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Obama’s amazing insult to Brown
It still passes belief that when the prime minister of Great Britain visited the president of the United States and gave him, as part of the customary exchange of gifts between leaders, Martin Gilbert’s multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill, the president gave the prime minister … a box of DVDs. Either Obama is a transcendent idiot, or, as many observers see it, he deliberately dissed Brown as a way of ending the Special Relationship. It was certainly the biggest slap in the face to a leader of Britain since the Dauphin (the prince) of France, in response to King Henry V’s claim to a right of possession over major parts of France, sent Henry, in a gesture of total contempt, a cask full of tennis balls. As told in Act I, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the stunning insult rouses the warlike spirit of Henry and seals France’s doom:
Enter Ambassadors of France
KING HENRY V
Now are we well prepared to know the pleasure
Of our fair cousin Dauphin; for we hear
Your greeting is from him, not from the king.
First Ambassador
May’t please your majesty to give us leave
Freely to render what we have in charge;
Or shall we sparingly show you far off
The Dauphin’s meaning and our embassy?
KING HENRY V
We are no tyrant, but a Christian king;
Unto whose grace our passion is as subject
As are our wretches fetter’d in our prisons:
Therefore with frank and with uncurbed plainness
Tell us the Dauphin’s mind.
First Ambassador
Thus, then, in few.
Your highness, lately sending into France,
Did claim some certain dukedoms, in the right
Of your great predecessor, King Edward the Third.
In answer of which claim, the prince our master
Says that you savour too much of your youth,
And bids you be advised there’s nought in France
That can be with a nimble galliard won;
You cannot revel into dukedoms there.
He therefore sends you, meeter for your spirit,
This tun of treasure; and, in lieu of this,
Desires you let the dukedoms that you claim
Hear no more of you. This the Dauphin speaks.
KING HENRY V
What treasure, uncle?
EXETER
Tennis-balls, my liege.
KING HENRY V
We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us;
His present and your pains we thank you for:
When we have march’d our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.
Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler
That all the courts of France will be disturb’d
With chases. And we understand him well,
How he comes o’er us with our wilder days,
Not measuring what use we made of them.
We never valued this poor seat of England;
And therefore, living hence, did give ourself
To barbarous licence; as ‘tis ever common
That men are merriest when they are from home.
But tell the Dauphin I will keep my state,
Be like a king and show my sail of greatness
When I do rouse me in my throne of France:
For that I have laid by my majesty
And plodded like a man for working-days,
But I will rise there with so full a glory
That I will dazzle all the eyes of France,
Yea, strike the Dauphin blind to look on us.
And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turn’d his balls to gun-stones; and his soul
Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance
That shall fly with them: for many a thousand widows
Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands;
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;
And some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s scorn.
But this lies all within the will of God,
To whom I do appeal; and in whose name
Tell you the Dauphin I am coming on,
To venge me as I may and to put forth
My rightful hand in a well-hallow’d cause.
So get you hence in peace; and tell the Dauphin
His jest will savour but of shallow wit,
When thousands weep more than did laugh at it.
Convey them with safe conduct. Fare you well.
Exeunt Ambassadors
- end of initial entry -
Philip M. writes from England:
We never valued this poor seat of England;
And therefore, living hence, did give ourself
To barbarous licence; as ‘tis ever common
That men are merriest when they are from home
Aside from the fascinating observation about people being happiest away from home, I wonder what he is getting at here. Is he saying that the rulers of England, being from Norman stock, had never really engaged with the people of England, that they had been remote, foreign rulers and as such treated us in a reckless manner? Is Shakespeare trying to create a myth that this was the turning point when our monarch suddenly reconnected with the English for the first time since the Norman conquest, or is he merely talking about his own misspent youth?
Reading this makes me realise how little I got from Shakespeare when I was younger.
