Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
In his forthcoming biography of Barack Obama, author David Maraniss turns to letters and diaries kept by former confidants and old flames of the young Obama to document the President's history. The biography, which has uncovered some inconsistencies in Obama's own memoirs, is already making the President squirm.
The present edition of Vanity Fair is running a short adaptation of Maraniss's work, which zeroes in on Obama's relationships with two ex-girlfriends, both white, from his early twenties. In a letter to girlfriend Alex McNear, with whom he had become acquainted at Occidental College, the young Obama wrote about literature and of his quest to find himself. Excerpts:
I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
[...]
Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.
Now, I've read neither Dreams from My Father nor The Audacity of Hope, but Ann Althouse thinks that these excerpts from his old letters should put to rest the notion that Bill Ayers ghost wrote the memoirs. "I am now willing to believe Obama wrote his own memoir," she writes. "This is that jejune 'creative writing' style that I was talking about back in 2009."
Jejune indeed. And entirely pretentious.
(h/t Mollie Hemingway)
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May '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
I tip my hat to one of the great b___s___ artists of all time. And I thought I could sling it. I am a rank amateur and I repent my pretensions in dust and ashes.
Jun '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Apparently, Obama didn't think he was Al Green then. He thought he was Woody Allen.
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
These are love letters?
Dec '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
You're too hard on him, Diane. He was in college. For a kid, I would say he's doing pretty well. Pretentious? Sure. But he's trying to say something real, and clearly still finding his voice.
The problem probably is that someone didn't help him harness that voice better. Or, perhaps, someone did, and he was too arrogant to take the advice.
But even in the latter case...well, I don't want anyone telling stories about what a pompous arse I was when I was 20!
Jun '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
The difference is, you changed...I'm assuming. Obama didn't.
Jul '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
And my cologne? Why it's Narcisse....
Jul '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
KarlUB: You're too hard on him, Diane. He was in college. For a kid, I would say he's doing pretty well. Pretentious? Sure. But he's trying to say something real, and clearly still finding his voice.
The problem probably is that someone didn't help him harness that voice better. Or, perhaps, someone did, and he was too arrogant to take the advice.
But even in the latter case...well, I don't want anyone telling stories about what a pompous arse I was when I was 20! · 9 minutes ago
I used to beat up kids like that and take their women. Well maybe not but it would be funny.
Apr '12
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
If he marries white, does he become president
Oct '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
He might have been sillier in some areas, but more ideologically pretentious then than now? I doubt it. I think he is probably as arrogant in his ideological convictions as any sophomore. The fact that he's been able to hide it behind a facade of statesmanlike gravitas--now crumbling--is what makes him dangerous.
Aug '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Is Ann Althouse sure he wrote this letter himself ?
May '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz - huh? What? Man, that was boring stuff he wrote!
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
This provides me with needed perspective: Barack Obama is improving with age. Let's help him mature still further by sending him back home this November.
Aug '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
I don't know... The guy was in college, and writing to impress a girl. Pretentiousness goes with the territory. I'd cut him a lot of slack on that. I once wrote a poem in college that was so bad and pretentious I still whimper a bit when I think about it.
In these letters, Obama comes across as pretentious but also well read and pretty smart. That's not the writing of someone who skated through college with bad marks on the affirmative action program. I don't think there's anything damning here at all.
There is perhaps one small red flag: his reference to " bourgeois liberalism". Depending on usage, this can mean anything from classical liberals (i.e. the Adam Smith kind), to Jewish bankers and merchants, to 'poseurs' who pretend to be leftist radicals while ensconced firmly in the luxuries of the middle class. In my experience, you rarely see that term used unless the writer is a postmodernist lefty or a young radical.
Jul '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Yes, you have lost your Job.
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Too hard on him? Maybe.
You should look at the feature in Vanity Fair and share whether your impressions of him improve or worsen.
Aug '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Hey folks, there are some moments when you've come home early and done another line, and like a fool keep talking through some letter and it never makes sense in the morning, much less 20-30 years later and you're president. Don't you hate that feeling ?
{nice work EJ}
Edited on May 3, 2012 at 2:03amMay '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
What kills me is that poor inner-city blacks somehow feel represented by this guy. First black President? By skin only.
If only Thomas Sowell or Bill Cosby could expect similar receptions.
Jul '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
"One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough."
From Dreams of My Polygamist Commie Father yet in fact it is a fabrication since Barrack's girlfriend at the time, Genevieve, has no such memory. Was this to impress Meesh? Or just to sell books and look cool. Waaaaaaah, I'm not black enough, Waaaaahhhhhh.
Apr '12
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Love letters to himself. Talk about living in a fantasy world. If I got this sort of letter, probably would have ended it pretty quickly.
Feb '12
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
College chicks dig jejune.