Posted on 04/14/2008 1:26:06 AM PDT by MartinaMisc
I havent read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s, when I taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, it didnt take me long this weekend to find my copy of The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker a book that was assigned in thousands of college courses in the 1970s and 80s, and that now must lie, unopened and un-remarked upon, on an awful lot of rec-room bookshelves.
My occasion for spending a little time once again with the old Communist was Barack Obamas now-famous comment at an April 6 San Francisco fund-raiser. Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: Its not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who arent like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
This sent me to Marxs famous statement about religion in the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right:
Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.
Or, more succinctly, and in the original German in which Marx somehow always sounds better: Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I’ve wondered about the number of “change agents” joining FR
seeking to “get feisty” over the critiquing of their favorite candidates. I laughed over Browneyed’s trumpeting of herself “as a BLACK WOMAN” in order to bolster her enlightened “experience” in cultural affairs as if being a “BLACK WOMAN” gives her extra moral clarity to judge the “typical” FREEPERS here. She sounds like she assumes that all Freepers are just “typical white people”...just like Obama’s grandma!
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“Another thing that gets me - what devout Christians would say people cling to their religion out of frustration?Seems more like something an atheist or agnostic would say.”
It does sound derogatory, like a child “clinging” to its security blanket. Like something that you grow out of when you mature. Since he is a professed christian, why does he have a problem with people turning to religion? Unless he sees it as a bad thing.
“The only justification for maintaining a black experience is cultural and Barry does not share a black cultural experience. He is a white man raised in a white culture by his own white family. That he chooses to align himself with black extremism says more about the man than it does about his genes.”
So by your ridiculous argument, in the movie “The Jerk” Steve Martin really was “a poor black child”.
The viking kitties are gonna be eating a lot of troll meat this election season!
No question. . .and we cannot forget the heritage that ‘political correctness’ shares as well, which facilitates the agenda of the Left; they simply take your ‘mind’. Makes their task so much easier.
I didn’t catch King Jaja....did the Viking kitties get him?
Sometimes I think the only problem with Jeremiah Wright's remarks about rich white people is that he criticized them for the wrong reason.
I think it would be more accurate to say that Obama converted to Black Theology rather than Christianity.
“opium masks pain and does not cure”
True enough, but there were very few real cures of any sort in the 1840’s when Marx wrote. Most things either killed you outright or left you with chronic pain. That’s where opium had its value, not in curing anything, but in reducing pain enough to make an otherwise unbearable life worth living.
I see, when you asked me to define the Black American experience and I did, then any answer would have been “preposterous.” Is it only allowed to be answered by Black Americans?
I will ignore your risible insults to my intelligence for the sake of enlightenment.
How would you define the Black American experience? Is there a shared one? If Black Americans are held down by race, why is it that second-generation Caribbean Americans have higher educational and income attainment than American whites as a whole? Is it fair to say that the experience for blacks in the last 40 years in America might be different than the experience of blacks growing up in America from 1900 to 1940? Better or worse?
There seems to be a lot of anger on your part which is somewhat hard to understand. I think the original question on this thread was why Barack Obama when he became a Christian did not take a Christian name? Others have at far greater cost as I have demonstrated in some of my posts.
I don’t normally have a lot of regard for this metrosexual, but Kristol is right on.
By your ridiculous example the Jerk had a deeper black experience than Barry.
Do I sense you are becoming testy?
As to your leeward island friends, those I have met from Barbados and Trinidad do not identify with the black culture in the US.
You may insist upon being a racist all you like. It is simply true, however, that skin color does not determine cultural experience.
Great post.
We're a country divided by a common language...and opposing world views.
We on the right speak and assume a purpose in speaking. The left uses language in a different way and for a different purpose.
The left understands that. We ignore it at our peril.
I would Please enlighten a black woman on what exactly the Black American Experience is and how Obama didn't share it exactly the same way I would enlighten anybody else.
But, frankly, I am happy to leave the whole matter obscure because I think all this posturing over the Black American Experience is nonsense, anyway.
“You may insist upon being a racist all you like. It is simply true, however, that skin color does not determine cultural experience.”
First off, I made no comments regarding my leeward-island friends so you must have confused me with someone else. Perhaps that also accounts for your absurd attempt to label me a racist. In any case to say that a very dark skinned man has the same racial experience as a white man is absurd on its face. He may have different attitudes due to upbringing, but people’s reaction and attitudes towards him in school or society may be very different. For example, a black man and a white man walking through some inner city neighborhoods or hick towns may have very different experiences regardless of who raised them.
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