Agreed, fire Provost Robel. Immediately.

That’s it in a nutshell.

And never date a woman with a tattoo.

This is above my head. I still haven’t figured out how anything written by howling dog Zimmerman is even comparable to any sentence written by Faulkner.

Bonne merde. Merci, Monsieur Dinh.

It was both predictable and highly inevitable that headlines yesterday saw Pompeo claiming that the US is ready for military action against Turkey. It was clear over three years ago that Turkey was in Israel’s gunsights, which of course means the US would be ordered to turn on its Turkish ally and use American troops and money to accomplish zionist goals (as usual).

If there is a military coup in the US I’m sure after the smoke clears you will find Israel’s fingerprints. And after they liberate us from Donald Trump–barring any show of gratitude for their efforts–we will all be herded into gulags. For a concise view of life in the gulag see: anything by Solzhenitsyn.

At this moment, Washington DC appears to me to be taking on the vertiginous warp and woof of a David Lynch film. I expect, any moment now, to turn on my tv set to catch the drift in DC and end up seeing a crippled midget dancing to 70s pop tunes and singing in Middle English.

Individuals are free to express their opinion about current Israeli policies and Israeli treatment of Palestinians by NOT buying Made in Israel products, e.g. Teva drugs and medical equipment, and not buying products by foreign companies with substantial investments in Israel — this includes Starbucks, Coca Cola and Nestle.

In the late '90s when the Feds froze highway funds due to non-attainment of even the old, liberal air quality standards, the BROC (Budgetary Responsibility Oversight Committee) composed of well-intentioned but appallingly ignorant Georgia state legislators commissioned a study by the Performance Division of the Department of Audits to determine what could be done to improve air quality enough the get the fund flowing again so their developer buddies could pave, baby, pave. I guess it never occurred to them that their own DOT had studied it to death with not a single new revelation in years. Ground level ozone, as it happens, is caused primarily by the vast pine forests upwind of Atlanta, that with Hartsfield Airport, the incredible number of trucking distribution centers, and, because of the racial chasm, the nation's longest average commute, you can outlaw charcoal grills, wood burning fireplaces, two stroke weed whackers, mandate the cleanest of designer fuels, etc., and not dent Atlanta's air quality. It's an incurable urban melanoma and the amount of money they're passing the hat for won't even buy a bandaid.

From the movie, Body Heat:

Oscar: We've got more of everything bad since the [heat] wave started. It's the crisis atmosphere. People dress
different, feel different, sweat
more. They wake up cranky and they
never recover. Look at Lowenstein.
(a flash of smile)
Things are just a little askew. Pretty soon people think the old rules aren't in effect. They start breaking them. Figure no one'll care, cause it's emergency time… time out.

I used to work for the State of Georgia, doing work which took me to every little county seat in that great state. In the evenings after a hot day, the black folks would come out, often dressed as if for a party, and promenade down the middle of the streets until after dark. It was something Ray Bradbury would have written about had he seen it.

I hate to say this for all of the Daniel Websters here, but "funeralize" is a legitimate word – we just don't use it. I heard a black girl in a booth in Atlanta keep saying how she'd been "discipled" and thought that was the stupidest thing I'd heard, but when I looked it up, it's a legitimate usage, but again, primarily used as black church speak.

On another topic, if at every funeral, two gang-bangers get whacked, so that when the two killed at this funeral are buried four more are sent onward, in 21 such iterations, that would be 1,480,000 fewer gang-bangers robbing pizza guys, driving crazy with their heads below the wheel, grabbing at their crotches when your woman walks by, etc.

I'm the anonymous who mentioned War and Peace. Madame Bovary is all about the sexy bad boy/boring nice guy contrast. That novel is about nothing else but that.

No. "Madame Bovary" is about the triumph of the reductionistic/materialistic world view. Flaubert once famously wrote, "I am Madame Bovary." Like Emma, he would rather die than live in a world that no longer believes in love.

"[Rodolphe,the Roissy-esque playboy] had heard such stuff so many times that her words meant very little to him. Emma was just like any other mistress; and the charm of novelty, falling down slowly like a dress, exposed only the eternal monotony of passion, always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of such great expertise, the differences of sentiment beneath the sameness of their expressions. Because he had heard such-like phrases murmured to him from the lips of the licentious or the venal, he hardly believed in hers; you must, he thought, beware of turgid speeches masking commonplace passions; as though the soul’s abundance does not sometimes spill over in the most decrepit metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of their needs, their ideas, their afflictions, and since human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing-bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars."

