These gems are unforgettable. They’re imbedded in the hall of jokers. George W, as president, patted the man called Michael Brown alias Brownie and commended him for his ‘excellent’ handling of Katrina, the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans five years ago. Brownie botched up badly but Bush was blind. Well, his successor Obama has now taken a shine to brownie! No, not the man, but the colour brown.

He’s got his Oval Office (OO) redecorated in shades of brown and won wonderment from the chattering classes who ‘hate’ it! Me included. Are the Obamas trying to send a message to white America that brown is beautiful because it’s the 'audacity of taupe', as Arianna Huffington of Huff Post playfully puts it, punning Obama’s bestseller Audacity of Hope.

Ladies and gentlemen, the colour wars in the US have finally arrived. But, first, decorating for dummies. How does colour impact on the mind of the man occupying the Oval Office?

This is no piddle; the man sitting behind Queen Victoria vintage desk daily makes decisions that affect the world, including ours. Perhaps the browns evoke a warm and fuzzy feeling for Pakistan, setting off earthly tones in the left lobe of Obama’s brain to write a heftier cheque for the flood victims! Not bad eh? His man cave or Oval House (OO ) is good for us earthlings.

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times is unimpressed. She calls the “classiest, most powerful place on earth,” i.e. the OO “suffused with browns and beiges and leather and resembles an upscale hotel conference room or a ’70s' conversation pit with a boxy coffee table that even some Obama aides find ugly.” She calls the decorator for this disaster a “chichi” – a word that means “showily or affectedly elegant or trendy; pretentious.”

Others have chipped in with calling the room “too brown, too dowdy, too ho hum.” The editor of Architectural Digest quotes a friend as saying “It looks like a law office in a strip mall.”

Message from the Obamas: We care for the poor, but not enough to stop the fancy vacations and posh renovations!

So the colour brown is driving everyone nuts in the US. While white America is terrified of the invasion of ‘browns and blacks’ – we’ll come to that in a moment to discuss the millions gathered recently in Washington to restore honour to their country – it’s most fashionable to go brownie, tawny and taupe and splash dark browns, greys and wheat colour on the walls and décor.

I love watching HGTV (Home & Garden TV channel) just to relax. All the hip interior designers chatter about is going contemporary which means sautéed! How boring and burnished. Americans certainly lack originality, sense of style and creativity. They go with the herd, including Barack and Michelle as seen in the makeover of the OO. Hillary Clinton was unblushingly snazzy when she put a tipsy/electric blue carpet in her husband’s OO (unwittingly making Bill run wild with his intern, Monica Lewinsky). Today that famous carpet and Hillary’s taste are trashed as ‘flashy’ and ‘garish.’ Laura Bush on the other hand played safe and gave her husband mindless sunbeams that dulled George W’s thinking down to a dunce!

The third richest after Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are the Koch brothers. They have vowed to get the Obamas out of the White House. And the two puppets the bros string are a TV talk show host Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. They fund ‘Americans for Prosperity,’

who gave its ‘Blogger of the Year Award’ to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.” Besides they donate freely and generously their millions to activists of the ‘Tea Party’ a movement named after the 1773 ‘The Boston tea party’ where rebels boarded British ships carrying tea and threw it into Boston harbour to protest royal taxation. This term was re-born in 2009 against Obama spending and has caught on among the Republican Party sympathisers who hope to trounce the Democrats in the coming November polls for Congress.

But if truth be told, the real fight in America today is between the whites and the coloured. How do I know it? Darn, I see the battle lines drawn every day. But added to simmering racism is the joblessness among Americans. They blame Obama who promised them ‘change’ but failed to deliver. America is bigger than him and so is his man cave, the brownie OO!

anjumniaz@rocketmail.com