April 13, 2008

Time Magazine on Mama Obama

Time Magazine runs a cover story on Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetero, but bowdlerizes her leftist politics and exotiphilic sexuality. For example, Time vaguely burbles:
"Shortly before she moved to Hawaii, Stanley saw her first foreign film. Black Orpheus was an award-winning musical retelling of the myth of Orpheus, a tale of doomed love. The movie was considered exotic because it was filmed in Brazil, but it was written and directed by white Frenchmen. The result was sentimental and, to some modern eyes, patronizing. Years later Obama saw the film with his mother and thought about walking out. But looking at her in the theater, he glimpsed her 16-year-old self. "I suddenly realized," he wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, "that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen ... was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life, warm, sensual, exotic, different."

But as I noted in The American Conservative over a year ago, on that same page (p. 125), Obama went on to make much clearer why the incident was so upsetting to his delicate sensibilities:
Years later, when he’s working on Wall Street, he’s creeped out by his visiting mother’s insistence on seeing her favorite film, the 1959 Brazilian art-house classic “Black Orpheus.” He belatedly realizes that his very fair-skinned mother is sexually attracted to dark men. He pompously intones, “The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”

Ben Wallace-Wells mentions in Rolling Stone:

"There is an amazingly candid moment in Obama’s autobiography when he writes of his childhood discomfort at the way his mother would sexualize African-American men. ‘More than once,’ he recalls, ‘my mother would point out: “Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man on the planet.”’"

I summed up:

I suspect he feels that she messed up her life due to naïve faith in Third World countries and Third World men; but if she had been wiser, where would he be? This is one of life’s conundrums that’s hopeless but not serious, and yet Obama can’t help being serious about himself.

A British reader writes:

Have you seen the Time profile on Obama’s mom? It is a wonderful read-between-the-lines piece.

Aid agency circles are rife with stories of white females falling for charismatic Third World figures. Many come from frightfully-posh English private-school backgrounds. It usually ends disastrously.

Sixties black nationalist Michael de Freitas worked in London as a pimp, drug dealer and strong-arm man. Then he reincarnated himself as a black leader called Michael X and started doing away with rivals in his native Trinidad. He was tried and hanged in his native Trinidad for murder in 1975.

One of his victims was Gale Ann Benson, the infatuated, privately educated daughter of a Conservative MP. She was a model and a socialite and was attracted by the aura of danger. Again she bit off more than she could chew.

Her body was found in a shallow grave. She was still alive when she’d been buried.

Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul told their gruesome story in his short book "The Killings in Trinidad." (Here's Joan Didion's review.)

My correspondent goes on:

It also ended disastrously for a 27-year-old children’s aid worker called Emma McCune. In 1991, she took herself off to a refugee crisis in southern Sudan.

McCune scandalized the relief community by marrying a local guerrilla leader; to whom she became a "First Lady-in-Waiting"

Formerly a champion of children's rights, Emma couldn't stop her husband from holding hundreds of adolescent boys in a squalid camp. According to Wikipedia she embraced the hardships of African life (bouts of malaria, water teeming with bilharzia), she was well-fed by local standards, eating fish that her husband's soldiers had stolen from a weaker, starving tribe.

“They were instantly attracted to one another, and Machar, who already had a wife, proposed on their second meeting a year after the first. After taking up with Machar, including using a UN-supplied typewriter to produce manifestoes, she was fired by Street Kids International. She lived with Machar as war intensified and he split his faction away from the larger movement. At one point they fled a machine-gun attack. In 1993, after becoming pregnant, she moved to Nairobi; she died in a car crash.”

A book about her has been written by Deborah Scroggins called Emma’s War. It was to be filmed by Tony Scott.

Nicole Kidman was scheduled to play Emma.

