How Barack’s pot-smoking grandfather introduced him to his Communist, group-sex-practicing mentor
(In this thread, Kidist develops an unusual psycho-sexual theory of Barack Obama. )
Among the father figures in Barack Obama’s father-deprived life have been his absent, alcoholic, bigamist black African father, whom he only met once for a couple of weeks at age ten; Frank Marshall Davis, the black Communist who was Barack’s friend and mentor during his high school years and whom he wrote at length about in Dreams from my Father; and, of course, Jeremiah Wright, the white- and America-hating preacher whom Obama followed devotedly for 20 years. Also, in light of today’s big news, we shouldn’t leave out Obama’s latest father figure: Joe “Motormouth” Biden, 18 years older than Obama, selected as Obama’s running mate for his “gravitas”!
Now the Telegraph (via Rocco DiPippo) has further information on Davis, and it is, as the tabloids would say, shocking. Davis and his wife engaged in numerous group sex encounters, sometimes with minor girls. Under a pseudonym, he wrote a book about his sexual experiences, all of which he insisted were true and none of which he said were wrong. Also, Stanley Dunham, Barack’s maternal grandfather, with whom Barack lived during his teens, was personal friends with Davis—they smoked pot together—and introduced his grandson to Davis.
As I said yesterday, given Obama’s spectacularly dysfunctional family background it’s a wonder he can function at all. We should respect him for having built a stable, decent life for himself notwithstanding an upbringing that would have crippled most people. At the same time, no sensible country would dream of electing such a man as its leader, especially when the only notable achievement in his life is being a successful demagogue and self-proclaimed messiah who can reverse the course of the oceans..
- end of initial entry -
James W. writes:
Yes, it is an important aspect of our personalities that we may react to what negative qualities that surround our early lives and then project the opposite in our own. This describes my own father, who is a fine man. So, Obama has made a stable family for himself. But it does not content him to stop there.
It interests me that he is not himself a ladies’ man, or takes advantage of the many opportunities offered to him that most others do in his circumstances. While I am readily inclined to think that this is very admirable, I just do not see that sex is even of primary interest to him.
Being The One is. In a broad sense that means being a father to everyone, owning the fealty and reverence of all, which affirms his worth and relevance. Commanding the oceans to recede.
History’s list of powerful men who had no particular interest in sex is actually quite alarming. I do not see where Obama carries the brutality of those men, but the ideology he carries with him certainly has ways of filling the gap. He is the perfect foil to deliver it.
LA replies:
Here’s one way of looking at it. Obama has, to an extreme degree, the problem that typically affects liberals: he lacks an adequate father figure, and thus his life is spent in search of a father figure or in angry reaction against either his actual father or the symbolic father (i.e. society, objective morality, God). Obama, as James suggests, seems to have found the solution by making himself the father, i.e., the messiah, who will solve all problems in the universe.
Kidist writes:
Please excuse my obduracy on this topic. I think no-one “gets” Obama.
If Obama’s life were really so decent and functional as you say it is, then why is it that throughout his life he is hounded by controversies? [LA replies: But all I meant was the apparent order and happiness in his personal and family life, not his political or financial controversies.] Even his real-estate deals have made it to the papers, as well as his wife’s job. As you say, no sane country should choose him as president, but he keeps cropping up in all those right places, with his not-so-clean slate, to keep applying for the very position no one should give him. And they give it to him!
His choice of family is probably one of the reasons why it is so successful. He chose his strange wife. And I don’t think she’s half as smart as he is, and it seems like he can get around her. And he doesn’t have to be around his children all the time, so they can just see the kind, fatherly part of him.
People like Obama are like those underhanded dealers who keep showing up to gullible buyers. And everyone, including their grandmother, is on that list. Everyone has given him a break, and I think that is precisely his character that makes this happen—to be a lackluster law student, an over-qualified community worker, a non-performing lawyer, a senator who hasn’t produced much, and now a candidate for presidency—a most important, and most dangerous position.
Maybe if people realized his psychology, they wouldn’t be giving him so many breaks. Dysfunction doesn’t have to come out in dramatically obvious forms.
I’m not analyzing him like this to besmirch him and his family, but he keeps getting slack after slack, and now he’s reached a dangerous position.
I once read a book, I cannot find the reference now (I read about it on Jim Kalb’s site), about people who want power, attention, or some kind of narcissistic pursuit, who can con anyone around them into thinking they’re on their side. But children are especially susceptible on picking this up, without realizing exactly what it is, and it can “damage” them too.