(The reality is that Zuckerberg has had the same unspectacular girlfriend, to whom he appears devoted, since he started Facebook. Monogamy is a huge time-saver.)

Very true. Celibacy is an even great time-saver, which is how Sorkin portrays Zuckerberg's lifestyle in The Social Network (besides a "quickie" in a bathroom stall). Zuckerberg, unlike Saverin and Parker, is not distracted by women.

Asian wife, silly (and vaguely gay, actually – real men don't do Facebook) 'social net' website. A screaming beta.

I hope you're being sarcastic. Both Zuckerberg and Obama have homely, non-white wives, and both men could be characterized as vaguely gay. However, they are definitely not "screaming beta"s. Oh well. I guess it's part of the transvaluation of all values that white men now define alpha males by their women.

Steve is so, so much smarter than his readers on this issue. While they see him as a dumb African socialist interloper, Steve pretty accurately recognizes Obama as what he is–basically a smart, middle class white guy with dark skin and an unusual life story who reinvented himself as a black guy for reasons of political opportunism and self-fulfillment.

I agree Steve is ahead of all commentators on this issue. However, I think it's even more complicated than you suggest. I've suggested in my previous comments that one of Obama's models was Michael Corleone. Like Michael, Obama is cool, self-possessed, and responsible. Michael did not chase after women like his knuckleheaded brother, Sonny. I think Obama learned that lesson well.

There is a difference, however, between Michael Corleone and Obama: Michael knew he could never be president because of his ethnicity and religion (remember the book and movie were both completed within 10 years of the Kennedy assassination. Puzo and Copolla were very fatalistic about the promise of America for the immigrant). No doubt Obama identified with Corleone's disillusionment. Obama obsessed over his father's race and immigrant status. But, at some point, Obama had a "aha moment." Obama realized, unlike Michael, he is a WASP. He could be the president because he's black and, most importantly, the right kind of white person. (Go here to hear Bill Clinton explain that Obama is a black man acceptable to "upscale cultural liberals.")

In Puzo's world view, being the right kind of white person gets you into Harvard Law School and the CIA; being the wrong kind of white person gets you assassinated

A long time ago I pretended to be a professional photographer to document Hosea William's "Freedom March" in Forsyth Co., GA. Martial Law had been declared for the march area and all of the journalists/photographers were grouped into one area prior to the march. A black photographer was loading film into his camera and threw the cardboard box and wrapper on the ground. Without thinking, I picked up his trash and dropped it in the open camera case slung around his neck. His response: "Who the f*** do you think you are?" I just stared at him and he didn't throw it back on the ground – at least then.

I lived in downtown Atlanta and endured a number of "Freakniks". Over time I've come to the conclusions that they are nothing at all like us and that for us to preserve who we are and to preserve our values, we need to make them keep their distance.

I care a great deal. I lived around Piedmont Park for over a decade and the killing hit me low in the guts. Nikosi is what brought me here the first time, then to all of the related sites and I'm a daily visitor to each. That rat-bastard was my personal tipping point, when I realized that the current "status quo" is untenable. I've been waiting for that worthless piece of excrement to enter the judicial system to be macerated. It may grind slowly, but it grinds exceeding fine, as his mammy knows full well. He's f*ckered for all time and set me on my present course.

A couple more random comments after scanning through the ones above:

To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell. Milton

It's the dog that don't bark you gotta watch for.

The response by the idiots "running" Detroit cracks me up. If someone is incapable of driving a car and is damaging property and threatening lives, a responsible person removes them from the driver's seat. The assertion that having someone competent come in from the outside to make responsible decisions is tantamount to a return to plantations and slavery is so absurd it would be funny if it weren't so tragic. Being bypassed as incompetent failures and having their power and titles usurped is the real issue. They don't give a rat's ass about dey con, constit, constuits, de peoples what voted dem in. I can only imagine what an objective outsider might find when given full access for what passes for government: waste, fraud, abuse, nepotism, fictitious vendors and employees, collusive contracts, play for pay, and pure foolishness. The alternative is to let the new law be passed preventing intervention and stand by for the inevitable implosion to occur, something which 10 years ago I never would have imagined happening in the US. Disgraceful.