By the way, I've finally figured out why the seemingly cosmopolitan Obama grew up so narrowly Afrocentrist in his identity and why he became a politician. It's a pretty funny story rooted in his mother's passive-aggressive war on her poor second husband Lolo's attempts to provide a decent living for her and some other guy's kid, but I'll have to postpone it until I have time to type in more of Obama's endless sentences.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

24 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is a trailer for the Black Orpheus that Mrs Obama would have seen. It is on http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NkxGkL7o9xk

It looks pretty good.

James Kalb said...

Is there any connection between Mama's attraction to 3rd world men and Son's attraction to aggressively black and left wing types like his various mentors and maybe the missus?

Anonymous said...

"...even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves."

Like all blinkered egomaniacs, Obama is great at seeing the underlying motivations for everyone else's behavior, but crap at noticing his own.

Tell me he didn't choose his wife for her forceful, rather masculine personae, which compensates for his own meticulous, delicate, high strung nature. Michelle is man enough for both of them.

Unknown said...

Steve,

No need to "type in Obama's endless sentences".

Your correspondent should use a scanner and optical character recognition software. A scanner that I bought about two years ago does the job with software that came with it.

Anonymous said...

Makes me feel sorry for Obama. He comes off more as his grandparents' child than his mother's.

However, his afrocentrism is probably more than just a result of his mother's behavior. Children who have a missing parent usually romanticize the one who is gone. His father was definitely gone, and African through-and-through.

beowulf said...

Your British reader mentioned "Michael X" and his white girlfriend, Gale. Go see the new Jason Statham's new flick "The Bank Job" (best movie of the year so far). Their story is a major element of the plot.

Anonymous said...

Interesting that Time chose a fairly flattering picture of his mother. She looks to be 14 or 15 at best. In all of the other pictures I've seen she is by no means a looker. Late puberty/early adulthood was in no way kind to her.

Also interesting that Obama notes that his grandparents were lapsed Baptists and Methodists. I thought they became Unitarians? Is that incorrect or did Obama not want to mention that?

Obama's mother reminds me of those girls who are smart and idealistic (and usually very multiculturalist), yet deranged (and frequently hypochondriatic).

Anonymous said...

Heartbreaking stuff. The aid worker who fell in love with her African warrior,and wound up buried alive. Would their special song be "Take My Breath Away"? And could a similar fate await George Clooney?

Anonymous said...

"Michael X" was rumored to have helped in a 1970s English bank robbery to retrieve incriminating evidence on a Royal family member.

http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/film/tag/Gale%20Ann%20Benson/

The movie "Sexy Beast" had a similar plot. In that movie there were incriminating pictures of an anonymous woman woman. While they weren't part of the story, I wonder if someone was letting something slip on purpose.

Anonymous said...

Things like the "Michael X" story should be an instruction manual to these jejune young white girls who are so desperately seeking to prove how open minded they are. A "Scared Straight" type of thing to these naive sheltered types falling for the exotic nonsense...of course,white girls who grow up in more urban areas don't need such admonishment. Common sense and reality will steer them in the right direction.It's ALWAYS the Stanley Ann Dunham's who end up in this predicament.

michael farris said...

""I suddenly realized," he wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, "that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen ..."

Oh God, another politician who doesn't understand the difference between his ass and art. Just what the world needed.

Black Orpheus may not present a realistic portrayal of slum dwelling Brazilians (I certainly never assumed it did) but so what?

It's a work of art and on its own terms moving and beautiful. Carmen is hardly a realistic portrait of Gyspy-Spaniard relations either (hint: Carmen is neither gypsy nor Spanish but French). Black Orpheus presents French archetypes in an atypical setting. Anyone who can't understand that is just ...

While nothing is more cliched than a sheltered white girl falling for a brown or black outlaw, his mother seemed does seem to have been genuinely engaged in the world and other people in a way that the self-absorbed untouched-by-others'-failtures Obama is not.

Anonymous said...

