PrintSeptember 14, 2009
What's in a leftist's name?
What hurts a lot of people is not so much their weaknesses, but their endless feelings of weakness and inadequacy. Take Van Jones. His birth name wasn't Van, which is a truck for moving things. Ludwig "van" Beethoven means Louie "from" the farm village where they grow all the beets. ("Van" means "from". "Hoven" means farms. "Bete" means beets. Ludwig means Louis, or in American, Louie.)
So "Van" means "From." Hi, I'm Mr. "From" Jones. Just call me "From."
Wuzzat? I hear you say? Well, that's what you get when you adopt the name of an English preposition, ‘cause it sounds cool.
As for "Jones," it's the same as Johnson or Jansen or Johansen, the son of John. But "John" is English for the Hebrew name "Yohanan," or "God brings mercy."
So we have Mr. "From" the Son of "God Brings Mercy."
Van Jones thought "Van" sounded cool, and his whole name turns out to be a prayer. I think I'll call him "From," though, because Mr. Van Jones is always trying to figure out where he's From. Whereyacomin'from, Dude? I'm just From, Man.
Today we see Mr. From Jones as a militant Red-talking black radical Green Employment ex-Czar, the very incarnation of Radical Chic, 2009. The Left considers him so important that as soon as he got fired by Obama, he was instantly picked up by John Podesta, the ex-Catholic neo-Jesuit monk who runs the Center for American Progress, the Left in Exile, sponsored by ex-Jewish ex-Hungarian ex-capitalist but not ex-Leftie Old Guy George Soros. Whose name used to be Gyorgyi Schwartz before it became a Scrabble anagram.
All the "ex's" in that paragraph refer to their various Stations of the Cross, as they jump from one identity to another. All those "ex's" are the marks of someone with a haunting sense of inadequacy. Just call me X, like Malcolm X Little El Hajj Malik El Shabazz.
Barry Soetoro Barack Hussein Obama II is of course another one. That's why, having conquered the US presidency from the far, far, outasight Left, while covering up his true identity, he now feels the craving to preside over the UN Security Council for the first time in history. Being President doesn't satisfy Mr. Obama. He must be the Second Coming of Christ, giving lasting peace to all the peoples of the world whether they like it or not. Swallow that ObamaCare, kid, or else.
David Horowitz, who's been there and studied the Left all his life, says the Left is always chasing personal meaning, without the traditional option of choosing religion. That is why the atheist Left must attack all human religions -- about as dumb an idea as attacking biological gender. (Oh, they've done that, too? You don't say?). There are lots of atheists in the world, but the militant critics of religion are not just atheists. They are atheists in endless search of meaning in their lives, and never quite able to find a world that will keep them stable. So they keep bouncing around to find new saviors.
Obama is now a Savior for the same folks who looked upon Bill Clinton as their Savior in the 1990s. When Obama gets boring after a while, they'll be looking for another one. How about Caster Semenya?
When I was a teenager I had a black friend who was constantly trying to find himself. I can't mention his name, but that doesn't matter, because my friend was constantly changing names. The last I heard from him, he was calling himself "Dirk." He thought it sounded better for chasing girls.
At some point most people figure out who they are, and if they are lucky, they like it well enough. They discover a world of meaning -- in their family, in their God, in some obsessive hobby like stamp collecting or in being a Cat Person. Or, in this day and age, they become an Eternal Rebel, and if they're Saul Alinsky they explicitly dedicate their book to Lucifer. (As Alinsky did with Rules for Radicals.) Trouble is, most of that isn't satisfying either, so they have to find a never-ending crusade, with its very own evil enemies to fight, and its own messianic heroes to follow. They're always chasing Tomorrow. Christopher Hitchens is a classic case; he keeps looking for another God, from Karl Marx to Leon Trotsky to Thomas Paine. They're all The God that Failed.
Barry Soetoro is still chasing that elusive identity that will finally stabilize his life. The next time you see another one of those vastly over-confident speeches of his, echoing and echoing as he grooves to the sound of his own voice, just notice that he always sounds like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, but the words keep on changing.
‘Cause you can never get enough of being something you're not.