Zenster,

Go research the Lebanese civil war and you'll find the Christian minority was running the country and made Beirut the "Paris of the Middle East" until the Muslim majority blew it all to hell. Lebanese Christians are some of the finest people I've known and bear scant resemblance to the Saudis, Syrians, Jordanians, Egyptians, etc. I've worked with. PS, I was there. No one doubts your fervor, but your scope is a little narrow.

Random comments:

When I went through Navy boot camp, very few of the blacks in my company could swim and had to go through drown-proofing – not really swimming, but floating tests – to finish. I swam competitively from age 8 through junior high and won all of the sports week swimming events I entered and don't recall a single black swimming in the competition. How many blacks have you see on the podia in swimming competitions or the Olympics?

The Spartan mindset isn't part of the American black culture. The intrinsic rewards of private glory, of that type of growth and sacrifice, doesn't register as meaningful in some cultures – go through hell or ring the bell? That's a no-brainer.

It's ironic that Obama has completely abused the finest, most capable military ever assembled and is in the process of gutting it through budget cuts and reductions in force, and the outrage devoted to merely recruiting non-whites into the SEALS is so great. Where's the outrage over Obama gutting our military to keep the EBT cards funded? I can only imagine the burning hatred behind the eyes of the career military staff who have to look at that impostor face to face, his pathetic weakness, indecisiveness, absence of character, his glib emptiness. Study Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" and he's the antithesis of a wise leader. Now that's outrageous.

Hmmmmmm, I watched the clip and if anything I'd say it's taking shots at the stupidity of white guilt, not endorsing it. The old guy in the chair – "Because she's black . . ." is saying 'you wouldn't have let a white person dominate your show the way you allowed this black to'. I call this one high and on the outside.

I traveled extensively with a black guy while working for one of our great southern states. He was black college educated, built like a running back, and dressed impeccably. Eating lunch in a restaurant one day, he had a black girl lay over the back of his side of the booth and ask him all sassy like, "You like to party?" A quick exchange of numbers and he was set for the rest of that week. Happened in almost every town we hit, big or small. He talked about tattooing all of his "cocaine Annies" when we weren't traveling – "Stealin' dey pride" – until he tried rock, lost about 30 lbs and half of his mind before he was able to kick, but it still cost him his job. That was the last I heard of him. To complete the cultural portrait, he had an out-of-wedlock son he saw infrequently.

Angie Miller, Executive Director of Community Action Duluth is the point DWL for this campaign. Under increasing fire for the accusatory nature of the campaign, the 15 organizations behind it are going to meet to discuss its future. Miller stated ". . . no way, no how . . ." are we backing down. We shall see.

Interestingly, while the city endorses the campaign, it did not provide funding.

Her email: [email protected]

The article:
http://www.wdio.com/article/stories/s2476946.shtml

Their ad campaign is likely to have the opposite effect. Whites are offended at the accusatory message and the hyphenated ethnicities feel heightened resentment and entitlement. It's only going to increase polarization. I live in the same region in a county with 3% non-whites and ask anyone on the street and they will tell you they're damn glad of it. Go be "special" somewhere else thankya very much.

Paul,

You ruined my morning – I always thought those said "canoeist" and thought it was great so many people in and around town were big on paddling.

SuperCracker, I hear you but you'd be surprised. A black female state employee attacked her supervisor who was legitimately on her case about her performance with a pair of scissors and it took a year to go through the HR process to remove her. Another black state employee, an accountant with gender issues, developed a drug problem and got passed around from assignment to assignment, barely able to speak or stay awake at times, until he assaulted a co-worker on an assignment and forced the issue out into the open. It's been my experience that white managers will very often take the path of least resistance with a black employee rather than run the gauntlet to get something done, especially in a large bureaucracy in which it can go unnoticed.

Look at the crime wave which hit Lenox Square Mall (Atlanta) when that station opened and it's no wonder outer Atlanta has resisted the honor. It was a feeding frenzy for the previously pedestrian denizens of East Lake. I worked downtown and rode MARTA until it became too sketchy to ride home on the nights I had to work late.

Nice to see NY's finest imposing a little order – that's a good, if symbolic, start.

Fiscal Conservative back again.

