Governor Paul LePage hates white people.
Not all white people, of course. Mostly white Democrats, Caucasian liberals, and honky journalists. He’s OK with melanin-deprived Republicans and pinkish independents, so long as their skin hue is just mild sunburn and doesn’t denote communist sympathies. He’s definitely cool with Miss Maine USA, who, in spite of her tan, appears to be white.
In hating whites, LePage is in good company. At an August 12 fundraiser in Belgrade, the governor allegedly told the assembled crowd that President Obama “hates white people” (my source said the actual comment was “really doesn’t like white people,” but why quibble over the degree of Obama’s hostility). This was interpreted by the media as a racially charged remark, but it could have been a simple attempt by LePage to show that his low opinion of the pasty-faced descendants of European immigrants is more mainstream than his critics dare
to admit.
Also in the governor’s defense, he doesn’t have too many other options for people to be prejudiced against. More than 96 percent of Maine’s population falls in the pale-to-ruddy category on the color palette, making this the least racially diverse state in the country. So even if LePage hated every Mainer who is African-American, Native American, Arab-American, Asian-American, Hispanic, or some other assorted ethnicity, he’d still be forced to despise some pallid people to fill his hate quota.
Unless he used tourists. But most of them are white, too.
While I in no way condone racial profiling, LePage does have a point. It’s a fact that whitey — and I don’t mean Bulger — commits most of the murders in Maine. Whites are responsible for nearly all the armed robberies, burglaries, shoplifting, and jaywalking. Drug dealing is controlled by them. So is extortion, embezzlement, and email fraud. Our jails and prisons are overcrowded because of white convicts.
Who’s dragging down test scores in our schools? Ill-prepared white students, that’s who. Who’s boosting our welfare costs? Lazy-ass whites. Those people (and you know who I mean) sit around their trailers drinking Allen’s Coffee Brandy mixed with Moxie to wash down their whoopie pies. And they buy all that stuff with food stamps and public-assistance money. Nearly every unemployed person in the state is white. So are most of the panhandlers seen on the streets of Portland and Lewiston. And the poor lifestyle choices that white people make are responsible for the painful increases in health-care costs and Medicaid reimbursements.
LePage knows all this, and he understands it better than most, because he has reluctantly admitted to having white blood in his own family background. But for the vagaries of fate, he might have succumbed to his genetic heritage and ended up becoming another milky drag on society. Instead of winning election as the state’s chief executive, he could have fallen into the pattern practiced by all too many whites, cobbling together a living out of several part-time gigs, searching for returnable bottles in trash cans, or running a department-store chain that specializes in heavily discounted goods of the type commonly associated with degenerate white culture.
I understand that whites can’t help being true to their primitive natures. Expressions of their bizarre sexual appetites have been well documented in cases involving members of Congress, the mayor of San Diego, a New York City mayoral candidate, and a lot of white guys in southern Maine with an unusual interest in taking up Zumba.