I think Hillary got him. (I think they’re similar). She could have gone after his Wright problem, she (and Bill Clinton) seemed to understand it very well. I think that was her biggest failure, but she probably doesn’t really think like that—that sacrificing for the truth is worthwhile. She was, as usual, hedging her bets. He’s more dangerous than we all think.
Kidist writes:
I just read James W.’s comment.
First, I think the fact that Obama has put himself out into the public gives us ordinary people license to discuss him openly, including his sexual and other behaviors, since his personal and private lives are keys to understanding his potential leadership.
I disagree with James regarding Obama’s lack of interest in sex. Throughout interviews, for example, he cannot get his hands off his wife. Plus, I think his very choice of this particular mate is a strange choice.
What I find strange is that she looks much more like his father (at least in skin color) than his mother—the father who abandoned him. She also speaks harshly of whites (I don’t know how she is around them individually, but as a group she has nothing positive to say). There is something odd about his choice of a partner who resembles his father and dislikes intensely his mother’s group. It is almost like a reverse-Freudian, with all the strange connotations that brings (including homosexual). The very ones that loved him are the subject of his attack—just look at the grandmother incident—while the one that abandoned him fulfills a strange sexual urge. How this relates to public matters, I will have to work out. Perhaps he will have no real sympathy for whites’ causes, and he will be opportunistic towards blacks—which is exactly how he is behaving right now.
As for The One, I see that James W. has seen the enormity of Obama’s ambitions. I did liken him to Hitler (in his desire to change the world so dramatically). But, of course, no one dares compare Obama to such a harsh model, since he really does look so innocuous and likable.
Finally, his “we are the ones we have been waiting for” is an ingenious trap to get people on his side. Each demagogue knows how to enter the psyche of the people. Hitler actually used art. He made the German people think that they were artists—they could (re)create Germany—as well as make art the centerpiece for his civilization (this has been written about especially by this author.) I haven’t quite figured out how Obama’s message fits into the American psyche, but I think it has to do with multiculturalism and race. As in “we are all one.”
I hope my ideas make sense. For some reason, I have been fascinated with Obama’s progression, and how people just cannot see through him, including conservatives who, always seem to find something to praise about him, to the extent of forgiving and forgetting his atrocious records.
LA replies:
I think Kidist’s psychoanalysis of Obama is overwrought and involves too much imagination and invention. I don’t see the basis for some of her statements. Obama’s attraction to his wife is a “strange sexual urge,” with “homosexual” overtones? Why? What are her grounds for saying this? Isn’t she hanging an awful lot of baggage on the simple fact that his wife is dark?
Kidist seems to be thinking like a novelist. But this is a real person she’s talking about.
August 25
Kidist replies:
I think we’ve had a similar discussion before, regarding Robert Spencer.
I think you’re right, that I seem to think in intuitive and “imaginative” ways. Perhaps that is why I am in the arts. Also, people who work with intuition are often called imaginative and inventive, but actually we work with what we see around us. Here is an interesting site on intuition.
But, many people think like this, and have come up with credible analyses of people. Perhaps that is why the political world is so late in figuring things out. If they used their intuitions AND intellect a little more, they may end up with better choices.
My reverse-Oedipal analysis is not mine, it is a variation of Freud’s. I’ve reversed “Killing his father to have sex with his mother,” that’s all. So if in this reverse-Oedipal complex, sex with the father indicates a homosexual sex, rather than heterosexual.
In the concrete world of Obama’s, he’s harming his mother’s world, and using his father’s for his own gratification—to feel and be black. That’s all I’ve said.
And in terms of his relationship with his wife, I have no idea how they interact in the privacy of their home; I am basing my views on their public interactions, on TV:
- On interviews, like I said, he cannot get his hands off her.
- But, he seems to view her with a bemused distance, almost like she is a small child. I know many husbands feel protective towards their wives, and often treat them in what appears to be this condescending way, but it is done with such apparent love (and often exasperation!) that it is endearing. But in Obama’s case, I’ve seen him do this in a detached, unconnected way. I found it strange, that’s all, and I wonder if his attraction to her is more biological than metaphysical—to use some words used in the great post initiated by ILW.
- Other commenters have voiced, for example, his rather hard decision to let her Princeton papers out into the public, as a political expediency. He didn’t have to do it at all, just as Clinton didn’t release many papers that she was pushed to do.
- This reader at VDare suggests that even the way he sits in relation to his wife indicates to her that there is a strange dynamic going on. I agree with her to some extent.
When I sent you my email, I clarified that the only reason I was doing this was not to harm or besmirch Obama and his family, but he has put himself out there asking Americans (and by proxy, the rest of the world) to accept him as a valid world leader. I’m just adding another dimension to observations.