Against my better judgment, I'm going to take another kick at the tar baby (Br'er Rabbit reference). Some of the responses to my comments warrant a reply.

Paul chose not to post one of my comments yesterday which, while it may have been inflammatory, might have shed more light on my point of view.

First, I spent more than a decade in Georgia state government, much of it tracking every dime of federal and state money which flowed through county school boards, right down to watching the little kiddies go through the cafeteria lines and reviewing applications for free and reduced price meals. The purpose of the maps I referenced was to show how many counties are considered chronically poor. In those counties are multitudes of white children receiving free lunches. My question was this: would you feed poor white children and let poor black children starve? It's unlikely you're going to be able to re-segregate schools at this point. If you would let the little pequeninos (means "little ones" and is the origin of "pickannies") starve, do you realize that children who are deprived of the necessary proteins and fats are going to be biologically, socially, and emotionally disadvantaged out of the gate because their brains cannot develop normally? In addition to the severe cultural disadvantages black children face, this would guarantee they become an even greater burden on society. Ultimately it comes down to how you see this problem playing out. In response to a couple of comments, it also hinges on whether you regard them as human at all.

I'm all for personal responsibility and motivating people to do for themselves but children by definition lack the capacity to make rational decisions, especially when they have no choice but to view their world as normal.

I despise our steady drift towards socialism from Johnson forward and believe charity is a personal matter. I believe anyone 18 and older receiving government support should be made to work in any capacity which benefits the society they burden. That said, I wouldn't watch a dog starve, much less a child.

He actually found an answer to Sigmund Freud's baffled question, "What do women want?" and all of a sudden, women's behaviour, something which has baffled the greatest writers, thinkers, and scientists from forever, wasn't all that mysterious anymore.

"He had had such things said to him so many times that none of them had any freshness for him. Emma was like all his other mistresses; and as the charm of novelty gradually slipped from her like a piece of her clothing, he saw revealed in all its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and always speaks the same language… Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Don was not born a member of the WASP/Yankee/East Coast elite like his rivals Pete Campbell and Roger Sterling. He's not even named Donald Draper. He's Dick Whitman, the son of a hilly billy prositute.

A recurring theme to the show is that Don is missing and no one know where he is. Everyone, including his own wife, senses that he might light out for the territories without giving a moment's notice. He's the spiritual heir to Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby.

The show makes excellent use of classic bluegrass and folk songs, or more appropriately called roots music. Don, after all, is a man severed from his roots. And that is really what the show is about: who is Don Draper?

"PATET EXITUS. An Illuminee, they would tell us, should make away with himself rather than betray his Order; and they also represent a secret voluptousness to be inherent in suicide." — Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism Vol. 4, Abbe Barruel

Simon's nonfiction book Homicide is excellent, including this amazing passage.

But in one rowhouse on Newington Avenue, two dozen human beings have learned to leave food where it falls, to pile soiled clothes and diapers in a corner of the room, to lie strangely still when parasites crawl across the sheets, to empty a bottle of Mad Dog or T-Bird and then piss its contents into a plastic bag at the edge of the bed, to regard a bathroom cleaning product and a plastic bag as an evening's entertainment. Historians note that when the victims of the Nazi holocaust heard that the Allied armies were within a few miles of liberating the camps, some returned to scrub and sweep the barracks and show the world that human beings lived there. But on Newington Avenue the rubicons of human existence have all been crossed. The struggle itself has been mocked, and the unconditional surrender of one generation presses hard upon the next.

Unfortunately his fictional work is not at the same level. I think the First 48 is much better than The Wire because the former features more reporting and less ideology.

The smartest thing liberals ever did, and it may not even have been on purpose, was to use hollywood and the media to make leftist political beliefs a status symbol…

Have hope, my friends, there was a time not too long ago when all educated people believed in eugenics. If there is a conservative renaissance in the western world, HBD will lead the way.

Not going to happen. Geeks don’t inspire great artists to create. Just the opposite, geeks (and their plans for eugenics) only inspire ridicule. Dr Stranglove is the funniest movie ever made.

You’re right about one thing, though: Sarah Palin does not appeal to our smarts. She appeals to our sense of beauty, which makes her very dangerous to the ruling elite because the regeneration of the western world will be lead by those who are motivated by a love of beauty, e.g. Alex DeLarge and Travis Bickle.

