Posted on 10/09/2008 6:53:19 AM PDT by Velveeta
Barack Hussein 0bama in his own words. From the Audacity of Hope, pages 19 and 20.
I’ve always felt a curious relationship to the sixties.
In a sense, I’m a pure product of that era: As the child of a mixed marriage, my life would have been impossible, my opportunities entirely foreclosed, without the social upheavals that were then taking place. But I was too young at the time to fully grasp the nature of those changes, too removed—living as I did in Hawaii and Indonesia—to see the fallout on America’s psyche. Much of what I absorbed from the sixties was filtered through my mother, who to the end of her life would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal. The civil rights movement, in particular, inspired her reverence; whenever the opportunity presented itself, she would drill into me the values that she saw there: tolerance, equality, standing up for the disadvantaged.
In many ways, though, my mother’s understanding of the sixties was limited, both by distance (she had left the mainland of the United States in 1960) and by her incorrigible, sweet-natured romanticism.
Intellectually she might have tried to understand Black Power or SDS or those women friends of hers who had stopped shaving their legs, but the anger, the oppositional spirit, just wasn’t in her. Emotionally her liberalism would always remain of a decidedly pre-1967 vintage, her heart a time capsule filled with images of the space program, the Peace Corps and Freedom Rides, Mahalia Jackson and Joan Baez.
***It was only as I got older, then, during the seventies, that I came to appreciate the degree to which—for those who had experienced more directly some of the sixties’ seminal events—things must have seemed to be spinning out of control.***
Partly I understood this through the grumblings of my maternal grandparents, longtime Democrats who would admit that they’d voted for Nixon in 1968, an act of betrayal that my mother never let them live down.
***Mainly my understanding of the sixties came as a result of my own investigations, as my adolescent rebellion sought justification in the political and cultural changes that by then had already begun to ebb. In my teens, I became fascinated with the Dionysian, up-for-grabs quality of the era, and through books, film, and music, I soaked in a vision of the sixties very different from the one my mother talked about: images of Huey Newton, the ’68 Democratic National Convention, the Saigon airlift, and the Stones at Altamont. If I had no immediate reasons to pursue revolution, I decided nevertheless that in style and attitude I, too, could be a rebel, unconstrained by the received wisdom of the over-thirty crowd.***
Gives us a timeline of 0bama's "investigation". Sometime after 1975, 0bama began to strive towards the radicals.
LOL, I don’t remember hearing that line. Thanks for the smile. :-)
ping
Where he also absorbed the “Dionysian, up-for-grabs” spirit of the ‘60s...
I have trouble believing that Obama actually wrote this.
Like that’s the kind of attitude we want in a President.
I have similar suspicions.
Thank you for this thread, shows how sad they are/were.
And how they raised their children to be just like them.
One cranked up dude pulled a pistol on an Angel and then pointed it at the stage.
He got his “suicide by biker” wish fulfilled.
3 other people died in accidents at the concert.
Two were victims of hit-and-run and one drowned in an irrigation canal.
The Angel [Alan Passaro] was completely exonerated and acquitted by a jury who reviewed the video and found it to be self defense.
The only reason “Meredith Hunter” sticks in the collective consciousness is because he was black, and surprise, some tried to turn it into a “racial incident”.
It was not.
Meth-induced stupidity comes in all colors.
Maybe Barry hallucinated ‘his version’ of the event.
“Maybe Barry hallucinated ‘his version’ of the event.”
And, that is really my comment. His romanticism of these different events have shaped a distorted view of any of those realities.
That is really the problem I have with him: he is fully engaged in the abstract and indulges “real” policies that try to use false notions of history.
Whether it is not being smart enough to know the actual history of an event or bastardizing known principles of economics (or geo political strategies)...he still suffers from a willing ignorance or a desired romanticism.
Here’s my watermark memory of the 60s.
For reasons known only to my dad, [political obliviousness, no doubt] he took us to Canada in 1969 for vacation.
We camped in a park FULL of hippies and my dad had to escort us womenfolk back and forth to the bathrooms because naked, screaming, filthy hippies were dancing and shrieking around bonfires all night.
They harassed anyone non-hippy every chance they got.
Everything I needed to know about them I learned that night.
[truly, it looked like a scene from Dante’s Inferno]
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