Advice to a would-be POTUS
(or is it would-be Jesus?)
The material here is dated - but all the better because the elapsed months give us a better perspective on the events/episodes commented on. Spengler's advice column may be a spoof, but as I noted in CULTURE & POLITICS, where I posted his advice to 'Bothered in Beijing' about the Tibetan problem, the spoof offers kernels of truth and/or Spengler's honest opinion about things.
Speak truth to paranoia
April 1, 2008
Dear Spengler,
Just when I thought I had locked up the Democratic nomination for President of the United States [POTUS], the media made a scandal out of the pastor of my church. They played video clips in which he blamed the government for inventing the AIDS virus and for giving drugs to young black men order to get them into jail. It sounded pretty crazy, and made me look bad.
Now, I denied ever having heard his craziest sermons and gave a speech arguing that my white grandmother was just as big a racist as my pastor, but the problem lingers on. What should I do?
Shivering in Chicago
Dear Shivering,
You may have to take a big risk. Your white grandmother doesn't frighten voters, but your pastor does, not only because he sounds racist and anti-American, but also because he sounds like a raving loonie in the video clips.
Some voters may fear that you are one person in front of a black audience, and another person altogether on the campaign trail. The voters want to hear you speak truth to paranoia. You should ask for the pulpit of your church and tell your congregation (and the television cameras) something like this:
Our pastor was wrong to appeal to your rage. Rage only hurts you. Rage is what puts a third of young black men in the criminal justice system.
The government doesn't give them drugs to sell. Criminals do. And the drugs they sell hurt you more than anyone else. The government helps you by locking up criminals, because black people are the main victims of crime perpetrated by other black people.
And don't blame the government for AIDS. If you don't want to get AIDS, don't shoot dope with dirty needles, and you fellows, get off the "down low". Stop blaming other people for your troubles and take responsibility for your own lives.
If you get out of the room alive, you will be a shoo-in for the White House.
Spengler
Hit the road and vamoose!
April 15, 2008
Dear Spengler,
I'm in big trouble over something I said to a private group that some busybody posted on the Internet.
Just when I was about to lock up the Democratic presidential nomination, everyone is on my case because I said that small-town voters in Pennsylvania were bitter about losing their jobs, and cling to their guns and to God by way of compensation.
I've qualified, temporized, reorganized and sanitized my remarks, but the story just won't go away. What should I do about it?
Shivering in Chicago
Dear Shivering,
Last time you wrote to me (Ask Spengler April 1, 2008) the best course of action seemed clear. This is a tougher one. Some gaffes don't go away. You might consider emulating the legendary Abu Hussan, whose story is told in the
Arabian Nights (as translated by Sir Richard Burton):
They recount that in the city of Kaukaban in Yemen there was a man named Abu Hasan of the Fadhli tribe who left the Bedouin life and became a townsman and the wealthiest of merchants. His wife died while both were young, and his friends pressed him to marry again.
Weary of their pressure, Abu Hasan entered into negotiations with the old women who procure matches, and married a woman as beautiful as the moon shining over the sea. To the wedding banquet he invited kith and kin, ulema and fakirs, friends and foes, and all of his acquaintances.
The whole house was thrown open to feasting: There were five different colors of rice, and sherbets of as many more; kid goats stuffed with walnuts, almonds, and pistachios; and a young camel roasted whole. So they ate and drank and made merry.
The bride was displayed in her seven dresses - and one more - to the women, who could not take their eyes off her. At last the bridegroom was summoned to the chamber where she sat enthroned. He rose slowly and with dignity from his divan; but in do doing, for he was over full of meat and drink, he let fly a great and terrible fart.
In fear for their lives, all the guests immediately turned to their neighbors and talked aloud, pretending to have heard nothing.
Mortified, Abu Hasan turned away from the bridal chamber and as if to answer a call of nature. He went down to the courtyard, saddled his mare, and rode off, weeping bitterly through the night.
