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Science Forum Index » Anthropology Forum » Obama's women reveal his secret
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 Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 6:32 pm |
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Front Page
Feb 26, 2008
Obama's women reveal his secret
By Spengler
"Cherchez la femme," advised Alexander Dumas in: "When you want to
uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman." In the case of
Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native
anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama's
women reveal his secret: he hates America.
We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president
in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary
Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own
character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a
single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled
with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real
Barack Obama. No man - least of all one abandoned in infancy by his
father - can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the
influence of a brilliant wife.
America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind
of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative
destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the
tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its
creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the
decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the
trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the
world's 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next
century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of
despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists,
the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who
really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama's mother, the
University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.
Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with
primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically
draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues
describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review,
through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national
politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the
devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures
of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he
applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against
America. The probable next president of the United States is a
mother's revenge against the America she despised.
Ann Dunham died in 1995, and her character emerges piecemeal from the
historical record, to which I will return below. But Michelle Obama is
a living witness. Her February 18 comment that she felt proud of her
country for the first time caused a minor scandal, and was hastily
qualified. But she meant it, and more. The video footage of her
remarks shows eyes hooded with rage as she declares:
For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my
country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think
people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our
country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my
frustration and disappointment.
The desperation, frustration and disappointment visible on Michelle
Obama's face are not new to the candidate's wife; as Steve Sailer, Rod
Dreher and other commentators have noted, they were the theme of her
undergraduate thesis, on the subject of "blackness" at Princeton
University. No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which
founded her fortunes as a well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote, "My
experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness'
than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal
and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be
toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really
don't belong."
Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her
husband in public. Early in Obama's campaign, Michelle Obama could not
restrain herself from belittling the senator. "I have some difficulty
reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There's Barack
Obama the phenomenon. He's an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or
whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner.
Pretty amazing, right? And then there's the Barack Obama that lives
with me in my house, and that guy's a little less impressive," she
told a fundraiser in February 2007.
"For some reason this guy still can't manage to put the butter up when
he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn't get stale, and his
five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is." New York
Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, "She added that the
TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she'd
like to meet him sometime." Her handlers have convinced her to be more
tactful since then.
"Frustration" and "disappointment" have dogged Michelle Obama these
past 20 years, despite her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate
board memberships. It is hard for the descendants of slaves not to
resent America. They were not voluntary immigrants but kidnap victims,
subjected to a century of second-class citizenship even after the
Civil War ended slavery. Blackness is not the issue; General Colin
Powell, whose parents chose to immigrate to America from the West
Indies, saw America just as other immigrants do, as a land of
opportunity. Obama's choice of wife is a failsafe indicator of his own
sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they
must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his
mother's milk.
Michelle Obama speaks with greater warmth of her mother-in-law than of
her husband. "She was kind of a dreamer, his mother," Michelle Obama
was quoted in the January 25 Boston Globe. "She wanted the world to be
open to her and her children. And as a result of her naivete,
sometimes they lived on food stamps, because sometimes dreams don't
pay the rent. But as a result of her naivete, Barack got to see the
world like most of us don't in this country." How strong the
ideological motivation must be of a mother to raise her children on
the thin fair of government assistance in pursuit of a political
agenda.
"Naivete" is a euphemism for Ann Dunham's motivation. Friends describe
her as a "fellow traveler", that is, a communist sympathizer, from her
youth, according to a March 27, 2007, Chicago Tribune report. Many
Americans harbor leftist views, but not many marry into them, twice.
Ann Dunham met and married the Kenyan economics student Barack Obama,
Sr, at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and in 1967 married the
Indonesian student Lolo Soetero. It is unclear why Soetero's student
visa was revoked in 1967 - the fact but not the cause are noted in
press accounts. But it is probable that the change in government in
Indonesia in 1967, in which the leftist leader Sukarno was deposed,
was the motivation.
Soetero had been sponsored as a graduate student by one of the most
radical of all Third World governments. Sukarno had founded the so-
called Non-Aligned Movement as an anti-colonialist turn at the 1955
Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Before deposing him in 1967,
Indonesia's military slaughtered 500,000 communists (or unfortunates
who were mistaken for communists). When Ann Dunham chose to follow
Lolo Soetero to Indonesia in 1967, she brought the six-year-old Barack
into the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage, immediate following one
of the worst episodes of civil violence in post-war history.