That Balzac line Rosenbaum quotes, “behind every great fortune is a great crime,” is inscribed on the title page of The Godfather. Apparently a great introductory book if you’re not from the continential United States and plan to get involved in US politics. In the second movie, Hyman Roth promies Michael that the plan is for him to be president one day.

up yours new yawk said…

What’s interesting about this Madoff scandal is the growing list of liberals and neoconservatives who felt that involvement with charities that work to keep the Jewish bloodlines clean are respectable enterprises to be involved with.

How many Jews are castigating whites for the slightest hint of racial identity and then at the same time funding various “keep it Jewish” charities?

I’m reminded of Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, the wily, energetic man of shady origins — the patriarch of the Snopes family was named “Ab” (Abraham?) — who, over the course of three novels, moved from clerk to bank president, attempting to obtain respectability in the town of Jefferson while simultaneously destroying the town’s way of life.

“…customers who had traded there for years, mostly serving themselves and putting the correct change into the cigar box inside the cheese cage, now having to deal for each trivial item with a man whose name they had not even heard two months ago, who answered Yes and No to direct questions and who apparently never looked directly or long enough at any face to remember the name which went with it, yet who never made mistakes in any matter pertaining to money.”

— Faulkner, The Hamlet

Of coures, I’m also reminded of Jay “The Great” Gatsby aka Jimmy Gatz.

Putting purported differences in verbal ability aside, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see some very influential Chinese-Americans start to hit their stride in respectable culture in the next decade or so, pushing the post WWII Jews out of the limelight a bit.

Times are already a-changin’. In the “Dark Knight” the accountant for the Gotham mob is Chinese!

I read on another thread the comment that this sort of political corruption happens everywhere. But that is not true. Not on the scale that it occurs in Chicago. Obama specifically chose to begin his political career in the most corrupt city in America.

“At ten o’clock on a Saturday morning the conference room began to fill up. Besides the Five Families of New York, there were representives from ten other Families across the country, with exception of Chicago, that black sheep of the world. They had given up trying to civilize Chicago, and they saw no point in including those mad dogs in this important conference.”

— Puzo, “The Godfather” (281)

The point is that our country’s two biggest states are just very different, and much of that has its roots in their very different terrain.

Can you imagine Bill Kristol or David Brooks making this point in the NYT? I can’t either. It’s one of the most basic conservative concepts which cosmopolitan elites either can’t seem to grasp or willfully ignore.

Perhaps it’s a concept best conveyed by a novelist. Cormac McCarthy’s work from Blood Meridian through the Border triology to No Country for Old Men is one long brilliant examination of the intersection of terrain, wild life, and human beings along the Texas/Mexico border from the 1830’s to 1980.

Having a family of one’s own is simply out of reach for most men — and the social cost that will exact is going to be large I think.

The novelist Michael Houellebecq suggests sexual tourism to third world countries as the only alternative left for many single men and women in the West. He shocks by simply suggesting an honest exchange.

“Something is definitely happening that’s making Westerners stop sleeping with each other. Maybe it’s something to do with narcissism, or individualism, the cult of success, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that from about the age of twenty-five or thirty, people find it very difficult to meet new sexual partners…. So they end up spending the next thirty years, almost the entirety of their adult lives, suffering permanent withdrawal….

“Therefore,” I went on, “you have several hundred million Westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction. They spend their lives looking without finding it, and they are completely miserable. On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation, and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality.… It’s an ideal trading opportunity.”

Houellebecq’s relationship with his mother is similiar to the relationship between Obama and Stanley Ann. She was a doctor who, during the 60’s, sent Houellebecq to live with his grandmother in France while she attempted to fix the third world. The really is something contemptible about the covert sexaul nature of white women’s concern for the third world.

Reading iSteve on a daily basis, I’ve noticed that many of the problems addressed are caused by the inability of people to perceive the world as it is or, perhaps, the blatant discard for seeing the world as it is. My term for this is Madame Bovary Syndrome.

In the novel Madame Bovary, a shady dream merchant, M. Lheureux, the 19th century version of a platinum card, loans Emma Bovary the money she needs to pursue her romantic dreams without her husband’s knowledge. When her bill comes due, she is reduced to begging her ex-lover for the money to pay off the mortgage her husband has taken out on his property. The modern condition can almost be defined by the refusal to realize that the bill will come due one day.