In time he reached Lahej, where he found a ship ready to sail for India; so he boarded, arriving ultimately at Calicut on the Malabar coast. Here he met with many Arabs, especially from Hadramaut, who recommended him to the king. This king (who was a kafir) trusted him and advanced him to the captaincy of his bodyguard. He remained there 10 years, in peace and happiness, but finally was overcome with homesickness. His longing to behold his native land was like that of a lover pining for his beloved; and it nearly cost him his life.
Finally he sneaked away without taking leave and made his way to Makalla in Hadramaut. Here he donned the rags of a dervish. Keeping his name and circumstances a secret, he set forth on foot for Kaukaban. He endured a thousand hardships of hunger, thirst and fatigue; and braved a thousand dangers from lions, snakes and ghouls.
Drawing near to his old home, he looked down upon it from the hills with brimming eyes, and said to himself, "They might recognize me, so I will wander about the outskirts and listen to what people are saying. May Allah grant that they do not remember what happened."
He listened carefully for seven nights and seven days, until it happened that, as he was sitting at the door of a hut, he heard the voice of a young girl saying, "Mother, tell me what day was I born on, for one of my companions wants to tell my fortune."
The mother answered, "My daughter, you were born on the very night when Abu Hasan farted."
No sooner had the listener heard these words than he rose up from the bench and fled, saying to himself, "Verily my fart has become a date! It will be remembered for ever and ever.
He continued on his way, returning finally to India, where he remained in self exile until he died. May the mercy of Allah be upon him!
I suggest you change your name, move to a place where no one knows you, and stay out of sight.
Spengler
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I wonder if - I hope he does - Spengler will do a piece on Mr. Obama's recent Berlin 'hot air' lift....
But kidding aside, here is a thought-provoking (and in many ways, informative) commentary Spengler wrote earlier on Mr. Obama, the women in his life, and their impact on who he is - or is not.
It's the sort of thing one hardly ever gets to read in the American media which is, like, 99.9% liberal - and therefore calling the cues for the liberals' collective swoon/obsession/fixation/monomania on an inexplicably over-rated, overly ambitious, and oh-so-breastbeatingly-presumptuous politician [called 'eloquent and inspiring' for demagogic speeches that push all the 'left' buttons yet who, in his unscripted remarks, says 'Ah...' too often and hesitates infinitely much more than the speech-challenged George W. Bush ever did, even during his first campaign]. He is certainly not the best the Democratic Party has to offer - but the Democrats don't care, they just want to win back the White House, and they are so sure they will with BAM-BAM-BARACK-BAM-BARACK-BAM-BOOM!
It's just as remarkable that Spengler wrote this, back during the highwater tidemark of Obama frenzy. If he were writing in the US media, he'd have been chased out, tarred, lynched and quartered, for treason to his tribe!
Obama's women reveal his secret
"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.
[The perfect one-line description!]
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 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 aforethought, 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 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.
Note
1. Obama bin lottery Asia Times Online, January 29, 2008.
And there's more. He had a follow-up article one week later::
Sing, o muse, the wrath of Michelle
March 3, 2008
The wrath of swift-footed Achilles, of which Homer called his muse to sing, nearly lost the Trojan War for the Greeks. The wrath of swift-tongued Michelle Obama well might lose the White House for her husband.
We had a peek into her diary last week when the Obama campaign finally made public her undergraduate thesis, titled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community". The contents of this remarkable document sharpen the profile of Obama's women that I offered last week ('Obama's women reveal his secret', Asia Times Online, February 26.)
Barack Obama, I argued, evinces a preternatural sangfroid, for he is in America but not of it, a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans. But his wife's anger at America will out, for it is a profound rage amplified by guilt.
Mrs Obama averred that she could not recall the contents of the thesis she composed in 1985, but that cannot be quite true, for it is a poignant cry from the heart. It explains her controversial outburst during the campaign to the effect that she felt proud of her country for the first time in her adult life in 2008, after "feeling so alone" in her "frustration" and "disappointment" at America.
