The Master, recalled

Obama’s trip to Africa put me in mind of a passage from one of Wodehouse’s novels. I had to hunt a little bit to find it, but here it is, from Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (and, no, I’m not suggesting that I am having the same thoughts about Obama; it’s simply that the upcoming junket triggered a recollection of what I have always found to be a particularly funny paragraph).

Bertie Wooster, not surprisingly, is hiding behind a sofa, attempting to avoid running into famed explorer Major Brabizon-Plank (for reasons that need not detain us). While he crouches, he reflects not only on the obnoxiousness of the explorer, but on the lack of a can-do attitude among those who might have been expected to have rid the world of this human pestilence :

My disapproval extended to the personnel of the various native tribes he had encountered in the course of his explorations. On his own showing, he had for years been horning in uninvited on the aborigines of Brazil, the Congo and elsewhere, and not one of them apparently had had the enterprise to get after him with a spear or to say it with poisoned darts from the family blowpipe. And these were fellows who called themselves savages. Savages, forsooth! The savages in the books I used to read in my childhood would have had him in the Obituary column before he could say “What ho,” but with the ones you get nowadays it’s all slackness and laissez-faire. Can’t be bothered. Leave it to somebody else. Let George do it. One sometimes wonders what the world’s coming to.