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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Daren Jonescu
Much has been said, here at American Thinker and elsewhere, about Barack
Obama's recent pair of teleprompted references to his (presumably) non-
existent sons.
Thomas Lifson toys with the notion that Obama might in fact have secret sons
, as a way of making sense of the seeming insanity of it. Selwyn Duke
suggests it might indicate brain damage from Obama's (presumably) past drug
use. (Funny, isn't it, how often one is left no choice but merely to
presume about the Cipher-in-Chief.) David Paulin asks whether Obama might
be the victim of a teleprompting prankster/saboteur.
All of these are reasonable speculations -- which is, in itself, reason to
be perturbed about America's current devolved state. However, I would like
to throw one more possibility into the mix, more straightforward, but no
less bizarre, than the others. I believe it is likely that Obama compared
the future prospects of "my daughters" to that of "my sons" precisely
according to a sincerely prepared and carefully vetted script.
Watching the two instances on video, it is clear that he does not blink in
either case, suggesting that he doesn't think he is making an error. True,
he didn't blink when he heard himself talking about 57 states, either. But
of course that one could plausibly be chalked up to genuine ignorance.
After all, why should a 47 year-old man, serving as one of the 100 elected
members of a body comprised of exactly 2 people from each U.S. state,
himself famously (and presumably) born in the 50th state, and running for
President, necessarily know how many states there are?
Arguing, as Selwyn Duke does, that every American school child, "when very
little," knows there are 50 states, misses the point, in as much as Obama
was not an American school child when he was very little. When he was very
little, he was (presumably) studying in Indonesia, where his homework on
American history was, presumably, very little. Thus, Duke's point that
Obama ought to have known how many states there are by the time he ran for
President is the height of unfairness. And we all know how Obama feels
about unfairness. (Which reminds me of another possible explanation for
offering imaginary sons to match his real daughters: equality, as in
familial justice, a "fair" distribution of genders in the Obama home.)
To display a similar level of ignorance about the composition of one's own
immediate family, however -- and to do it in exactly the same way, in
exactly the same context, on two different occasions -- now we're into the
realm of the supernaturally strange. This is why I doubt it was a mistake.
So what to make of it? Here is the text of one of the two almost identical
references:
I want women to control their own health choices, just like I want my
daughters to have the same economic opportunities as my sons -- we're not
turning back the clock.
He wants his daughters to have the same economic opportunities as his sons.
He wants to be born in Kenya when it's more advantageous than being born in
Hawaii. He wants to give detailed intimate descriptions of composite
girlfriends who never actually existed in concrete reality. He wants to be
a Harvard intellectual among middle class voters, and a cokehead seeker of
his African identity among black voters and anti-American leftists.
And if he wants all these contradictory things, why can't he have them?
After all, he is (presumably) Barack Hussein Obama. In what sense, then, to
get down to brass tacks, does he think he has sons to match his daughters?
In the same way, and for roughly the same reason, I suspect, that he
thought it was perfectly okay to have an imaginary birthplace to match his
real one: he is a megalomaniac, in the literal, clinical sense.
He is not a liar, or not simply a liar. He envisions himself as more than a
man. Not a god, exactly, but a kind of ethereal, roving force -- a
collective (or collectivist) energy enveloping the world.
The historical "majestic plural," colloquially known as "the royal we," is
the manner whereby those perceived as ruling by divine dispensation refer to
themselves. When such a man -- a king, for example, says "we," he
represents himself as the symbol of his entire kingdom, all things together
in one person. Obama turns this around. When he says "I," he seems to be
trying to portray the world -- or at least the world of desirable
possibilities -- as a mere symbol of himself.
Think of his supra-Gore campaign promises to lower the waters, speed up the
planets, pay your mortgage, and so on. Could any normal man, or even any
politician, speak of himself this way? Yes, of course, someone else wrote
those words for him, just as someone else likely wrote the script about "my
sons." But they wrote what they thought their mouthpiece could say -- what
he would say. And, sure enough, he willingly said it.
Perhaps, in seeking the explanation for this inexplicable "gaffe," we have
all been focusing on the wrong words. Perhaps the relevant question is not
what he meant when he spoke of "my sons," but rather what he meant when he
spoke of "my daughters." Given that he has no actual sons, but that he
mentioned them anyway, why should we presume that he was talking about his
actual, biological "daughters" when he used that word?
On the contrary, isn't it more likely that he meant both "sons" and "
daughters" in the same sense that he meant "Kenya" in that literary
biography; in the same sense that he meant "my Muslim faith," when George
Stephanopoulos was forced to cover for him embarrassedly; in the same sense
that he meant Bill Ayers was merely "a guy in my neighborhood"; and in the
same sense that he means the myriad other mind-bogglingly peculiar things he
is wont to say.
In short, isn't it likely that he meant no sons or daughters in particular,
but all sons and daughters in general? Isn't it likely that where you or I,
speaking of society as a whole, would say "our daughters" and "our sons,"
Obama the Great, through his megalomaniacal reversal of the royal "we,"
speaks of "my daughters" and "my sons"?
He is not "all of us," in monarchical fashion. Rather, we (by which I mean
all things in the known universe) are all him. Thus, he can legitimately
lay claim to having sons, for all fathers are Obama. He can refer to
himself as both Muslim and Christian, for all faiths are Obama. Composite
girlfriends can be discussed in detail in a supposed work of non-fiction,
for his romantic past includes the infinite list of all possible girlfriends
, as all boyfriends are Obama.
He is the world spirit and the end of history. When Hegel said it, people
thought, and still think, he was a madman. But Hegel, at least, was a great
intellect. His defense against such critique was, in effect, "According to
my reasoning, someone must embody the end of history, so why not me?" And
dang it all if he didn't have a point.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, is an intellectual, moral, and historical
lightweight, a manufactured man of significant accomplishments on paper
which somehow don't match up with anything one can point to in reality. If
his delusional understanding of his relationship to the world were true, and
we were all him, the world would be in a heap of trouble.
Come to think of it.... |
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