P.S. The editor forgot to put the word 'Stupid' in front of the article title.
Posted on 12/15/2018 4:14:05 PM PST by simpson96
Yolanda Collins arrived at the SAP Center in San Jose without a ticket in hand. The Michelle Obama event had sold out long ago — tickets were going for hundreds of dollars — but that wasn’t going to stop Collins.
“I’m from Chicago,” she said with a smile. “I’m supposed to be in that room tonight.”
Soon enough, a stranger approached and offered her a ticket, insisting that Collins could have it for just $20.
Collins was ecstatic: “I’m going in to hear not only my forever first lady — I am going in to hear a sister from Chicago, someone whose story, I’m sure, is exactly like mine.”
Collins was one of 12,600 people — mostly women — in the pleasantly chaotic, chatty queues for the metal detectors honeycombing the entrance of the arena on Friday, Dec. 14. (Earlier in the day, Obama took part in a nonprofit’s workshop at a community center in San Jose.) Faces glowed with neon lights and anticipation. Michele Norris, the former National Public Radio host, was about to have a warm, inspiring, often hilarious conversation with her friend, the former first lady of the United States and author of the blockbuster best-selling memoir “Becoming.” Obama is on an ambitious book tour that will take her throughout the United States, Canada and Europe until May.
“This is historic,” said Jamillah Moore, president of Cañada College and a Sunnyvale resident. “People are starving for this, given the divisiveness in this country right now. Michelle Obama knows how to go high when the whole world is going low.”
This reference to Obama’s famous line from the 2016 Democratic National Convention speech laid bare the tension that hung over the night: Is this a publicity event or a political one? “In “Becoming,” Obama calls herself “an ordinary person who found herself on an extraordinary journey.”
Several people described her appeal by saying something like “she’s so real, she’s so human,” but at the same time the crowd was brimming with the awe of seeing an icon, a celebrity.
This was the atmosphere in the hall in the lead-up to Obama’s appearance: sweatshirts and drinks for sale, stations where you could take a picture with a cardboard cutout of Obama — diminished from her 5-foot-11 stature, perhaps to be less intimidating — or sit in front a glowing circle on a wall notched with the word Becoming. Pop hits skewed toward funk and R&B blasted over loudspeakers, interrupted by videos of Obama singing “This is for My Girls” with Missy Elliott in James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke,” rapping “Go to College” with Jay Pharoah, and dunking on LeBron James with a Nerf ball for her Lets Move! initiative. Regular folk and celebrities said what they were “becoming” on the screen (Sarah Jessica Parker), then onstage (Ayesha Curry).
There was a kind of audiovisual CliffsNotes of “Becoming,” with a homegrown slideshow of family pictures, hand-plucked quotes about the American Dream, and recent interviews with Barack, Malia and Sasha Obama — just being black and beautiful and funny, being the new Huxtable family so many desperately need. People were hollering and laughing and crying before Obama even stepped out, and when she did, wearing a dusky rose silk pajama suit, the crowd gave her a standing ovation. Then she sat down and her solid, warm, wry energy spread over the room and everyone calmed like children. Storytime.
This was the unspoken longing of the evening. That very day, the courts and border patrol were in the process of undermining the Obamas’ legacy in the White House. But apart from a reference in the last five minutes to “leaders leading through fear instead of hope,” there was no mention of the Republican elephant outside the room. Yet it was clear that if, as Obama says of their time in the White House in “Becoming,” “we ourselves were a provocation,” many are looking to them now to be a balm.
Norris teased us with a political question right off the bat, saying she was going to ask about something from just this week. It turned out to be a low ball about Obama’s friendship with former President George W. Bush, recently sealed with a public exchange of mints. This Americana side to Obama can’t be avoided — she calls herself “Joe Public,” “a child of the mainstream” in the book — and it emerged through the many mantras that littered the talk. For kids: “find your own personal fan club,” “don’t let fear be your guide”; for women: “put your life on the calendar first,” “create a community of health.” This sort of thing has the exact appeal of a Norman Rockwell painting: simple, elegant, quaint, a bit boring, and rife with contradictions.