As I watched the estatic reaction to the result of the presidential election, I was reminded of a scene in another of Flaubert’s novels, Sentimental Education, that takes place after the abdication of Louis-Philippe and the restoration of a republic. It’s difficult to determine if the joyous atmosphere is based on the belief that a single act will create universal peace, freedom, and justice, or if the crowd is ecstatic, like Emma Bovary, because it offers them a release from the drudgery of their daily routine. We are desparate to escape our ennui, desperate for change.

But even though Flaubert could see through the illusions, he would have no more sympathy for testing99 than he did for Emma’s husband, the quintessential “good guy”, Charles Bovary. Women need heroes. Poets need heroes. Otherwise the beauty is drained from the world and life becomes tedious.

Is an alpha male the same as a hero? I believe this is a question posed, not only by Flaubert, but also by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness (a novel referenced three separate times in Dreams from my Father). To equate the two is nihilistic, is it not?

Perhaps that’s Obama’s secret. All those single women that voted for him think that he’s the hero that’s going to pay off their debt.

So Obama’s war time consilgere is Rahm Emmanuel. Is Michael Signator his Al Neri?

It is a beautiful book. It is deeply introspective and thoughtful. I wish I had known more people like Barack Obama in my life. Instead, the vast majority of the jerks I went to school with were either vapid preppies looking to become bond traders, or obtuse jocks.

I’m guessing you’re a female, and I’m sure as Obama becomes more powerful, the book becomes more beautiful and more introspective and more thoughtful to you. “Dreams’ is perhaps the most deeply cynical book I’ve ever read about the differences between men and women. I’ll say this much about Obama: he’s nobody’s fool.

Kay Adams: Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don’t have men killed.

Michael Corleone: Oh. Who’s being naive, Kay?

Obama Sr. was quite likely the only East African in Honolulu in November 1960.

Not true.

“At the same time many haole youths flip over the local dolls of various strains and combinations, for Paradise has some of the most lushly beautiful women on earth. Many local studs are frantic to bed a soul sister who is not a pro; propaganda painting their passion and horizontal ability has fallen on receptive ears. Afro-American brothers make out with all kinds of dolls. One pure black African student from Ghana wreaked havoc among co-eds at the university, and the wife of a prominent while local politician considered shucking her husband for him; another student from Kenya split leaving two pregnant blondes.”

— Frank Marshall Davis, Livin’ the Blues (318)

I finished your book and it’s clear that you’re way ahead of anyone else currently writing on Obama. If Davis or some other black man is, in fact, Obama’s father, I don’t really see how it would invalidate anything you’ve reading. You understand the man and his ambition.

“Except for a few places like Boley, Oklahoma and Mound Bayou, Mississippi, there were no black mayors in my youth. From the Reconstruction era until 1928, when Oscar Depriest was elected in Chicago, there was not a black congressman anywhere and pitfully few judges. That, too, has changed for the better. Until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, we could aim our hope no higher than selection for what was termed the president’s “Kitchen Cabinet.” Since then we have been inching our way slowly toward the Oval Room.”

— Frank Marshall Davis, Livin’ the Blues (332)

If Captain Ahab, a character in a novel written in 1851, was based on John Brown, who didn’t become nationally prominent until 1856, Herman Melville had some interesting abilities.

He certainly did have interesting abilities. Melville was an Old Testament prophet. I guess we don’t believe in such things these days, but perhaps we’re living in an age that’s superficial and overly optimistic.

“The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave-yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;–not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.” — Moby Dick (465)

A commentator named “Tommy” analyzed “Moby Dick” for the sort of nautical metaphors that Obama uses and came up short.

In terms of “Moby Dick” and “Dreams”, I think the comparison is more about substance than style. Obama has inherited the the unbearable self-righteousness that possessed both Captain Ahab and the 60’s radicals.

“To put a stop to the hand-wringing, Rudd, who once told a Columbia history professor he had read Moby Dick nine times, gave a speech declaring that, a revolutionary dedicated to destroying the United States, he was a monomaniacal as Captain Ahab pursuing the Great White Whale. Bernadine Dohrn praised Charles Manson, the cult leader who ordered the Sharon Tate murders, as a “right-on” revolutionary, and a leaflet handed out to War Council participants made it clear that the time for armed struggle was now.”