Princeton both humiliated her and corrupted her, Michelle Vaughn Robinson complains in an undergraduate prose that is all the more touching for its clumsiness.
By condescending to the young black woman from a Chicago working-class family, the liberal university made Michelle feel like an outsider. Worse, by giving her a ticket to financial success, Princeton caused her to feel that she was selling out to the institutions she most despised.
Michelle's ambivalence towards Princeton, and by extension towards America, has the makings of a tragedy of the sort found in the novels of Theodore Dreiser or F Scott Fitzgerald, a fatal compromise in pursuit of status.
Young Michelle felt she was betraying "lower class Blacks" by assimilating:
... the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my 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. This realization has presently made my goals to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable.
Nonetheless, she was drawn moth-like to the flame of success:
At the same time, however, it is conceivable that my four years of exposure to a predominantly White, Ivy League University has instilled within me certain conservative values. For example, as I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates - acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high paying position in a successful corporation. Thus, my goals after Princeton are not as clear as before.
Hopelessness, young Michelle sought to demonstrate, afflicts black Princeton students who are torn between loyalties to the black community and the pursuit of success.
Her thesis tabulated the results of a questionnaire sent to black students at Princeton on their attitudes towards the black community and themselves. She drew a bright line between "separatist-pluralist" attitudes, that is, rejecting assimilation into white America, and an "integrationist-assimilationist" stance. Clearly her sympathies lay with black separatism.
The idea of separationism and pluralism (both cultural structural and social structural) is also discussed by Billingsley (1968) who believes there is a need for Blacks to build up their own communities, define themselves by new "Black" standards different from the old White standards and exercise power and control over their own institutions and services within the Black community.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's [sic] (1967) developed definitions of separationism in their discussion of Black Power which guided me in the formulation and use of this concept in the study: "The concept of Black Power rests on the fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must close ranks."
It was black separatists, she concluded, who cared about the black community, whereas integrated blacks turned their backs on it:
... the more respondents became sep[aratist]/plur[alist], during the Pre-to-Prin period [prior to attending Princeton], the more respondents became motivated to benefit the Black community; and the more int[egrated]/assim[imilated] they became, the more unmotivated they became to benefit the Black community.
Universities such as Princeton, moreover, rig the system for the benefit of whites, as she favorably quoted Dr Carolyn Dejoie:
Institutional policies of predominantly White Universities have established practices which favor the preferred groups and have ranked priorities which are meant to facilitate the tasks and improve the conditions of White students while ignoring the needs of the Black students ... Fraternities, sororities, homecoming activities and student government maintain the White status-quo [sic]. As in academic areas, the social aspects of university life systemically follow the interests of White students - the majority group.
Although the black separatists are the ones who care about the black community, she continues, their sense of loyalty and concern also inspires a sense of hopelessness. That is an unexpected and highly personal conclusion. Her prose chokes up and her spelling breaks down as she writes of this hopelessness:
[The data] demontate [sic] a strong relationship for [sic] the change in ideologies during the Pre-to-Prin period and the feeling that the situation of the Black lower class is hopeless, such that the more responds became sep[aratist]/plur[alist], the more respondents; and the more respondents became int[egrated]/assim[imilated], the less hopeless they felt.
My speculation for this finding is based on the possibility that a separationist is more likely to have a realistic impression of the plight of the Black lower class because of the likelihood that a separationist is more closely associated with the Black lower class than are integrationist [sic]. By actually working with the Black lower class or within their communities as a result of their ideologies, a separationist [sic] may better understand the desparation [sic] of their [sic] situation and feel more hopeless about a resolution as opposed to an integrationist who is ignorant to [sic] their plight.
Michelle did not imagine the contempt with which the white liberal professors of Princeton regarded black students, for the above passage was preserved in the final version of the thesis stored by the university, errors and all.
Black students who reject white society, she concluded, understand the desperation of the black lower class, and therefore feel hopeless, whereas assimilated blacks ignore this desperation and therefore are more cheerful.
