Obama: an emperor, a revolutionist, a Zelig, or some combination thereof?
Who the heck knows?

Front page photo in today’s New York Times of Obama during his acceptance
speech. This is not the iconography of republican government, but of empire.

Philip M. writes from England:

I am loving VFR at the minute. For me it is the main reason I have the Internet, having given up on all other papers and media outlets. I find the analysis and contributors so refreshing. It is a relief to know there are others out there that are as scared witless by the falsity and shallowness of the West as I am.

Speaking of which, as an outsider I am finding your Obama coverage fascinating. He has been compared on your site to Hitler, Kennedy, even Ozymandias. But can any of these come close to describing the character of this man—insofar as he can be said to have one? The guy is just one big question mark to me.

People say he will have a special relationship with black America, but perhaps an American on this site could enlighten me on this, because he does not seem like someone who would even be comfortable in the presence of real African-Americans. His black identity, like everything else about him, seems “constructed,” something he has had to put time and effort into building rather than something he intrinsically is. So much of the navel-gazing of his speeches and books seems to be about constructing a working model of a Barak Obama that he can pass off to the world, and I wonder whether becoming President is more about having another label he can gratefully attribute to himself (who am I? Why, I’m the President!) than about serving America—it is another form of therapy, and perhaps one of the reasons he is so popular is that many in the rootless West empathise with this aspect of his non-being, and want to turn this election into a group therapy session.

Barak and his wife like to talk of America as a process, something that is under construction, something we are reaching towards. Is it possible that when they speak of America they really mean Obama, that, as I said, it is he who is the work in progress, not just the USA? Maybe you should all vote for him just so that you—and he—can find out where this strange man leads to. He really seems a man without essence, a cipher.

LA replies:

Philip writes:

So much of the navel-gazing of his speeches and books seems to be about constructing a working model of a Barak Obama that he can pass off to the world, and I wonder whether becoming President is more about having another label he can gratefully attribute to himself (who am I? Why, I’m the President!)….

That’s really good. It’s been said at VFR (particularly here) that Obama is a person who has had to construct his own identity, because of his bi-racial parentage and marginal origins. But Philip has taken the analysis further, suggesting that Obama’s presidential candidacy is but the culmination of his life-long project to find himself.

As for the Obamas talking about America as a process, that has been a standard leftist multicultural view of America at least since the early 1990s, even in history textbooks. But as suggested by Philip, this process of “America becoming” has now become incarnated in the form of Obama himself. As Obama and especially Michelle keep saying, it is by supporting and electing Obama that America stops being fearful and cynical and makes itself whole. That doesn’t just mean that America makes itself whole, it means that Obama makes himself whole.

If this view is correct, then the truth about Obama is not that he’s a black-racialist and radical leftist pretending to be moderate in order to get into the White House and lead a revolution. The truth about Obama is that he’s a talented cipher, a man who has no major accomplishments except for garnering the adoration of millions, a man who doesn’t know who he is, and that running for and becoming president is his way of finding out.

Thanks for Philip for the kind comments. I’m happy he is getting so much out of VFR.

- end of initial entry -

August 30

M. Mason writes:

I agree with Philip M’s assessment along with your reply, and almost included a paragraph about this in my last post about the subject on another thread. A couple days ago you asked: What is Barack Obama?— and that is indeed the question. In my judgment, after reading his autobiography and watching this man for more than a year now, I too am convinced that he doesn’t even know himself who—or what—he really is. The product of a mixed-race marriage, suffering a profoundly deep rejection (no matter how he tries to romanticize it) from an absent, bigamist father who abandoned his half-white son, and having an extraordinarily dysfunctional, spiritually rootless upbringing, the man appears to have no settled sense of selfhood, no solid core. Instead, he has spent most of his entire life as a shape-shifter, re-inventing himself again and again, both to try to meet his own inner need and to cope with outward circumstances. Yet bizarrely, such is his haughty and inestimable self-regard, his sense of superiority and entitlement, that he can now confidently inhabit the role of universalist messiah of “racial healing” to the benighted masses. And there’s obviously no shortage of spiritually rootless, guilt-ridden white liberals looking to a presidential campaign for a dizzying, feel-good orgiastic experience and meaning for their lives.