— Castellucci, The Big Dance (122)

“Mayor Richard Daley played a perfect Moby Dick for us — white and fleshy, he reeked with the stench of evil.”

“Our Captain Ahab was Tom Hayden, former president of SDS, new leader of the National Mobilization to End the War, the coalition leading the convention protest.”

— Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days (121)

Ahab was (probably) modeled partly on John Brown, a person evoked by Ayers as a man to emulate, and partly General Sherman.

Melville understood that there is nothing more terrifying than people who are anti-racists and anti-war. In other words, people who cannot accept that evil is, to use Henry James’ phrase, “the bulwark of God’s power inexpugnable”.

I would really like to believe the election of Barack Obama would finally satisfy the desire of the chosen few (the SWPL crowd) to sanctify the wicked, but I’m not optimistic. Actually, I’m a bit of a fatalist. I can’t help but wonder how many people, the last time we elected a senator from Illinois president, asked “what’s the worse that could happen?”

I’ve thought all along it was due to anti-Jewish animus.
What, exactly, are your thoughts on this?
Oh, I know Obama has little love for whites, but I have felt he feels the same way about Jews, too.

While I was over at Jack Cashill’s site reading his articles on why he thinks Ayers was the ghostwriter on Obama’s first book, I came across an article where Cashill makes a point that I haven’t seen made any place else (forgive me, Steve, if you have point the following point). In Obama’s speech given in 2002 in opposition to the US invasion of Iraq, he stated “What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” Cashill doesn’t believe Obama wrote that and neither do I. Why would Obama single out two Straussian Jews when he could have named Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Rice, or any number of other possible villians in the Bush administration?

Cashill seems to think Ayers is responsible. I disagree. I suspect David Axelrod is more likely than Ayers to have come up with the names of Perle and Wolfowitz. The Jewish Axelrod is, by his own admission, the son of “classic New York Leftists.” He graduated in 1977 with a degree in political science from the University of Chicago, so clearly he’s familiar with the influence of Leo Strauss.

There is a split between Zionist Jews and Marxist Jews. The latter group blames the former for betraying the communist/civil rights movement in the US. I believe this explains Obama’s mixed feelings for Jews.

Obama’s making the same point made by Kathy Boudin in this quote — “…the Old Left argued their cases on technical, not political grounds, and they were always in the courtroom appealing, never in the street demonstrating” — that can be found in Big Dance: The Untold Story of Weather-Man Kathy Boudin and the Terrorist Family That Committed the Brinks Robbery Murders.

“I find it more plausible that Obama used to be a secret moderate masquerading as a radical..”

What are you basing that claim on? Let’s return to what the man has written. Steve claims the nautical metaphors in Obama’s memoirs are plausible because Obama has read a lot of Conrad and Melville. And, indeed, Obama does mention Conrad more than any other author in “Dreams from my Father.” So if you want to understand Obama, read Conrad. Here is a good place to start.

Or perhaps you’re right. Obama is a moderate. Maybe Ayers really did write “Dreams from my Father” because it’s Ayers who was greatly influenced by Conrad and, just as his favorite author did, Ayers joined the merchant marine, and, just like one of Conrad’s main charcters, Ayers eventually became a bomb-throwing terrorist.

It’s rumored that a lot of Muslims are secret moderates, as well, but it’s only a rumor.

Steve, I think your post about the passive-aggressive behavior of Obama’s mother is the most insightful analysis of Obama that I’ve seen. But I have to say I’m a bit about confused about the conclusion you drew from your otherwise superb reading of the book.

“But he fell hook, line, and sinker for her canonization of his absent father, with whom he only spent one month after the age of two.”

While that certainly may have been true at some point, especially before he made his trip to Kenya, that obviously wasn’t the case by the time he wrote his book. You correctly understood the author’s intent: women are fools, especially white women. It would appear that, as he admits in this interview, Philip Roth did in fact very much shape his sensibility.

I’m starting to lean that way myself. If Obama’s elected president, it will be because of those silly white women, like his mother, whom he holds in such contempt. And having defeated both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin along the way will only make that victory more sweet.

She had only one ally in all this, and that was the distant authority of my father. Increasingly, she would remind me of his story, how he had grown up poor, in a poor country, in a poor continent; how his life had been hard, as hard as anything that Lolo might have known. He hadn’t cut corners though, or played all the angles. He was diligent and honest, no matter what it cost him. He had led his life according to principles that demanded a different kind of toughness, principles that promised a higher form of power. I would follow his example, my mother decided. I had no choice. It was in the genes.

