PrintSeptember 29, 2009
Where History Gets Weird
Barack and Michelle Obama find themselves in an odd psychological trap with Bill Ayers. It finally appears that Jack Cashill's landmark work in exposing the real authorship of Barack Obama's books, has found corroboration in "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," by Christopher Andersen.
The weight and plausibility of Cashill's findings of similarity between Ayer's writing and Obama's first autobiography were substantial, but now appears confirmed by Andersen.
Cashill quotes Andersen: With the deadline pressing, Michelle recommended that Barack seek advice from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."
To flesh out his family history, Obama had taped interviews with various family members. Andersen writes, "These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers."
This brings up a curious and odd psychological situation for the Obamas. They have become rich through the work of the white Ayers. Work that Barack Obama could never have succeeded at alone.
In fact, any study of B. Obama's own writing (what little there is), his speeches, and his extemporaneous manner of speaking demonstrate a singular lack of originality in expression, analogy, analysis, precision, concision, metaphor, and figurative language. Obama is hopelessly dull in prose and gassy in speech.
His second book, The Audacity of Hope, better illustrates Obama's tin ear, verbosity, pomposity, and dullness than the Ayer's penned Dreams From My Father, based as it is on his unfocused and platitudinous speeches.
There are meta-ironies wedged into the fact of Obama's wealth from the sale of his first book for he and Michelle.
Let's take Michelle first.
James Lewis noted in 2008: ". . . Barack and Michelle seem to suffer from real feelings of inferiority. Michelle is a Princess of Privilege -- Princeton University, Harvard Law School and her 300K job today. And yet, she tells us that she spent years feeling bad about being black in America, as she told the world in her undergraduate thesis, at the very time when blacks are moving ahead faster than ever before in human history."
Michelle wrote in her thesis introduction, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before," and that "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. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich (sic) I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."
At best, she prophesied for herself a marginal future - "further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant."
She has proven to be resentful over the fact that her accomplishments have come through affirmative action and not merit as when told in high school she wouldn't qualify for an Ivy League college because her test scores weren't high enough, and later had trouble with the Illinois bar exam.
A lot of colleges like Princeton also do a bang up job of making sure that minority students (who have included Obama and Sotomayor) never bond early on with whites students by holding separate orientation sessions for them, thus further encouraging any sense of alienation and separateness they feel.
All of Michelle's adult achievements have come through whites. The Ivy League colleges, the law firm she worked at, and then the University of Chicago. The same is true for Barack.
As for Barack, he is half-white and raised as a relatively privileged white boy except for his time in Indonesia when he was bullied for being culturally different and black .
Culturally, though, Barack is white. He learned to think, observe, speak, and imagine life through white culture and family. His life story is the unrelenting quest to purge all that whiteness from himself that he might assume the mantle of his coal black father, and ascend to lead his "people" (the oppressed) to freedom and prosperity out of the hateful clutches of the White Man.
The way for Barack to escape the problem of thinking "white" was to adopt Marxism as a way out of his dilemma: a black who'd been raised white. He now saw the world in purely class and racial terms.
Yet, everything he is and became depended on whites. His privileged education, his community work, his law firm and professorship - all provided by whites.
And Bill Ayers, whose help in Obama's adult life remains hidden to a large extent, has nonetheless been critical. Especially for the money conscious Michelle who complained $600 from a tax rebate to folks was only good enough for a decent pair of earrings, and spends $540 for a pair of fashionable sneakers (or kicks).
"You're getting $600. What can you do with that? Not to be ungrateful or anything. . . And then you go out and you buy a pair of earrings."
The Obamas, both of them, have been accused of being racists. Barack for his Marxist sentiments and worldview, his association with the vicious Rev. Wright ("white people's greed runs a world in need" which he wholeheartedly endorsed vuia 20 years' regular attendance), the remark of his grandmother being "a typical white person", comments in his books, "that's just how white folks' will do ya", and his classic explanation to a group of rich, elite whites how their low class brethren in Pennsylvania are "bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment".
But, some will say, the Obamas are surrounded by whites, they have white friends, they've always worked and played with whites. They can't be racists.
Liberals think that white racists, KKKers must hate all blacks. That's not how it works. A person can very much like, enjoy, work with individuals of other races without any difficulty, but find collective fault or general dislike for another race as a whole.
Barack gives Bill Ayers and the other whites of his circle a pass because they have transcended membership in an evil class of people by despising their own race as much as people from other races and cultures do. Marxists and liberals deracinate themselves in the eyes of people like the Obamas; just as people like Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Junior, Louis Armstrong, and numerous other blacks seemed deracinated and non-threatening to whites throughout the 50's and 60's.
Barack likes individual whites like David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and so on, but he is filled with rage at whites in general for all that went wrong with his childhood, his abandonment by his father, and so forth; whereas Michelle was raised with a chip on her shoulder in white-run Chicago, marinated in the resentments and attitudes of Jesse Jackson and his ilk to blame everything wrong with blacks on slavery and unrelenting, ever oppressive racism of whitey.
Many critics of Obama have observed that the narcissistic Barack appears to be a compulsive liar. Part of that pathology, though, appears to be his ability to convince himself of things that never were.
He loves to repeat his life story in hopes of inspiring others how he was abandoned by his father at the age of two and managed to become President of the United States. Which is no mean achievement. Yet, the facts are that after his birth, his mother never lived with Barack Sr. again. Instead, his mother moved with their newborn baby a mere fifteen days after his birth to Seattle to go to school there.
Barack never knew his father at all. Not even as an infant or toddler.
Granted that his story of abandonment at age two is sad enough that it hardly needs embellishment, still, we see a crumb of pathos in that additional, fictional amount of time that says, "I did know my dad a little for a tiny little while." Kind of like, "we at least had Hawaii for a brief time together."
But he didn't even have that.
So here we have Barack -- raised by whites, protected and privileged by whites, guided by whites, funded by whites, managed by whites, and finally, elected by whites. And someone who has turned all his inner rage into a diatribe against the society of whites and its free markets, liberties, government, culture, traditions, and beliefs.
And we have Michelle, affirmed by whites, promoted by whites, enriched by whites, and angry that all her success came, not from her own community, but as spoils from condescending whites, liberal guilt and noblesse oblige to less brilliant "coloreds" such as herself.
Think of what they owe Bill Ayers and the trust they've placed in him. He could spill the beans of what he's done for them at any time, but he won't. Obama is his Manchurian Candidate, his Trojan horse, his Quisling for Marxism and the ruin of white America.
But Obama can't destroy America anymore than Wilson, FDR, Jimmy Carter could. He can damage it, but never transform it, which means Obama fails, retires to private life like Jimmy Carter. He can certainly enrich himself as an ex-President as Bill Clinton has done, but underneath it all there lingers the sub-conscious knowledge for he and Michelle that it all began with a lie, unearned wealth, and white privilege.
This is history being weird.
