


And we are being led by, no doubt, a preternaturally smart guy, a man who changed his own name from Piyush to Bobby when he was four, who converted from Hinduism to Catholicism when he was eighteen, allegedly because he was so torn up by Roe v. Wade, who declared exorcisms could cure cancer when he was twenty, an experience he wrote about in one of the world’s leading Catholic journals, and who, in his early forties, essentially torched his own college degree in biology from Brown University, enacting laws that allow the teaching of New Earth Creationism as “science” in Louisiana public schools. “I’m not an evolutionary biologist,” he recently explained to the few people left in the world who still don’t realize that all biologists are, in fact, evolutionary biologists.

But Bobby Jindal’s official portrait (on the left) on the fourth floor of the Capitol building is, perhaps, the best example of what I’m talking about. Sometimes, a picture can speak 1,000 words, and these juxtapositions should.

11 thoughts

  1. The painted portrait above the receptionist’s desk on the 4th floor of the Capitol is even whiter. Couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it.

    Thought he was supposed to show how republicans could embrace people of color, but he isn’t portraying himself in that way.

  2. I am not certain what the point is. Who am I kidding. Yes I do know what the point is . I can still see the non European features. The lengths that people will go to. If this person were my photography, they of course would be fired. Unless of course that is the look you are going for.

  3. Not too long into Jindal’s first term a Lafayette legislator was asked what he thought of our new governor. The legislator, one never regarded as particularly thoughtful or insightful, floored those present with his response: “Governor Jindal has but one problem. He hates the color of his own skin.”

    This picture, along with the painting that hangs on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk on the 4th floor of the Capitol, along with other staged, public settings such as the Conservative conference in New Orleans earlier this year that featured a billboard-sized photo of Jindal that was jarringly at odds with reality when he strode onto the stage, suggests he may have been on to something. Sad to think Jindal may be yet another example of a self-loathing conservative, so many of whom strut about with a Bible in one hand and the key to their closet in the other, projecting his pain and misery on to the world. Projection, transference. Everytime Jindal offers public criticism of Obama or anyone or anything else, he could be talking to himself. Sad, but nothing new.

    1. @Thaddeus I was going to say he may have been trying more for the Bobby Brady look in the photoshopping, but he does look like Alfred E. Newman. Oy!

  4. What a horrible way to live. Being ashamed of who you are. I actually felt sorry for him but then remembered the harm he’s done.

  5. Jindal could easily be called the Michael Jackson of Louisiana politics. Reason: after Jackson’s death it was officially revealed he was using “chemical bleaching” on a regular bases to make his skin a liter color. Of course, Jackson suffered from a skin disease, vitiligo, the bleaching was an attempt to make his skin appear more uniform in color. Jindal does it for purely political reasons.

  6. This was posted in HuffPo in 2013, but it was written much earlier. Jindal’s feeling the need to “pass” is the only thing I feel any sympathy for him about. Still, I can’t have a lot of sympathy; all the man really had to do was stay home and take care of his state. After all, he was elected by a landslide. Did he believe that none of those voters had noticed he was brown?


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