Dear Bildebergers,

If this affirmative action spawned mediocrity called Obama is all part of some brilliant scheme to get me to be grateful for either McAmnesty or a broad as President, I have to say this is some of your best work.

Regards,
Random Peon

Anonymous said...

Benson sounds like a typical radical. The hard left doesn't value life, so how can they care about the downtrodden?

For all the left-wing radicals' compassionate-minded prattle about the poor and oppressed, and all their rage against the sufferings and injustices faced by common men, when the time comes to make tough moral decisions they show no capacity for genuine concern for other human beings. The masses serve merely as a smokescreen to hide inhuman ideologies and a self-absorbed fascination with change for its own sake.

Anonymous said...

Jim Kalb: Is there any connection between Mama's attraction to 3rd world men and Son's attraction to aggressively black and left wing types like his various mentors and maybe the missus?

Spengler, over at the Asia Times, has been exploring this theme for several weeks now; e.g.:

Obama's women reveal his secret
By Spengler
Feb 26, 2008
atimes.com

Anonymous said...

However, his afrocentrism is probably more than just a result of his mother's behavior. Children who have a missing parent usually romanticize the one who is gone. His father was definitely gone, and African through-and-through.

Yeah, his afrocentricism is definitely a projection, and as someone with the same pattern of an absent father and a subconscious idealization of his absent father's country/people (Italy/Italians, in my case) I can sympathize. But at the same time, I think such notions should disqualify one from the Presidency. The President of America's first loyalty must be to America and her people, not whatever country or people acts as a stand-in for his absent father. Of course I'm probably preaching to the choir here.

Anyway, Steve's valiant efforts aside, I think there's a good chance Obama is going to get the nomination and the Presidency (I'd probably prefer him to McCain but not to Hillary -- how sad is that?). I just hope Steve's right that he can be kept in check by the electorate. We have to make him more frightened of us than he is of his shrew of a wife.

Anonymous said...

Marc, Obama hates the "typical white person" and it shows. He can't hide his Type II Kinsleyan gaffes -- saying what he really believes. He's toast in the General. McGovern time.

As for the attraction by women, particularly white women, for dangerous and charismatic black men, it spans classes. Rich white women are the cliche, but so too the working class women. That Cop in Ohio who murdered the woman he had one kid by and gotten pregnant again was Black, the victim and all three of his mistresses/wives were white women (all good looking).

Women are hardwired for the most masculine, dangerous men. Unless constrained they'll fall in with those guys every time.

Why do these women go out to places like Africa in the first place? To seek out the most dangerous and violent men. "Aid work" is just the excuse.

Anonymous said...

Random Peon: Dear Bildebergers, If this affirmative action spawned mediocrity called Obama is all part of some brilliant scheme to get me to be grateful for either McAmnesty or a broad as President, I have to say this is some of your best work.

Okay, that was funny.

Anonymous said...

"but I'll have to postpone it until I have time to type in more of Obama's endless sentences."

That kind of summarizes the guy I guess.

Truth said...

"It's ALWAYS the Stanley Ann Dunham's who end up in this predicament."

And the Linda Clarksons, the Bonnie Lee Blakeys, the Jon Benet Ramseys, the Natalie Woods, the Marilyn Monroes, the Natalie Holloways, the Sharon Tates, the Chandra Levys...

Truth said...

...The Mary Jo Koepecknes the Virginia Rapps, Dorothy Strattens, the Rebecca Schaeffers, the Martha Moxleys, the Polly Klasses...

Truth said...

...The Susan Cabots, the Nancy Benoits, the Joy Admonsons, the Judith Barsis...

Anonymous said...

...the Holly Madduxes....

Anonymous said...

Women aren't children, but all of them have pronounced child-like personality traits. They are looking to be led by Mr. Muscles. A little later, or if disappointed, they seek Mr. Moneybags.

Since we get the human race through them, we'll have to continue playing along and taking their crap.

Heroic indeed are the Mormon men with multiple wives!

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