LA replies:
“So if in this reverse-Oedipal complex, sex with the father indicates a homosexual sex, rather than heterosexual.”
To make sense, this needs to be explained further. Let’s say for the sake of discussion that he identifies with the blackness of his father and wants to join with blackness rather than whiteness. Ok, that’s understandable. We know from his own writings that in his adolescence he made the decision to be “black.” He needed to find an identity and that’s where he found it, as I’ve written. So he marries a black woman rather than a white woman. How do you get from that (so far understandable and normal) fact to the idea that Michelle actually represents his father and that by marrying Michelle he’s having homosexual relations with his father?
Also, do you mean that in interviews he says he can’t keep his hands off her, or that during interviews he actually can’t keep his hands off her?
Also, how does he sit strangely in relation to her?
RB writes:
I would venture to say that Obama ‘s IQ is probably slightly above average. His father was bright, but only by Kenyan standards; African IQs are a full standard deviation (20 points) below the western average. Hence Daddy Obama was probably of average IQ, a genius by the standards of his country and enough to get him a US scholarship. Mama Obama did obtain an advanced degree; but it was in a soft social science subject. Thus I conclude that she was not brilliant but had an IQ slightly greater than average. This is Obama’s genetic inheritance. So how did this average, or slightly better than average shmoe attain such heights? The answer is simple—at every step of his academic and political career he was the beneficiary of affirmative action. And how did this hack ward politician become a possible president? The answer is again simple. Combine a soft spoken white-like personality with an exotic multi-racial and multicultural background and consider how that taps into the psychological disease that the left has been foisting on America over the last 40 years.
LA replies:
Guessing Obama’s IQ from guessing his parents’ IQ is without foundation. To describe him as a “slightly better than average shmoe” is obviously wrong. Obviously he’s bright, and, at the minimum, is an extraordinarily good talker, probably the greatest b.s. artist anyone’s ever seen, which requires outstanding talent. He also writes very well. From the start of Obama’s emergence into prominence, I have not gone along with people on the right trying to deny that he has any talents at all. It’s just plain mean spirited.
After the lies that came out re Wright and the church, I said Obama was a mammoth liar and should have been completely discredited. But that’s not the same as trying to deny that he has any talents or positive qualities, a denial that makes our side look small.
RB replies:
You’re right, the evidence is not overwhelming. However, there is a correlation between parents’ and offsprings’ IQs. We can’t definitely know what the IQs of his parents were, but as I pointed out there is some circumstantial evidence. In any event I don’t agree that saying someone is likely to be of slightly greater than average IQ is demeaning; I suspect that many of our recent presidents and presidential candidates were in that category. Clinton appears to be an exception—which only goes to show that high intelligence does not, of itself, make for a good decision maker.
The point is not to demean Obama on these grounds but to deflate the hyperbole of his followers and of the media—Obama is the great wise messiah who will lead us into a new era of change. Obama went to Harvard Law School and edited the Law Review; what an extraordinary person, what an exceptional intellect, how fortunate we are to have him etc.
Kidist writes:
I should preface this by saying that the reason I’ve made such a long argument for Obama’s sexuality is James’s comment: “I just do not see that sex is even of primary interest to him.”
I’m trying to argue that it is, and that it functions not in a healthy way, hence my interjection of Freudian terminology.
In response to your questions:
“Do you mean that in interviews he says he can’t keep his hands off her, or that during the interviews he actually can’t keep his hands off her?”
In at least two interviews I’ve watched, he sits very close and has his arm around her on somewhere on her body. Here are some other sexually charged public photos of them together. There are many photos like this on the Internet. Many leaders don’t flaunt this in public, instead they discreetly hold their spouse’s hand, or put their hand on their back, unless there is a joyous occasion (a win) and then they’re more demonstrative.
“How do you get from that (so far understandable and normal) fact to the idea that Michelle actually represents his father and that by marrying Michelle he’s having homosexual relations with his father?”
If you see Michelle’s physique, she’s tall, willowy and rather masculine looking, with a strong, square jaw. I would say that this is the best that Obama could do, without choosing an outright male, to find a female mate that resembles the masculinity of his father, and to fulfill the Oedipal twist that I have introduced. Here is a photo of Obama’s short mother with his tall father, and here is one with her at their wedding (I’m sure Michelle is wearing heals), showing that Michelle is at least as tall as Obama’s father (and slim). Here is also a photo of Michelle when she was younger, where she has a noted resemblance to Obama Sr. (I’ve photoshopped a rough black and white of them together.)
