Page 1 of 2 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 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
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