Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama?s Path
CB: When I read part of O's biography, I never got the impression he was telling an up from ashes story. He was in a middle class white family. The problem with that analysis though is most people haven't even read excerpts of his auto-biography. So when he and his Demoncrat supporters starting rambling on about how his single mother made so many sacrifices blah blah blah, what are they trying to put across? It's all right CB, every presidential candidate does this. Remember, most Americans are self-made people and/or pre-destined for heaven by God. In many other parts of the world, the self-made man story gets you nowhere. You have to brag up who you are based on the family you were born into. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama?s Path
CeJ jannuzi Well Obama's up from the ashes story just never sat very well with me. ^^^ CB: When I read part of O's biography, I never got the impression he was telling an up from ashes story. He was in a middle class white family. His mother was not a typical single mom. She remarried an Indonesian at some point. And Barack (Barry) lived with his grandparents for a significant time. His grandfather was a salesman( travelling ?) and his grandmother was an executive in a local bank. Obama sort of describes his life as middle class, and actually middle class white, not Black. His father is a high level government minister in Kenya, with whom he corresponds, though only meets briefly. His father chastises the white grandparents when O is allowed to watch television after doing homework during the brief visit. In other words, the father has a very strict standard. ^ Sure, it's a typical pattern of single moms of all races that they end up working for the Ford Foundation in the 1960s. Geraldine Ferraro got it so wrong. Obama is where he is because his mother was white and of fairly privileged background. His humble pie myth isn't even as convincing as Bill Clinton's. But I don't think all that background will keep him from being a categorically different president. So far though his relations with the Democratic Party elite are not indicating much good. If McCain could coax Colin Powell out of his shame-faced retirement from politics, the Dems are in big trouble. Would the Dems call him out for being guilty of what most of what they themselves are guilty of? That is, of going along with the 'WMD lies' and related intel apparatus misinformation in order to create future deniability. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama ’s Path
O's mother A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path By JANNY SCOTT In the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. The phrase comes coupled alliteratively to its counterpart, the black father from Kenya. On the campaign trail, he has called her his “single mom.” But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama. Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor. She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart — a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life. “She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s half-sister. “That was very much her philosophy of life — to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.” Ms. Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, was the parent who raised Mr. Obama, the Illinois senator running for the Democratic presidential nomination. He barely saw his father after the age of 2. Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life of a grown child, people who knew Ms. Soetoro well say they see her influence unmistakably in Mr. Obama. They were close, her friends and his half-sister say, though they spent much of their lives with oceans or continents between them. He would not be where he is today, he has said, had it not been for her. Yet he has also made some different choices — marrying into a tightly knit African-American family rooted in the South Side of Chicago, becoming a churchgoing Christian, publicly recounting his search for his identity as a black man. Some of what he has said about his mother seems tinged with a mix of love and regret. He has said his biggest mistake was not being at her bedside when she died. And when The Associated Press asked the candidates about “prized keepsakes” — others mentioned signed baseballs, a pocket watch, a “trophy wife” — Mr. Obama said his was a photograph of the cliffs of the South Shore of Oahu in Hawaii where his mother’s ashes were scattered. “I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book — less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life,” he wrote in the preface to his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” He added, “I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.” In a campaign in which Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has made liberal use of his globe-trotting 96-year-old mother to answer suspicions that he might be an antique at 71, Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, invokes his mother’s memory sparingly. In one television advertisement, she appears fleetingly — porcelain-skinned, raven-haired and holding her toddler son. “My mother died of cancer at 53,” he says in the ad, which focuses on health care. “In those last painful months, she was more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well.” ‘A Very, Very Big Thinker’ He has described her as a teenage mother, a single mother, a mother who worked, went to school and raised children at the same time. He has credited her with giving him a great education and confidence in his ability to do the right thing. But, in interviews, friends and colleagues of Ms. Soetoro shed light on a side of her that is less well known. “She was a very, very big thinker,” said Nancy Barry, a former president of Women’s World Banking, an international network of microfinance providers, where Ms. Soetoro worked in New York City in the early 1990s. “I think she was not at all personally ambitious, I think she cared about the core issues, and I think she was not afraid to speak truth to power.” Her parents were from Kansas — her mother from Augusta, her father from El Dorado, a place Mr. Obama first visited in a campaign stop in January. Stanley Ann (her father wanted a boy so he gave her
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama?s Path
Well Obama's up from the ashes story just never sat very well with me. Sure, it's a typical pattern of single moms of all races that they end up working for the Ford Foundation in the 1960s. Geraldine Ferraro got it so wrong. Obama is where he is because his mother was white and of fairly privileged background. His humble pie myth isn't even as convincing as Bill Clinton's. But I don't think all that background will keep him from being a categorically different president. So far though his relations with the Democratic Party elite are not indicating much good. If McCain could coax Colin Powell out of his shame-faced retirement from politics, the Dems are in big trouble. Would the Dems call him out for being guilty of what most of what they themselves are guilty of? That is, of going along with the 'WMD lies' and related intel apparatus misinformation in order to create future deniability. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama?s Path
Obama's exotic life story did not prevent him from gaining the respect and support of significant members of the elite. How this happened is worthy of study. People are only now reminded of Obama's deviant status due to the Rev. Wright flap, but neither Obama's supporters nor his detractors have to my knowledge put this scenario together with Obama's mainstream status. Two transitions are worthy of study: (1) the transition from Obama's upbringing to his decision to join a fire-and-brimstone activist black church, itself significant in addition to rejecting his mother's secular humanist perspective and becoming a Christian (yechhh!)--whether sincere or itself a political move (if there is any significant distinction), I wouldn't know; (2) the transition from community activist to political office. It is probably the case that regardless of the possible ways in which (2) contradicts (1), they could be regarded as two facets of one common bourgeois orientation, which I say for the sake of analysis not necessarily for condemnation. It is also interesting that transition (1) made Obama black and (2) whitened him up, metaphorically speaking. Obama's backers among the elite were apparently not troubled by (1), and it doesn't seem to have been an issue until the Wright video mysteriously appeared at just the crucial moment. At 06:29 PM 4/1/2008, CeJ wrote: Well Obama's up from the ashes story just never sat very well with me. Sure, it's a typical pattern of single moms of all races that they end up working for the Ford Foundation in the 1960s. Geraldine Ferraro got it so wrong. Obama is where he is because his mother was white and of fairly privileged background. His humble pie myth isn't even as convincing as Bill Clinton's. But I don't think all that background will keep him from being a categorically different president. So far though his relations with the Democratic Party elite are not indicating much good. If McCain could coax Colin Powell out of his shame-faced retirement from politics, the Dems are in big trouble. Would the Dems call him out for being guilty of what most of what they themselves are guilty of? That is, of going along with the 'WMD lies' and related intel apparatus misinformation in order to create future deniability. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
