October 21, 2010
A Soulless White House
By James Lewis
www.americanthinker.com________________________
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I think Barack and Michelle Obama are secret totalitarians -- in spirit, if not yet in fact -- who believe mostly in their own superior intentions. Michelle really does think the country needs an all-powerful Food Mom who will make the kids eat right so they never get fat...even though Michelle can't control her own appetite any more than the rest of us can.
Human beings love to eat because our ancestors lived in constant fear of famine. Humans got fat when food was plentiful because the chances were good that a drought or a freeze was coming soon to kill the crops and the cattle. Fat is how our bodies store food. Fat people can make it through the lean years when skinny people get sick and die.
So Michelle Obama is fighting against her own genes, just like the rest of us, and pretending the guv'mint can fix it. But fat is not something the government can dictate, short of a North Korean man-made famine. Even Kim Jong-il can't control his own appetites and is now dying from the effects of chronic diabetes. Good luck on that one, Michelle.
Barack is the same, except different. Where Michelle is essentially a normal control freak, Barack is special because he's always been raised by nostalgic Stalinists, beginning with his adolescent mother and his surrogate father, Frank Marshall Davis -- angry poet, porn artist, and Stalin's CPUSA rep in Hawaii. You have to feel sorry for the child Barry Soetoro, raised by enraged adults. His real father fled his wife and baby, then his mother dragged him to Jakarta to live in the bloody aftermath of a civil war that killed 200,000 people. Then she abandoned him -- sent him back to Hawaii to be cared for by the likes of Frank Davis.
Children who are treated like unwanted baggage can become alienated and objectified. They tend to see people as things because they have no experience of trustworthy adults who will be there for them for as long as they are needed. Little throwaway orphans stop thinking of themselves as special individuals. They always fear another abandonment. They blame themselves for adults walking away.
Barry Soetoro was celebrated by these "idealistic" Stalinists not for the child he was, but for the class of people he stood for. He was the abstract incarnation of the brown peoples of the world, the "wretched of the earth" who were the new revolutionary class now that the white workers were living well and ignoring the Left. Third-world peoples were to be whipped into rage against the white enemy, packaged into goose-stepping regiments, and launched to serve the Left's need for power. The radical agitators turned little Barry into one of them. He was never a normal child, just a walking demographic. No doubt he flattered his caretakers by reciting their Stalinist creed to them. It was the magic formula that lit them up and made them pass him on from one stepping stone to the next.
Psychoanalysts talk about narcissists as pretending to have a grandiose self, which is not the real self, but a false front -- like J Street, set up to provide a false front for Jews who do not support Israel, and the ACLU, which doesn't support civil liberties for conservative whites. But the key is the false front of compassion and holier-than-thou virtue the Left claims to have.
Obama thinks the world is a collage of demographics. That is why he has no normal human relationship to the American people. Unemployment, abuse of the auto companies, public rants against the conservative 60% of the country, stab-in-the-back politics -- it all means nothing. He cannot identify with the people he targets for abuse. They are objects.
Harry Truman would have been revolted by Obama, and not because of the color of his skin. No, Harry would have picked up something subtly wrong, because Obama sees people as categories. So do all his White House "czars," ranting ideologues to the last one. Some of them are LGBT ideologues, some of them are old-fashioned Reds, and some of them are Green Israel-haters (but never Jew-haters, of course).
That is also why Barry goes out of his way to favor Muslims. He doesn't believe in any Allah outside of Karl Marx, but he has been drilled into thinking of Muslims as natural victims. That is why the Obama Justice Department just warned the State of Montana that a local battle about where to place a mosque might violate the civil rights of Muslims in America. But city councils argue about zoning laws and the placement of churches and synagogues all the time. Nobody is stopping Muslims from religious worship. It's a local argument about land use. So this is weird beyond belief. It is Obama's projection of his third-world Socialism onto the humdrum reality of American zoning arguments.
It was G.K. Chesterton who first described the Left as a gaggle of professors who treat people as blocks of quivering Jell-O to be stacked and trundled around at the whim of the Left. The Left constantly claim to love humanity, but they've never liked real people that much. In Chesterton's terms, the Left deny the individual soul, which is why it is so easy for them to shoot thousands of people in cold blood. It's like mowing the lawn. Nobody mourns for each blade of grass; grass doesn't have feelings.
