Posted on 05/02/2012 9:12:41 AM PDT by Jedidah
In a new book called Barack Obama: The Story, author David Maraniss publishes diary entries and correspondence between the president, then in his early 20s, and two ex-girlfriends, providing new insight into Obama’s life in New York City while at Columbia University.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Her name was “Helen Keller”?
Dead women tell no tales. Neither do fictitious ones. They got the bases covered.
Apt screen name you have there. ;^)
Ding Ding Ding
Looks like he needs a hip hop nick for the 2012 campaign.
How about D-Lo? Cool Lo-Dee?
We as a Christian nation and society must not accept the practice of couples living together (shacking-up) before marriage.
Yeh right....They kept the love letters...yeh right...
Hey babe,
I just wanted to point out that Karl Marx would have enjoyed golf.
I am certain he would have golfed every chance he could.
Not to mention that Chairman Mao, when he wasn’t busy starving tens of millions of his own people, was entitled to go on a vacation frequently.
Love ya,
Barry Bear
L-L Cool Down
Arrrrrghhhhh!!!!
My Eyes!!!! My Eyes!!!! Sob....Sob.... (Deep and labored breath)
Dear Gawd!!!
I didn’t ask for this!!!! The pain... The pain!!! Please Dear Gawd!!! Make it go away!!!
It’s searing! All the way to back of my Head!!!
Why!? Why!? Would.... Who Would do something like this!!!???
sobbing, sobbing, sobbing.
Hello? Hello? Ugh... Can someone call 911??? I can’t see where the phone is!!! (I wish I had one of those Lifeline® with AutoAlert* will automatically call for help)
Please Dear God! I promise to be like Like Saul of Tarsus if only you restore my sight. I’ll be a monk if need me to.
I don’t think I’ll be able to stop drinking though..
OMG, the pain....
Alex was interested in postmodern literary criticism, and her arguments brimmed with the deconstructionist ideas of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher. In one letter she told Obama that she was writing a paper in her modern-poetry class at Occidental about T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” His reply wove its way through literature, politics, and personal philosophy:
I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
He was trying to find his place in the whirl of humanity, while at the same time refining the literary riffs that filled up page after page of his journals. Here’s a passage from another section of that same letter:
Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.
Obama was the central character in his letters, in a self-conscious way, with variations on the theme of his search for purpose and self-identity. In one letter, he told Alex that it seemed as if many of his Pakistani friends were headed toward the business world, and his old high-school buddies were “moving toward the mainstream.” Where did that leave him? “I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups,” he wrote. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/06/young-barack-obama-in-love-david-maraniss
These are about as legit as the “Hitler Diaries.”
My thoughts exactly. This is faker than Obama's Selective Service Registration card.
Diary?? From 1983. Wonder how much the party is paying her....Dan Rather should interview her. He knows how to get to the truth.
I agree! I read the “love letter”. If this is a “love letter” then he is gay. There is NOTHING romantic much less personal in this letter. It comes off as a pathetic attemp to try and extablish there were some “girlfriends” out there. Here are the really juicy parts (since they printed thi, I’m assuming this is the best of the sweet talk)
“Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism — [T.S.] Eliot is of this type,” Obama wrote in one letter to McNear. “Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter — life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?”
I can’t tell you how much I want my husband to speak of “fatalism” ... especially on Valentines day.
Dilli Lanilli.
Sorry about the spelling (or lack thereof). When I type too fast it really shows!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.