Over lunch I read the Rolling Stone profile of Obama from... er... I don't know, maybe February. Interesting fellow, that Obama:
I started thinking about this in relation to Steve Sailer's piece from last month. Sailer casts Obama's story as one of racial anxieties and antagonisms, which is understandable since so much of the hype around Obama is P.C.-ishly racial. But I think the root problem is something different - related perhaps to the point of inseparability, but different.
Obama is simply a child of a broken family.
His backstory reads like a textbook case study of a screwed-up divorced child: his mother, born in Kansas, moves to Hawaii as a child. As an 18 year-old freshman at the University of Hawaii, she meets and married a Kenyan, who becomes Obama's father. Obama Sr. abandons the family when Barack is two, his mother remarries, uproots him to Indonesia for four years, then ships him back to live with her parents in Hawaii, where he wins a scholarship to a posh prep school. Sure, race and class questions must have been in the child's head, but it's hard to imagine that the turmoil of divorce, and separation from both parents wasn't the root cause of his angst.
Sailer, in discussing Obama's years at the Punahou school, says:
Children of even the most amicable divorces (to the extent those exist) can tell you all about identity crises, confusion and rebellion, and particularly about "having to choose." In Obama's situation, both of his parents were off in other countries living new lives with new families that apparently had no room for young Barack. It seems perfectly natural that he would harbor resentment for and eventually rebel against the white grandparents who ended up raising him and "choose" to identify with his African heritage. This doesn't make teenage Obama disingenuous or opportunistic, it makes him a child, vulnerable and insecure. Being a child of a biracial divorce provides ample fuel for questions of identity. Even the drug use is absolutely predictable.
Honestly, all of the talk about Obama's race is boring as hell. It would be far more interesting to hear him start talking about being a child of divorce, how it felt to have parents who had agendas that didn't include him, and dealing with the resulting inner conflict and the search for the rootedness that comes from a stable family.My whole generation could relate to that. It would throw the excerpt I started off with into a new and much more fascinating light and even Obama's conversion to Christianity would be given an added dimension many can relate to. Unfortunately, "Broken families really, really screw kids up" doesn't focus-group too well.
Unfortunately, "Broken families really, really screw kids up" doesn't focus-group too well.
And -- well if you believe Kellmeyer -- it's sort of contrary to the modern political/economic agenda of splitting up families to encourage spending.
Great take, by the way. I'm wondering when the mixed-race thing in general will get old, but maybe that's just me.
I sort of believe Kellmeyer. Certain political/economic forces have a strong interest in maintaining the current societal structure, but I think this structure developed as a natural consequence from the implementation of bad ideologies (radical feminism, sexual libertinism) that people honestly thought would bring freedom and justice. In effect, Steve is right that the actual situation we have now is that a return to traditional family structures is not in the interests of those who worship corporate growth and so they resist it using the influence of the politicians who follow their marching orders.
I think where I depart from Steve is that I don't think big business wamnted this to happen, sure they benefit from it, but the same forces that led to splitting families so that we have more toasters per capita have also led to stagnant birth rates, meaning the future demand for toasters will diminish.
True, they favor open borders immigration, but I don't think Steve is right that it's because they want to wreak the same devastation on those families and split those families up to, since the migrants make substandard wages.
I simply don't think that corporate overlords conspire to plan a society to serve their whims. I think they're amorally opportunistic and need to be resisted, but I don't think it's right to pin the dissolution of the family on them.
Oh, and by the way, it certainly is not just you.
:)
Oh, and by the way, it certainly is not just you.
Yeah, I figure when everyone needs to fill out the census bubble forms half-way, they might stop asking. At least now the Federal census says "Check all that apply" instead of "Check one". (It didn't in 1990, it did in 2000).