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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Apr '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
I'm impressed that he found anyone who remembers knowing him back then. His people trail has seemed almost as denuded as his paper trail.
Jul '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
My feet hum over the dry walks.
Yeah, they're humming "What a self-indulgent and laughable load".
Nobody I knew would write anything resembling this with a straight face. Perhaps he didn't, either - but it's the writing of someone in love with himself. This kid had time for girls? What are girls when you can put words to paper about yourself, with no limits on what you can write?
Golly! The mind boggles!
Apr '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
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.
accede [verb (used without object)]
1.to give consent, approval, or adherence; agree; assent; to accede to a request; to accede to the terms of a contract.
2.to attain or assume an office, title, or dignity; succeed (usually followed by to ): to accede to the throne.
Jan '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
"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."
He gave his girlfriend reading assignments? To catch a sense of what he speaks?
Apparently, he was the solution he was waiting for.
Jun '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Jun '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Anyone who cares enough to research for a minute know who our president is.
Stanley Kurtz's book told us. Hannity and Beck told us.
Sep '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
The black man who looks much better by comparison to these memoirs:
Tiger Woods.
Incroyable.
Sep '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
i'm just wondering if Alex did in fact share that "irreconcilable ambivalence" , and if she would have admitted it.
Oct '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
The man simply learned to play the cards better, everyone suffers under the limits of personality and the man seems to be running out of cards to play. Frustration in his personal drive to fullfilment will dearly cost this Nation..
Oct '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Ironically, while narcissists themselves sui generis, they are all rooting around in the same pen. Willa Cather captures the type:
Jan '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Well, maybe it's just me, but I'm not that hard on the guy for this. I'm just glad nobody pulled out stuff I wrote comtemperaneously, I would sure be shuffling my feet. But, if I'm going to pile on, I would say he's writing more for himself than anything else.
Jun '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Thanks, Felicia. After two sentences I couldn't stand it any longer. I think I have an allergy. I can't read the transcript of his speeches either--must be the nausea.
I've written a lot of love letters to myself. Sadly my love is unrequited.
Nov '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
It seems excessive, and petty, to complain about Obama's youthful philosophizing.
Shall we next discuss how he picked his nose when he was three?
Obama's critics should stay focused on the big wrong things he's doing these days, and not get silly about words he wrote as a kid.
But if that's a subject worth discussing as harmless private entertainment, then I'd give Obama big points for trying.
Obviously he was strutting his intellect stuff for a bookish girl (note the several references to sex), and yes, his writing is pretentious and self-absorbed . . . but, really now, who isn't, especially as a youth? That's the process of figuring out who you are and who you want to be.
His musings ( e.g., the awareness of "the relation between fertility and death" and the recognition that the richness of Eliot's conservatism is superior to "bourgeois liberalism") show he spent time contemplating fundamental truths and questions about the human situation.
He was a kid with plenty of mental horsepower--but lazy, which manifests as superficiality. Too bad he didn't turn out better. Leftist indoctrination, disguised as education, ruined him . . . and many others.
Edited on May 3, 2012 at 8:46amMay '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
There are actually people who write such letters to each other? And they're running the country?
Can't be true. Must be a hoax. Please be a hoax.
Dec '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Diane Ellis, Ed.
Too hard on him? Maybe.
You should look at the feature in Vanity Fair and share whether your impressions of him improve or worsen. · 11 hours ago
I accepted the challenge! My opinions of him neither improved, not worsened. They solidified.
He is a rootless, academic, po-mo leftie. I always suspected he intentionally made himself 'black,' as well. And this confirms it.
The only thing that is new is I expected he was a pretty radical leftist all along. But, having read this, I find it entirely plausible that the community organizing racket in Chicago re-radicalized him.
And in regards to the letters, knowing that the first one was written to a young woman who edited a literary magazine while loving her some Derrida...well, it makes total sense.
The bit about jogging? I am pretty sure you can find lots of that in my juvenalia.
Sep '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Like the new Nike t-shirts popping up: "Lazy but Talented." And those wearing them are going through much the same indoctrination, I'd imagine.
Astonishing:
He was a kid with plenty of mental horsepower--but lazy, which manifests as superficiality. Too bad he didn't turn out better. Leftist indoctrination, disguised as education, ruined him . . . and many others. · 7 hours ago
Edited 7 hours ago
May '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
Turns out this is from page 1483 of the Affordable Care Act.
Aug '10
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
When you are brought up by a collection of grandparents and various stepfathers , uncles (Frank Marshall) that are just rotating boyfriends of your rootless mom, a protective narcissism is developed.
It is nurtured by grandparents especially and rarely too healthy.
This continued throughout his educational career. All show and no go, thus the lost grade transcripts and vaporised thesis and other papers.
As most of the media cocoon neglected to read the book , Dreams of My Father, they quickly pooh poohed the idea that there was a ghostwriter involved. Jack Cashill has done some pretty good research in pointing out who that ghost might have been. Then the writer was caught admitting it.
Turns out these two knew each other better than their account of their meeting.
Terrell is right.
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
KarlUB
Diane Ellis, Ed.
Too hard on him? Maybe.
You should look at the feature in Vanity Fair and share whether your impressions of him improve or worsen. · 11 hours ago
I accepted the challenge! My opinions of him neither improved, not worsened. They solidified.
He is a rootless, academic, po-mo leftie. I always suspected he intentionally made himself 'black,' as well. And this confirms it....
Thanks for sharing your impressions. I noticed, as you did, that the excerpt reveals that he intentionally adopted a "black identity", which at the time of these diaries and letters, was still entirely foreign to him. Fascinating.
Nov '11
Re: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama
If you promise to make me laugh like that every morning, I promise to start sending you money.