When I quipped yesterday that the Obama campaign might just as well have kicked it up a notch and had him fly around like Peter Pan among the Lost Boys last night, I wasn’t being entirely facetious. There is a disturbing symbiosis at work here, for left-liberals in their lostness and twisted collective longings have, in a sense, called forth the Obama candidacy for their own moral and spiritual redemption, which he quickly assumed in an attempt to fill that disordered spiritual void within himself. This dynamic, I believe, especially goes a long way toward understanding the appeal of the messianic Obama candidacy to many of his adoring non-black followers—for his bi-racial self reflects back to them a dream image of what leftist True Believers wish they were, and even more—for he ultimately holds out the hope of “absolving” them for the sin of being white.

In any other election, Hillary or even Nader would have been fine with them … until they were no longer the most intoxicating option available.

Gedaliah Braun (the author of Racism, Guilt, and Self-Deceit) writes from South Africa:

Do you remember that “issue” a few months ago when I said that I thought Barack Obama was an incipient tyrant, partly on the basis that this is how blacks in power behave and that I already saw evidence of this in Obama—do you remember that one of your readers went hysterical and accused me of saying terrible things? Well, I think Obama’s reaction to an about William Ayers ad constitutes some evidence in that direction.

Philip M. writes:

Thinking some more about Obama last night, trying to put myself in his shoes, a few thoughts about identity and race came to mind. I appreciate it is probably too long to print, but thought I would like to share it with you anyhow, just because I find it an interesting topic.

George Bush has successfully passed himself off as the “down home” cowboy, having himself photographed at his ranch in Texas. Few people have claimed that this is not “authentic,” despite the fact that his family is actually from New England, and he is the first generation that has lived in Texas. Would Barack Obama have been able to make this choice if he were born in Texas? Of course not. The difference is race. Obama acting like a cowboy would have seemed like a “wigger.” [LA replies: On one hand, Bush has lived in Texas since age two, so he doesn’t have to pretend to be a Texan; on the other hand, he has received abundant criticism for trying to make himself look like a cowboy, on a ranch without cows. Even his supposed best buddy, former Mexican president Fox, has derided Bush’s faux tough guy way of walking. ]

People do not have an unlimited choice about the identities they end up with. Despite all the propaganda about diversity, the people who seem to have the most stable, enviable characters are those who are the most grounded in a place and culture—the Southern Gent, the laid-back Italian and so on. Far from being impoverished by the lack of diversity in their backgrounds, such people have a humour, worldview, tastes, and approach to life which is all the deeper for having a solid anchor in the past. George Bush should consider himself fortunate that he was white and American enough that he could slide into a Texan identity with an ease that someone like Obama could only dream of. What identities are open to the mixed race, middle class Obama, which would not make him look ridiculous? For this reason I think I can appreciate why he cannot wear an American flag. How can he be expected to adopt a persona (the flag waving patriot), which, if we are honest, would be racially anachronistic? He might as well start listening to rock music and sit on his porch with a gun in his lap.

As a final thought, isn’t it just perfect that Obama is from Hawaii? It is the only part of America which is not part of continental America. I believe Noam Chomsky has said that Hawaii is not really a true part of America, and for this reason counts 9/11, not Pearl Harbor, as the first time Americans felt the psychological blow of an attack on “America.” Funnily enough, it occupies much the same relationship to the USA that Georgia (the birthplace of Stalin) does to Russia, or Austria (birthplace of Hitler) does to Germany. I make no comparisons with these leaders other than to say they were all seen as outsiders in the nations they sought to lead, so could it be that the search for identity which this presidential campaign represents is his way of becoming an “insider”? How could the President not be considered an insider? And of course, the white people voting for him get to feel that they are including him as an insider by making him President…like I said, its therapy for all concerned!

In this election it is the election itself that matters, not policies, nothing after the election day itself. The only question that matters is, will Americans prove to themselves, and the world, that they are capable of making a non-white man with an identity crisis feel like he belongs?

LA replies:

When I was a kid, I read a science fiction short story—I only vaguely remember the plot, and don’t remember the title or author), in which a group of people want a dictator to lead their society. They start with the same idea as Philip—that famous dictators such as Stalin and Hitler (I forget the other examples) came from the edges of their society rather than the center. They also had some kind of physical defect, and perhaps also had abusive fathers. This group of scientists, wanting to manufacture a dictator, arranges for the birth of a boy, or several boys, in circumstances roughly similar to that of Stalin and Hitler—in a marginal region of a country, with an abusive father, and with some physical defect. There are other specifics that they also arrange. Years later, one of their experiments has succeeded. The young man, already a political leader demonstrating dictatorial qualities, appears on the scene. The scientists who had arranged his birth and upbringing joyously tell him about the experiment of which he is the product, and he offhandedly and immediately orders them to be killed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 29, 2008 07:50 PM | Send