There is also Michelle and Obama’s physical dynamics, where he looks more feminine, and she looks more masculine—almost looking drag. This is joke, but someone has also compared her looks to James Browns.” [LA replies: the first linked photo in this paragraph is perfectly normal, I don’t think he looks feminine at all, I don’t think she looks masculine. I think they look like a perfectly normal, happy couple.]
But, my more relevant point is with the bigger picture. When translated to the larger community, in order to join/conjoin with the black community, he has to suppress/”kill” the white community. And his identification with the black community is wrought with self-gratification—to be black, to find his identity, to feel good—much like sex. And I don’t know how much love is in the picture, or selfless service.
That is why I’m trying to figure out his personality. Does he love blacks, or does he just want to use them for self-gratification? What will his relation with whites be? Will he reject blacks constantly (like he did Rev. Wright) to get his way? Who is he really for? So, what will he do to/for America?
I’m just juxtaposing the Oedipal myth into various levels of his life, to come up with a chronicle for his behavior for his potential presidency.
“How does he sit strangely to her?”
In the YouTube video the VDare writer describes, she discusses Obama’s sitting position (higher than Michelle), his hand over his mouth, his looking down later on, and cites body-language sources to support her claim that Obama is sexist. This is constantly what I come up with when I watch videos of Obama’s interactions with his wife. As though he will give Michelle a bemused attention, but no more.
LA replies:
I had just prepared your Obama comment for posting, which I was not on board with. For one thing, I felt you were overstating this business about Obama being feminine and Michelle being masculine. But then, a minute later, C-SPAN showed a few minutes of Michelle’s speech from earlier in the evening, and the dress she was wearing made her shoulders look so broad she looked like a male body builder! I’m not exaggerating. She was freakish looking. It was actually unsettling. (See photo and further discussion here.)
How could none of her advisors have caught this and gotten her to wear a different dress?
If my own reactions are any index, I think a lot of people are going to be at least subliminally turned off to the thought of the Obamas in the White House as a result of Michelle’s extremely mannish appearance tonight.
Kidist writes:
Thanks for not thinking my idea was completely wacky. I often wonder myself when I start on these explorations. But I think pictures never lie, and that is often what I use as my reference.
Paul K. writes:
I think Kidist is overanalyzing the Obama marriage. Yes, Michelle is somewhat masculine, but it’s my observation that black women are not as feminine as white or Asian women. That aside, she is an attractive person, has some strength of character, and is more articulate and intelligent than most. (Like you, I think it’s preposterous to suggest that Obama is not particularly intelligent when he obviously is. Though not as intelligent as he is, Michelle is no dummy either.)
By reading so much into Barack’s choice of Michelle, Kidist is implying that out of an infinitude of possibilities, he chose a woman of a particular hue, with a strong jaw, wide shoulders, etc. In fact, like most of us, he had to choose from limited number of available women, and chose Michelle due to a number of attractive qualities and accepted other qualities which he may or may not have found attractive. (She also had good political connections in Chicago, which I’m sure did not escape his notice.)
I watched the YouTube video in which he is looking at her as she spoke and saw nothing unusual about his body language.
I think there is enough reason to be distrustful of Obama without this approach.
August 26
John G. writes:
You seem to have some trouble with Kidist’s “reverse Oedipal” theorizing on Barack and Michelle.
She may be asking much of her intuition, but she has identified something rather fundamental: most men choose a mate who is like their father’s choice (i.e. like their mother). The anthropology or Rene Girard explains this (and by extension helps us see the wisdom in Freud’s Oedipal theory, but also helps us rid it of unnecessary conceptual baggage).
As Girard notes, human desire is inherently mimetic: we learn our desires from each other, since desire is something supplementary to and qualitatively different from (though not exclusive of) natural animal appetite or biological drive. Desire is focused on the sacred, and, especially in a mature civilization, figures of feminine beauty widely come to represent the sacred.
As I say, just what we should hold sacred, when it comes to female beauty, is something we cannot answer strictly by recourse to biological theorizing. We must learn what is beautiful from others. And fathers, when present and active, will do a lot in the way of mediating the desires that their sons will learn. As Girard teaches, desire is essentially a triangular relationship in which I become attracted to something because someone else, e.g. a friend or elder, teaches, or mediates, my/our desire for this kind of thing. Countless stories of the Romeo and Juliet variety—one’s interest in a girl is sparked by one’s friend’s interest—prove Girard’s tragic point.