The internal struggles in Obama’s story emerged over the course of the night — as they do in “Becoming” — through her own reflections. She stages her life as a kind of battle between two ways of being: “box-checking” and “swerving.” She talked frankly about the joys and difficulties of being a punctual, fastidious planner who married a “swervy dude … who didn’t believe in boxes, who didn’t believe in checks,” whose “cockamamie schemes” had her following him “almost off a cliff.” To reconcile these contradictions, she used the language of balance, context and, of course, becoming. “You can’t judge or revere” her, she said, “if you don’t know” her story, how she became who she is.
Discussing the cauldron of race and class dynamics that forged her in the Southside of Chicago, Obama described the shift between her first- and second-grade classes — white flight yielding a group of mostly black students, who were being underserved by a harried teacher. For her escape, Obama credited herself for getting out — she was “that kid” who complained about not getting homework — and her mother, Marian, who took her daughter seriously enough to get her shifted to a third-grade classroom. Obama also talked about those kids who didn’t get out, those who were just as smart as she was, just “stuck in a sociological situation.” But later, she slipped and summarized this complex, nuanced context as the danger of being put in the “dumb kids class, if there was one.” So is it sociological, structural? Or can it be overcome with rugged individualism and adults advocating for kids?
Whenever she spoke about race or class, a knot like this would form in the air. She was clear and cutting about the racial stereotypes that plagued her — the high school counselor who told her to set her sights lower than the Ivy League, the expectation that she and Barack, the only black associates at a law firm, would get together because “see, they all love each other!” But again, she slipped when describing the woes of “parenting through the presidency” (floated as a next book). Trying to capture her struggle to get her jet-lagged kids to smile at a welcoming ceremony in “Africa” (country unspecified), she channeled their inner thoughts: “I’m so tired. Why don’t they have clothes on?” Then Obama channeled the dancing, singing “Africans” and practically ululated. So much for not propagating stereotypes.
We laughed at these jokes anyway. The best comedy comes from contradiction, and Obama had us rolling whenever she went on a roll, even if she sometimes swerved off the political track. Besides, as we all know, she’s not running; the crowd was with her because it needed the comfort of not being against, not having to resist.
There was one moment when the audience response was at odds with her words, and tellingly, it was the only time she read from the book, a short passage about there being no FLOTUS guidebook, especially not for a black woman. It was a bracing analysis of the unfair expectations placed on “the only African American First Lady to set foot in the White House,” and oddly, that very phrase prompted scattered applause the moment she uttered it. In other words, the audience interrupted a black woman describing the difficulties of being first and black in order to praise her … for being first and black.
These flashes of incongruity suggest contradictions Obama isn’t aware of or doesn’t wish to acknowledge: about celebrity, about the “post-racial,” about the way our nostalgia might get in the way of our progress, about what we are in fact becoming. But this has always been the American appeal of the Obamas. If they contradict themselves, very well; they are large, they contain multitudes, which is another way of saying they know just how to hold all of us.
P.S. The editor forgot to put the word 'Stupid' in front of the article title.
Just don’t ask these scumbag, Marxist snowflakes to pay their own doctor bills or their college tuition. Their commie ass tantrums become unbearable.
There hasn’t been this much barfing since one of Michelle’s celebrated school lunch meals was served
Stupid people only.
Must point out how well Muchelle is doing since the curtain call for Hillary.
When you idolize Mrs Obama, you have truly hit bottom.
“Becoming.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Great title for an honest book about Michael becoming Michelle.
Oh, wait, it’s not that book.
“Bemoaning”
“Collins was one of 12,600 people — mostly women — in the pleasantly chaotic, chatty queues..”
Collective IQ of a sparrow...maybe.
Say, how about two for the price?
Opening act for the floundering, “A Conversation with the Clintons”.
“Collective IQ of a sparrow...maybe.”
—
Nope.
A friend of my daughter went in Boston.
Very smart,has her own business.
Beautiful home,nice husband,great kids.
(I just don’t get the attraction to this dreadful Obama woman..)
.
Somebody get the “starving” Namwali a balony sandwich!
“The Michelle Obama event had sold out long ago...12,600 people”
I wouldn’t call 12,600 people as being “sold out” in a venue with a capacity of 17,496.
Maybe that slight discrepancy explains the stranger selling tickets supposedly worth “hundreds of dollars” for just twenty dollars outside the event.
What is the Caine Prize for African writing? A bucket of strawberries?
Starving? Was Michelle in charge of providing lunch?
a meeting of the galacticly stupid!
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