Posted on 06/03/2011 1:23:47 PM PDT by pabianice
LONDON — For a long time Barack Obama’s mother was little more than the “white woman from Wichita” mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, “Dreams from My Father.”
Now, thanks to Janny Scott’s remarkable “A Singular Woman,” absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from “floating through foreign things,” as one colleague in Indonesia observes, “She was as type A as anybody on the team.”
That may seem a far-fetched description of a woman who was not good with money, had no fixed abode and did not see life through ambition’s narrow prism. It was the journey not the destination that mattered to Dunham. She was, in her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng’s words, “fascinated with life’s gorgeous minutiae.” To her son the president, “idealism and naïveté” were “embedded” in her.
Yet she was also a pioneering advocate of microcredit in the rural communities of the developing world, an unrivaled authority on Javanese blacksmithing, and a firm voice for female empowerment in an Indonesia “of ‘smiling’ or gentle oppression” toward women, as she wrote in one memo for the Ford Foundation.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is the desired end?”
0bama said in answer to Joe the Plumber that day in 2008 that he favored trickle up. Those words said to me that he wanted everything levelled to dirt and to destroy, only to remake in his own image and according to his whims.
The cupcake trees she planted still feed the herds of unicorns on Rainbow Bridge.
And on the anniversary of her death, bunnies hop out into the dewey meadows of the Kansas plains and form the immortal words “floating through foreign things.”
Very likely. I agree with the suspicion that Frank Marshall Davis, Communist organizer and friend of her father, molested Ann and got her pregnant, and that Obama Sr was a convenient stand-in.
You’re right!
I’d forgotten all about that.
We very often disagree & do so very strongly, but that is an excellent excerpt.
"Stanley Ann Dunham (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995), the mother of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, was an American anthropologist who specialized in economic anthropology and rural development. Dunham was nicknamed Anna,[2] later known as Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro,[1] and finally Ann Dunham Sutoro.[1] Born in Wichita, Kansas, Dunham spent her childhood in California, Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas and her teenage years in Mercer Island, Washington, and the majority of her adult life in Indonesia[3] as well as living in Hawaii.
Dunham studied at the Honolulu University of Hawaii Manoa campus, and the University of Hawaii Manoa's East–West Center, where she attained a bachelor's in anthropology or mathematics[4] and master's and Ph.D. in anthropology.[5]
Interested in craftsmanship, weaving and the role of women in cottage industries, Dunham's research focused on women's work on the island of Java and blacksmithing in Indonesia. To address the problem of poverty in rural villages, she created microcredit programs while working as a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development. Dunham was also employed by the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and she consulted with the Asian Development Bank in Pakistan. Towards the latter part of her life, she worked with Bank Rakyat Indonesia, where she helped apply her research to the largest microfinance program in the world."
Is ANY of this true?
What I don’t understand is why Stanley (the dad) insisted she go to the University of Hawaii. As a parent, I have to admit I wouldn’t advise my 18 year old to go to a university in a state so far away from home. Why Hawaii?
My bad. Apparently, dad was already in HI.
i think if i hear obama use the phrase, ‘you gotta break a few eggs to make an omlette’, i’d be headed for the door.
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