Obama is actually a figment of Bill Ayres’ imagination. He is a composite creature made up of all of the things that 1960s rich white Marxists adored: West-hating black Third World Marxists (think Franz Fanon), druggy, thuggish American black radicals (pick the 1960s Black Panther of your choice), and a dash of that violent religion that leftists have always found exotic and charming.
I grew up in NYC and I knew innumerable people like this. I went to one of NYC’s special high schools, where most of the other kids were the children of very well off families and could afford to spend a lot of their time staying stoned and having revolutionary fantasies. Every well- off white girl wanted a black radical boyfriend, and every well-off white guy wanted to be one. If said black radical was a foreigner, he was worth even more points on the status scale. A tinge of homosexuality or bisexuality was also valued. Real blacks were of very little interest, and of course the worst possible thing anybody could be was a black person who studied, was interested in something that had nothing to do with sex, drugs or radical politics, and expected to be treated like any other human being.
One thing we mustn’t forget is that Obama is crazy, and the only thing that sustains him is some completely delusional belief in his own almost supernatural superiority. Yet, because this is not based on reality in any way, it is coupled with a sociopathic personality that has no firm shape of its own and morphs into whatever Obama thinks will most benefit him.
So when you look at Dreams of My Father, you’re not even looking at Obama’s wishful thinking about being a Third -World identified anti-Western Marxist; you’re looking at a script for his life, created by Bill Ayres, who was almost assuredly the author of the book. This is one of the reasons that Obama sounds like a Sixties radical, although of course all that belonged to the generation before him and was well over by the time he got out of high school. But the people who created him belonged to that generation, and Obama is like an incarnation of everything they wanted to be. This is what explains his popularity with the press, most of whom are also not of that generation but are in a field that was profoundly influenced by it and whose members regard the Sixties as their glory days.
Ayres, of course, goes back to Saul Alinsky and the gang, the radicals of the generation preceding him. They were all Marxists of the worst possible stripe.
So I think Obama is all of those things, Marxist, Muslim and anti-colonialist, because they were part of the package. However, like any monster created by any Dr. Frankenstein, I’m not sure how controllable he is by them anymore. His bizarre personality or lack thereof swings from one of these things to another and his native lack of intelligence and inability to concentrate, coupled with his feeling that he doesn’t really have to do anything, he’s so special that he just has to be, make him very unpredictable and very likely also to turn on his creators at some point.
I think that in recent years, since becoming president, he has decided that what he really wants to be when he grows up is a third-world Islamist dictator, living the good life while his minions keep the population in line and he emerges once in a while to give free phones to the underclass which is, for some reason, always the group that loves and supports the very people who are holding them down. Notice that some of the biggest secular Marxists have actually left his administration lately, and have nothing to say about him. I think the monster has started to move on its own, and we should all be very worried.
And, very importantly, he, with his snake oil salesman-like charm ("cool factor") had the ability to appeal to large masses of (mindless) people.
All points in your comment are spot on. The one I highlighted has been on my mind too.
The commie left, in general, are supportive of the islamo-nazis. Bill Ayers, wife Bernardine Dohrn, Code Pink, 100% commies all, traveled to the Mid-East in recent months to aid and comfort the enemy there. It has nothing whatsoever to do with being supportive of the religion.
Great post, and I think it highlights a point that Robert Bork made in one of his books (I think it was The Tempting of America). He suggested that the most destructive character-related "affliction" that any human being could have is boredom, and your post demonstrates that point very well.
What a great post your #29 is! I’d read it before but had to come back to it today to copy to some friends!