That was written by a man who understands human nature. Give women the illusion of exoticism, perserve that illusion by keeping them at a distance, and never let them know that you see all the angles and cut every corner.

In the following passage Obama tells his sister visiting from Africa about his white girlfriend.

Well…there was a woman in New York that I loved. She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost years. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. That’s how it was.

In the Godfather, we first meet Michael and Kay during the wedding scene, where they are sitting at their own private table, away from the Corleone family. Later, when Vito Corleone is shot, Michael and Kay are shopping together in New York. Not very manly on Michael’s spot. He’s still a youthful and idealistic kid, living in a dream world with his Ivy League-educated WASP girlfriend.

In “Dreams,” Obama claims to have visited his girlfriend’s family:

‘Anyway, one weekend she invited me to her family’s country house. It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves. ‘The house was very old. The library was filled with old books and pictures of her grandfather with famous people he had known – presidents, diplomats, industrialists. ‘There was this tremendous gravity to the room. Standing in that room, I realised that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as could be. ‘And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.

She’s not just white, she’s really white. Obama breaks up with her because he realizes, like Michael Corleone, that they couldn’t live together in the same world. Remember Micheal breaks up with Kay in the Godfather and then hides away in Sicily. While there he marries an Sicilian girls and discovers his true identity. She is murdered and he returns to America transformed. In “Dreams,” Obama’s trip to Kenya is similiarly transformative.

By the way, what are the dreams that Obama inherited from his father? Once again, I return to The Godfather:

Vito:I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life–I don’t apologize–to take care of my family, and I refused to be a fool, dancing on the string held by all those bigshots. I don’t apologize–that’s my life–but I thought that, that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the string. Senator Corleone; Governor Corleone. Well, this wasn’t enough time, Michael. It wasn’t enough time.

Michael: We’ll get there, pop. We’ll get there.”

Obama’s dream is to be the Big Man. He’s almost there.

Below is a quote from “Dreams.” I can’t remember to whom Obama attributes it, but I don’t think it matters. I suspect these are really all his.

“I tell you one thing I admire about white folks,” he continued. “They know who they are. Look at the Italians. They didn’t care about the American flag and all that when they got here. First thing they did is put together the Mafia to make sure their interests were met. The Irish — they took over the city hall and found their boys jobs. The Jews, some thing…you telling me they care more about some black kids in the South Side than they do ’bout they relatives in Israel? Shit. It’s about bood, Barack, looking after your own. Period. Black people the only ones stupid enough to worry about their enemies.”

I’m not sure that dullness means he wrote it. I’ve read quite a few deadly-dull novels that were ghostwritten.

I believe he wrote it because he’s extraordinarily perceptive about what people are seaching for. Here’s, I think, is his best paragraph:

At that moment, I felt as if I were being given a window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad’s dark savages, 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.

Only with hard, cold eyes could a man see so clearly through his mother's illusions and desires. He has clearly learned how to remain removed from women and allow them to turn him into their ideal.

There are, indeed, many nautical references in Moby Dick, but much more intriguing is what is missing from the Great American Novel — women. The only appearance of a female is made by Capt Ahab's wife, a woman who remains nameless, better to symoblize every woman who has had her husband desert her to pursue his burning ambition.

I see him as a Michael Corleone, I mean, he doesn't really hide it. He named the Godfathers I & II as the best movies of all time in an interview he did with Katie Couric (if he was striving for authentically black, he would have named Scarface instead). Do we know anything about the rich white girl, his Kay Adams, whom he broke up with? I wonder if that story might be apocryphal.

You are probably right, Steve, when you suggest Ayers was inspired by Obama's book rather than the other way around. Obviously Obama is tremendously appealing to certain types of people, like ex-60's radicals.

It seems many commentators assume that, because his rise has been so meteoric, Obama is someone's puppet. I think he sees all the angles as clearly as he saw into his mother's heart. I imagine he has a lot of people believing they are potential kingmakers. He's very good, and ruthless.

If he ends up becoming the captain of this great nation it will be interesting to see where the ride take us. Who can forget what happened to Capt Ahab's ship?