Dunham's experience in Indonesia provided the material for a doctoral
dissertation celebrating the hardiness of local cultures against the
encroaching metropolis. It was entitled, "Peasant blacksmithing in
Indonesia: surviving against all odds". In this respect Dunham
remained within the mainstream of her discipline. Anthropology broke
into popular awareness with Margaret Mead's long-discredited Coming of
Age in Samoa (1928), which offered a falsified ideal of sexual
liberation in the South Pacific as an alternative to the supposedly
repressive West. Mead's work was one of the founding documents of the
sexual revolution of the 1960s, and anthropology faculties stood at
the left-wing fringe of American universities.
In the Global South, anthropologists went into the field and took
matters a step further. Peru's brutal Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path)
guerilla movement was the brainchild of the anthropologist
Efrain Morote Best, who headed the University of San Cristobal of
Huamanga in Ayacucho, Peru, between 1962 and 1968. Dunham's radicalism
was more vicarious; she ended her career as an employee of
international organizations.
Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith
of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of
this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who
seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism,
rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. In
the Muslim world of the 1960s, nationalism rather than radical Islam
was the ideology of choice among the enraged. Radical Islam did not
emerge as a major political force until the nationalism of a Gamal
Abdel Nasser or a Sukarno failed.
Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his
mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and
career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment
of American culture, although not their religion. He has the
empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects,
learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while
remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political
equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not
on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.
There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries
to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as
clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest
suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture.
Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist
Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal
of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The
latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly
recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama
speech.
America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak
of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation.
With malice of forethought, he has sought out their sore point.
Since the Ronald Reagan boom began in 1984, the year the American
stock market doubled, Americans have enjoyed a quarter-century of
rising wealth. Even the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2000 did
not interrupt the upward trajectory of household assets, as the
housing price boom eclipsed the effect of equity market weakness.
America's success made it a magnet for the world's savings, and
Americans came to believe that they were riding a boom that would last
forever, as I wrote recently [1].
Americans regard upward mobility as a God-given right. America had a
double founding, as David Hackett Fischer showed in his 1989 study,
Albion's Seed . Two kinds of immigrants founded America: religious
dissidents seeking a new Promised Land, and economic opportunists
looking to get rich quick. Both elements still are present, but the
course of the past quarter-century has made wealth-creation the sine
qua non of American life. Now for the first time in a generation
Americans have become poorer, and many of them have become much poorer
due to the collapse of home prices. Unlike the Reagan years, when
cutting the top tax rate from a punitive 70% to a more tolerable 40%
was sufficient to start an economic boom, no lever of economic policy
is available to fix the problem. Americans have no choice but to work
harder, retire later, save more and retrench.
This reversal has provoked a national mood of existential crisis. In
Europe, economic downturns do not inspire this kind of soul-searching,
for Europeans, richer are poorer, remain what they always have been.
But Americans are what they make of themselves, and the slim makings
of 2008 shake their sense of identity. Americans have no
institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has
consisted of waves of enthusiasm - "Great Awakenings" - every second
generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress
they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen.
Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes,
and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word "hope", they
instead hear, "handout". A cynic might translate the national motto, E
pluribus unum, as "something for nothing". Now that the stock market
and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for
nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The
trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every
penny of it, twice over.
The George W Bush administration has squandered a great strategic
advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world,
and has made enemies out of countries that might have been friendly
rivals, notably Russia. Americans question the premise of America's
standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility
and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to
destroy the dual premises of America's standing. It might take the
country another generation to recover.
"Evil will oft evil mars", J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that
Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the
country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a
stomach as Obama. As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams
From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married
and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein
Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist. The elder Obama became a
senior official of the government of Kenya after earning a PhD at
Harvard. He was an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured
his career.
The senior Obama died in a 1982 car crash. Kenyan government officials
in those days normally spent their nights drinking themselves stupid
at the Pan-Afrique Hotel. Two or three of them would be found with
their Mercedes wrapped around a palm tree every morning. During the
1970s I came to know a number of them, mostly British-educated hollow
men dying inside of their own hypocrisy and corruption.
Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they
wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is
nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from
within than to achieve his goals - and nothing can be more terrible
for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the
past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer
place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.
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