progressives back in the first half of the twentieth century are racialist.
Where as most of us see people, Progressives see categories.
Like the Black Prince, who was so fond of hunting in these parts, there is clearly dark skinned ancestry in my family too, yet in your twenty first century I am classified as ‘White British’ though I’ve never called myself such. I am an English peasant. England is the land where I have lived. English is the culture to which I belong.
As far as the Progressives are concerned Barack Obama is a Black American.
But he is not an African American.
His mother was of European ancestry and his father was from East Africa.
The African American people are an agricultural people, of  West African origin, many of whom emigrated to the industrial north of their country in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their experience is similar to that of Sicilians who emigrated to Milan and Turin or to that of Andalusians who emigrated to Barcelona and Bilbao, or the Irish who left for Glasgow and Birmingham.
President Obama is no more an African American than I am an Italian or Spanish peasant.
President Obama was born in Hawaii, and lived in Indonesia of all places, far far away from New Orleans or Detroit.
If anything, he is a Nobody from Nowhere, a typical member of the rootless bureaucratic class.
But with his tanned skin and daring names (Hussein, like Saddam, and Obama, a bit like the evil Osama), with his caring egalitarian rhetoric the President is a Progressive dream.
He is homogenous. President Obama is a Progressive, but without the guilty pale complexion.