Well, human beings do. I think that deep down, the American people have picked up on Obama's soulless style. If American voters are scared today, it is because they sense something profoundly wrong. Even Bill Clinton, the worst U.S. president since Jimmy Carter, could fake empathy like a Hollywood actor. Obama doesn't even try. Obama looks panicked today because his pretend self has been challenged, and he does not know what his scriptwriters want him to do next. This wasn't in the script. He is not just fighting for political survival; he is clinging bitterly to the only thing he has ever believed.
Take Obama's Dreams From My Father, whether it was written by him or not. In Dreams, Obama decides to adopt the political personality of a Kenyan man he never knew, a failed alcoholic socialist politician of the post-colonial era fifty years ago, a man who ruthlessly abandoned his wife and baby to build his political career back in Kenya. Obama Sr. left litters of babies wherever he could. He had no place in his heart for real human beings, something that comes naturally to revolutionary ideologues all the way back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (Rousseau's mistresses brought five babies into the world, and he sent them right to the nearest orphanage, to live or die at the mercy of strangers.)
According to Obama's self-promoted myth, BHO was neither an American black, with all the emotional baggage that entails, nor an American white like his mother. Middle-class whites are the hated "enemy" to Saul Alinsky and Frank Marshall Davis, and Barry certainly didn't want to be the enemy. He could have adopted the identity of a black man, like Malcolm X, who was showing signs of growth before he was assassinated by Elijah Muhammed. But Barry never wanted to be an American black.
No, in an act of imaginative audacity, Barry turned himself into an "African" like his runaway dad. What's usually ignored is that Barry thereby rejected his black American identity in favor of a completely imaginary pretense of being a post-colonial African revolutionary -- a Jomo Kenyatta without the tribal roots. But Barack had never been exposed to the reality of Africa and its own ancient and bitter history of black-on-black wars, genocides, and hatreds. He never fought with the Mau-Mau guerrillas or tried to hack a white farmer to death with a machete. Through most of African history, the enemy has not been white folks, who were totally unknown, but the black clan or tribe next door. Joma Kenyatta knew that in his very bones. Obama doesn't. In Dreams, Obama engaged in an act of pure pretend play, becoming the human incarnation of a whole African continent.
Africa is a vast and ancient mosaic of peoples who look and talk utterly differently from each other, who have warred against each other forever and identify with radically different tribal and religious creeds, clans, tribal territories, and countries. There is no such person as an abstract "African," as opposed to the San people, who look Asian rather than black, who speak a click language, and who still live to an extent as hunter-gatherers. The San people have nothing in common with Jomo Kenyatta. They have nothing in common with Obama Sr.'s Luo tribe in Kenya. The idea that skin color unites Africa is a plain absurdity. If that were so, there would be no ongoing genocides in Africa, as in Sudan. There are black people in Mumbai who have no contact with Africa at all.
What Barry did, under mentors like Bill Ayers, was turn himself into an abstraction. That's why liberals and leftist just looooove that book, Dreams From My Father. It's exactly how they see the world, as a bloody conflict between the victims of color against the nasty white evildoers. Barry was educated in that post-colonial ideology, and as a natural chameleon, he turned himself into the longed-for Messiah. It was a kind of self-delusion, because after all, Barry is not what he claims to be in that book. It is a false identity -- but then maybe Barry no longer remembers his latest front. Obama is now just a nexus of cravings for power and worship, bereft of relationships to other people. His pretend identity has been challenged by reality, and by now he knows that Leftist shibboleths are false and empty. But he can't admit that, since he still needs the radical Left to save his last seats in Congress.
After this election, Obama will see his last chance: dump the Left or lose his administration. That is why he looks so hysterical today. If the midterm election vote goes against him, we may see Obama's grandiose front crumble. The Democrats whose careers he destroyed will hate him. The new farm team will distrust him for fear of becoming the new sacrificial lambs.
The American people can't take their eyes off Obama for a moment because they know he will try to pull another trick to take away their rights or freedoms any day. And those trillion-dollar deficits now look like they'll be repeating every year.