When a father is absent, a man is less able to learn male desire, and specifically desire for the kind of woman that is his mother. Whether he will in turn come to have a strong mimetic attraction to the kind of “man” (on the theory that Michelle is rather masculine and not, as I would be more inclined to think, a matriarchal figure—though matriarchal figures are not what orthodox Westerners idealize as the epitome of the feminine) desired by his mother is not, I think, in any way certain; but it would not be surprising if it happens. [LA replies: I don’t think you are explaining or making more plausible Kidist’s imaginative leap; I think you are just repeating it.]
I would imagine that Obama sees something of his mother in Michelle, reflecting how he has imagined his absent father’s desire but also how he has learned from his step father and from the mother who has mediated her own desirability to the male on the margins of Western society. This would not exclude the possibility that his desire for Michelle is also part of a desire he has learned from his mother for the masculine and/or racial Other. [LA replies: In my view this is too complicated, indeed so complicated it’s almost esoteric, to be useful as an all—purpose explanatory theory. Why not refer to a reality that is simpler and also widely recognized as true, which is that men are often drawn to mates that have qualities similar to their mother? And that this is the case, whether or not there is the “mediating” influence of the father, whose desire is imitated? And, further, that, as with any such theory, there are innumerable exceptions? As Paul K. sensibly points out, Obama could have been drawn to Michelle for any number of reasons. Maybe he liked her because she was different from BOTH his parents, having some quality of toughness that his dreamy mother AND his no-account father lacked. Or maybe Barack and Michelle were simply compatible and hit it off. Or maybe, as is often the case, he was drawn to someone that had a quality he lacked: he is more amiable and affable, she is the opposite. Look at how many couples there are in which the couples seem to be opposites of each other and seem to be drawn together by the fact that each supplies qualities the other lacks. My point is, the Girard theory may apply in some instances, but no single theory can account for something as complicated and varied as people’s choice in a marriage partner.]
In any case, I don’t think any of this need be seen as pathological. Whatever it may say about someone’s relative marginality in a given culture, any person can come to terms with who he is and what he desires in ways that are not self-destructive. I admit however there may be some reason to doubt the Obamamessiah has done the introspective work necessary to open himself up to truly productive possibilities and not just to Gnostic fantasies. He sure is skilled at mediating many Americans’ deeply rooted desires for a Gnostic divine, which is a sign, obviously, that he is not an orthodox Western patriarchal figure.
Anyway, if that’s not enough, here’s my theory: Michelle did the relatively unusual in choosing a mate who is not very much like her father or mother (notwithstanding the dubious claim in her convention speech that the two families are much alike). At first, I’m guessing, she had a lot of doubts about Barack’s suitability as a mate (more than usual in what becomes a marriage). He had seriously to woo her, mediating his own desirability in all kinds of clever, narcissistic, ways. That key experience informs how he approaches the American electorate and also Michelle’s role in “telling the story” of this man and our desire for him. [LA replies: I don’t think you have accomplished your purpose, which was to explicate and make plausible Kidist’s “reverse-Oedipal,” “homosexual” theory of Obama’s attraction to Michelle.]
John G. replies:
You wrote:
I don’t think you have accomplished your purpose, which was to explicate and make plausible Kidist’s “reverse-Oedipal,” “homosexual” theory of Obama’s attraction to Michelle.
Fair enough, but I don’t know enough about Obama to develop the theory; I just wanted to say that Kidist’s theory is plausible: most men model on their father, but when the father is absent things may indeed be reversed. Anyway, as I said, I see Michelle as a rather matriarchal figure and so if I were to develop this idea I would want to ask if there is reason to think Barack has a well-developed desire for a Great Mother figure. Homosexuality is often prominent in matriarchal cultures (as much of the West seems to be becoming today); but this homosexuality is obviously not, at least for men, focussed directly on the mother but is a reflection of the lack of a highly differentiated and disciplined patriarchal culture (the Western nuclear family involves all kinds of values that have to be taught and disciplined; there is nothing natural about the Western ideal; and homosexuality is common in animals and primitive cultures, easily learned from one’s fellows).
“My point is, the Girard theory may apply in some instances, but no single theory can account for something as complicated and varied as people’s choice in a marriage partner.”
Well, whatever the limits of my presentation, Girard does not present a theory of how mimetic desire must work itself out. There is nothing determinative about it (unlike Michelle’s Marxist claim that since their two families have similar socioeconomic backgrounds, therefore they are alike.) He explains the workings of mimetic desire by recourse to the literary classics and certain archetypal stories; but his point is that we are all a volatile mixture of many competing desires and these will not work out in entirely predictable ways. Hence the need for a generally Christian response to teach the original sin of our desire and the possibility for personal redemption once we have fallen into one or another scandal of frustrated or realized desire. There are common patterns in any culture, but no sure things.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 23, 2008 11:36 AM | Send