LA replies:
Interesting. It never occurred to me that Henry was speaking of the Norman kings of England being too detached from England. But I don’t think that’s the case. For one thing, the Norman kings had been fully involved, hardworking leaders of England for a long time, not playboys. Think of Edward I and Edward III. For another thing, in the time of Henry V, the early 15th century, the divisions between Normans and Saxons were no longer an issue; by the end of the previous century, the time of Chaucer, the Normans and Saxons had become one people, sharing a single language and culture. I think Henry is speaking only of himself and his own turnabout.
March 17
Joseph L. writes:
Brown is a nullity. But the British nation is the mother of our own. Even in its currently moribund state it is organically connected to the actually existing, non-propositional, historical reality of the American people.
The first order of business for “the first true American” must be to break this connection, symbolically, in public.
LA replies:
Whom do you mean by “the first true American”?
Joseph L. replies:
By “the first true American,” I was referring irreverently to Obama, who was given that title by John Ridley of PBS. Ridley’s delusions are quoted, at arm’s length, at your site:
“Obama is the more perfect union. He is a house united…. [J]ust by virtue of his being, Obama is America, and the first true American to lead our nation.”
LA replies:
Right, how could I have forgotten? I missed the sense of your comment. As the “first true American,” i.e., as the first nonwhite American president, Obama must break the historic and organic connection with England which is central to American identity.
Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:
My take on the Obamas’ (because it includes Michelle as well) insult to the Browns, Mr. and Mrs., is more nuanced and perhaps more harsh.
I think that Obamas deeply-felt dislike of whites (and white culture) as enunciated by his two books, his 20-year membership in a black church with a black pastor who openly showed his dislike (hate?) of whites, his marrying a black woman who is very dark-skinned and whose background includes a university thesis that is essentially antagonistic towards whites, makes it very difficult for him to associate and interact with white culture.
So, when it comes to simple (well, obviously not so simple) things like buying gifts for Western world-leader colleagues, I think his contempt for white culture, and because of this his (and his wife’s) misunderstanding of and lack of involvement in white culture, and his default behavior of turning things into a “black” experience rather than an American or a Western one, curtailed his gift-giving ability.
He may indeed be a “transcendent idiot,” but I think his behavior is a mixture of contempt with a lack of culture, which stems from that contempt. I would think everything that he and his wife do is tinted with “blackness,” which is not culture but grievance. The penholder carved from the timbers of HMS Gannet which Brown gave him, that puts together the personal history of the gift recipient and an over-all shared cultural history, was beautiful. I think the Obamas are incapable of thinking in that manner towards whites, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they stumble over future gift-giving protocols (which will forthwith be corrected by his loyal entourage). But I wonder what he would give, say, the President of Kenya, despite his election fraught with problems.
Philip M. replies to LA:
French, not English, was spoken at court for three hundred years after the Norman invasion of 1066. This would practically take us up to 1387, when Henry V was born.
And the tension between Saxons and Normans never totally went away. When Labour came to power in 1997 the House of Lords still had a suprisingly large number of descendents from old Norman stock.
Also, this is from the Wiki entry on Henry Fifth:
“Starting in 1417, Henry V promoted the use of the English language in government[7], and his reign marks the appearance of Chancery Standard English as well as the adoption of English as the language of record within Government. He was the first king to use English in his personal correspondence since the Norman conquest 350 years before.”
LA replies:
This astonishes me, because I thought that by the late 14th century, English had become the language of government and French was no longer being used.
Dale F. writes:
Regarding Henry’s lines beginning with, “We never valued this poor seat of England,” I believe he is making the point in passing that he is a king of France, but such a phrase is also consistent with the sarcasm and barely checked anger that characterizes his entire speech. Remember that at the beginning, when the French ambassador asks if he may deliver his embassy plainly, Henry avows that he is no tyrant,
but a Christian king;
Unto whose grace our passion is as subject
As are our wretches fetter’d in our prisons
Henry keeps this promise—no harm is done the ambassador, despite the Dauphin’s insult—but Henry’s language is extraordinarily violent and contemptuous, and presages the actual violence of war that France will now endure at Henry’s hands.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 16, 2009 10:48 PM | Send
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