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PrintSeptember 8, 2010
Was Obama's Hendrix Reference Freudian?
The headline story on my Yahoo News reads, "Obama channels Hendrix on critics: ‘They talk about me like a dog.'"
"Though Obama didn't acknowledge it," reads the article by Holly Bailey, "the line was a verbatim quote from "Stone Free," the first song Hendrix wrote after moving to England in 1966."
Holly dear, if Obama has not acknowledged help with his 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father, he is not about to acknowledge the source of this oddly inappropriate whine.
Still, this reference may be more than whimsical. For those who insist on a celebrity father for Obama, Hendrix makes a much better candidate than Malcolm X. Two days older than Obama's mom, Ann Dunham, Hendrix was not at all abashed about dating white women at his high school, also in Seattle where Ann Lived. Indeed, Hendrix was allegedly thrown out of high school for holding a white girl's hand.
Ann might well have fallen for the tall, thin musician. She never dated "the crew-cut white boys," said friend Susan Blake Botkin. She did not meet many of those at the jazz clubs and coffee houses she frequented in Seattle
In Dreams, in a further Paul-is-dead kind of twist, Obama cites as his personal marker for 1967 the fact that "Jimi Hendrix performed at Monterey." In the same book, he mistakenly identifies the year he met Michelle, the year his half-brother died, and the year his parents married, but he gets Monterrey right?
I can envision the mirthless Huffington headline now, "Right wing hack job says Hendrix Obama's father!" The weird thing is that the imagined tale of Ann and Jimi is only slightly less credible than the tale as told of Ann and Barack Obama Sr. in Dreams and ever since.
For the real dope on Obama's paternity, see "Deconstructing Obama" to be published in February.