It is hard not to admire the young black woman whose indignation over the predicament of the black lower class bursts out of the bland style of academic sociology, and who throws the condescension of her white liberal professors back in their faces. But that is not what afflicted the future Michelle Obama.
To the young Michelle's sense of hopelessness about the prospects for the black lower class, Princeton added something even worse, namely guilt over "striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates - acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high paying position in a successful corporation".
Despite her black separatist sympathies, Michelle Vaughn Robinson succumbed to the temptations of which she wrote in her thesis and got a law degree from Harvard, earning around $400,000 a year in salary and corporate director fees by 2005.
Her "hopelessness", "frustration" and "disappointment" remain, exacerbated by guilt over her own success. That is not speculation, but a precis of her own account. One might speculate that the guilt became all the more poignant to the extent her success was unearned.
Michelle Obama's employer, The University of Chicago Hospitals, paid her $121,910, a reasonable sum for the skill level evident in her thesis, but raised this to $316,952 shortly after her husband was elected US senator.
Unlike her husband, whose focus on his audience is unwavering, Michelle Obama remains at the mercy of the same internal conflict that she reported in her senior thesis. She is too bitter at the hopelessness of lower-class blacks to assimilate, but too attracted to money and privilege to reject white society.
She hates the white institutions that made her prosperous, not only because they cannot solve the problems of the black lower class, but even more so because they made her feel guilty about her own success.
These internal conflicts help explain Michelle Obama's erratic behavior. Despite her own financial success, Michelle Obama continues to preach austerity and self-sacrifice to others. Speaking before a working-class audience in Ohio on February 29, she urged her listeners to eschew corporate law or hedge-fund management, which was odd, because most of them did not have a high-school diploma, let alone a university degree:
We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we're asking young people to do. Don't go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we're encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond ... many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management [quoted by Byron York in The National Review Online].
But she did not leave corporate America. She did leave the corporate law firm that hired her out of Harvard Law School, but there is no reason to believe that idealism drove that decision.
The major law firms make partners out of a fifth of their new hires, who slave for years for the opportunity. Michelle Obama was not partner material for a top firm. She took more than a year to pass the Illinois Bar Examination, a substandard result, and - as her thesis makes clear - lacked the command of written English required for legal success. Her skills were better suited to the hospital position she eventually filled. Not only did she sell out, but she sold out for mediocre results.
Bitterness over the meager price that the white power structure offered for her soul nags at Michelle Obama. At the Ohio speech cited by NRO's York, she complained, "The salaries don't keep up with the cost of paying off [student loans], so you're in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids ... Barack and I were in that position. The only reason we're not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books ... It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids."
But it was not only Senator Obama's writing income, it was Michelle's $200,000 salary increase and corporate directorships following his election to the US Senate that made the family prosperous. And it wasn't just piano lessons and summer camp, but a mansion in the Chicago suburb that represented an adequate price for Michelle's soul.
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In addition to being very put off by Mrs. Obama's smoldering and sinister (as in leftist) resentment - which is always there even when she is trying her best to 'make nice' - I also take strong exception to a comment she made on that horrible daytime henhouse called "The View' that imagines it is an intelligent discussion forum on current events, when she said that "The problem with America is that it is afraid of strong women" (meaning herself).
HELLO! Our Princeton-Harvard Ebony poster girl never heard of Dolly Madison, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Coretta King, Condoleeza Rice, and yes, Hillary Clinton - to name just a few, off the top of my head? My, my! What is there in the Chicago neighborhoods that bred in both Obamas this delusion-complex of being 'the first' in all things?
Back in 1996, I prayed all I could that Colin Powell would decide to seek the Presidency. There is a man I believe eminently qualified to be POTUS, and that I had hoped could become America's first black President. Now, here I am again with a more ambitious dream: that Condoleeza Rice could become the first black President as well as the first woman President. Please, Lord! Anyone but Obama!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/08/2008 11:30]