The above is from 1945 or so, when senior American officials knew how to stand up on their hind legs. And now, from About.com, a company of the New York Times, we learn a little bit about etiquette in Japan, with which we have no quarrel — it’s good to be polite in social settings:

Let’s begin learning how to bow properly in Japan. Bowing seems simple, but there are different ways of bowing. It depends on the social status or age of the person you bow to. If the person is higher status or older than you are, you should bow deeper and longer. It is polite to bow, bending from your waist. Men usually keep their hands in their sides, and women usually put their hands together on their thighs with their fingers touching. If it is a casual situation, you can bow like nodding. The most frequent bow is a bow of about 15 degrees.

But of course the American President greeting a foreign emperor is not a social setting that the Times commented on above. It is a formal affair of state — indeed, the State Department has had rules on bowing for over 200 years. Let’s review some guidelines on the matter from a site that concerns itself with forms of address:

Does the President Bow to a Foreign King or Queen?…I would follow the advice of Chris Young, President of the Protocol Diplomacy International / Protocol officers Association (he’s also Chief of Protocol of the State of Georgia, and Director of International Affairs) when he says “Look no further than the U.S. Constitution, which states in Article I, Section 9, that ‘No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.’

Those weren’t just words that prohibited Congress from naming someone a prince or princess, duke or duchess, lord or lady. Those words were clear signals that in the U.S. all persons are on equal footing: that no nobility would exist here and thus no one had to bow to anyone. Certainly people here have titles such as president, chief executive officer, mayor, chancellor, and the like, but none of those titles was encoded on someone’s DNA. Titles were to be ascending, earned through one’s own sweat equity and remarkable character, rather than descending, simply a generational bequeath to one’s progeny.”

So a US citizen when meeting a king or queen –- in the United States or in the monarch’s country — should simply offer nod of the head as a sign of respect and shake the hand of the monarch if it was offered. This contrasts with either a deep bow or curtsy which would be an appropriate sign of fealty from a subject.

Regarding the President. again I would quote of Chris Young, when he says both are “equals on the world stage. Both are heads of state ….the only order of precedence that exists between the two is usually an alphabetical one rather than one of rank.”

Well, that’s certainly not the way the current President sees things, as we noted in his deep bow before the Saudi Arabian king (which the White House insipidly denied he did, by the way). The curious thing about Obama’s behavior is that he is perfectly willing to perform gestures that abase the United States before the world, but he personally regards himself as the biggest big-shot of all, a man who tells every other country what it ought to do. This fellow Obama seems almost precisely 180 degrees out of phase with the America we grew up in.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 6:34 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.