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(s)Elections See other (s)Elections Articles Title: Sing, o muse, the wrath of Michelle Sing, o muse, the wrath of Michelle The wrath of swift-footed Achilles, of which Homer called his muse to sing, nearly lost the Trojan War for the Greeks. The wrath of swift-tongued Michelle Obama well might lose the White House for her husband. We had a peek into her diary last week when the Obama campaign finally made public her undergraduate thesis, titled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community". The contents of this remarkable document sharpen the profile of Obama's women that I offered last week (Obama's women reveal his secret Asia Times Online, February 26.) Barack Obama, I argued, evinces a preternatural sangfroid, for he is in America but not of it, a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans. But his wife's anger at America will out, for it is a profound rage amplified by guilt. Mrs Obama averred that she could not recall the contents of the thesis she composed in 1985, but that cannot be quite true, for it is a poignant cry from the heart. It explains her controversial outburst during the campaign to the effect that she felt proud of her country for the first time in her adult life in 2008, after "feeling so alone" in her "frustration" and "disappointment" at America. Princeton both humiliated her and corrupted her, Michelle Vaughn Robinson complains in an undergraduate prose that is all the more touching for its clumsiness. By condescending to the young black woman from a Chicago working-class family, the liberal university made Michelle feel like an outsider. Worse, by giving her a ticket to financial success, Princeton caused her to feel that she was selling out to the institutions she most despised. Michelle's ambivalence towards Princeton, and by extension towards America, has the makings of a tragedy of the sort found in the novels of Theodore Dreiser or F Scott Fitzgerald, a fatal compromise in pursuit of status. Young Michelle felt she was betraying "lower class Blacks" by assimilating: Nonetheless, she was drawn moth-like to the flame of success: Hopelessness, young Michelle sought to demonstrate, afflicts black Princeton students who are torn between loyalties to the black community and the pursuit of success. Her thesis tabulated the results of a questionnaire sent to black students at Princeton on their attitudes towards the black community and themselves. She drew a bright line between "separatist-pluralist" attitudes, that is, rejecting assimilation into white America, and an "integrationist-assimilationist" stance. Clearly her sympathies lay with black separatism. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's [sic] (1967) developed definitions of separationism in their discussion of Black Power which guided me in the formulation and use of this concept in the study: "The concept of Black Power rests on the fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must close ranks." It was black separatists, she concluded, who cared about the black community, whereas integrated blacks turned their backs on it: Universities such as Princeton, moreover, rig the system for the benefit of whites, as she favorably quoted Dr Carolyn Dejoie: Although the black separatists are the ones who care about the black community, she continues, their sense of loyalty and concern also inspires a sense of hopelessness. That is an unexpected and highly personal conclusion. Her prose chokes up and her spelling breaks down as she writes of this hopelessness: My speculation for this finding is based on the possibility that a separationist is more likely to have a realistic impression of the plight of the Black lower class because of the likelihood that a separationist is more closely associated with the Black lower class than are integrationist [sic]. By actually working with the Black lower class or within their communities as a result of their ideologies, a separationist [sic] may better understand the desparation [sic] of their [sic] situation and feel more hopeless about a resolution as opposed to an integrationist who is ignorant to [sic] their plight. Michelle did not imagine the contempt with which the white liberal professors of Princeton regarded black students, for the above passage was preserved in the final version of the thesis stored by the university, errors and all. Black students who reject white society, she concluded, understand the desperation of the black lower class, and therefore feel hopeless, whereas assimilated blacks ignore this desperation and therefore are more cheerful. It is hard not to admire the young black woman whose indignation over the predicament of the black lower class bursts out of the bland style of academic sociology, and who throws the condescension of her white liberal professors back in their faces. But that is not what afflicted the future Michelle Obama. To the young Michelle's sense of hopelessness about the prospects for the black lower class, Princeton added something even worse, namely guilt over "striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates - acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high paying position in a successful corporation". Despite her black separatist sympathies, Michelle Vaughn Robinson succumbed to the temptations of which she wrote in her thesis and got a law degree from Harvard, earning around $400,000 a year in salary and corporate director fees by 2005. Her "hopelessness", "frustration" and "disappointment" remain, exacerbated by guilt over her own success. That is not speculation, but a precis of her own account. One might speculate that the guilt became all the more poignant to the extent her success was unearned. Michelle Obama's employer, The University of Chicago Hospitals, paid her $121,910, a reasonable sum for the skill level evident in her thesis, but raised this to $316,952 shortly after her husband was elected US senator. Unlike her husband, whose focus on his audience is unwavering, Michelle Obama remains at the mercy of the same internal conflict that she reported in her senior thesis. She is too bitter at the hopelessness of lower-class blacks to assimilate, but too attracted to money and privilege to reject white society. She hates the white institutions that made her prosperous, not only because they cannot solve the problems of the black lower class, but even more so because they made her feel guilty about her own success. These internal conflicts help explain Michelle Obama's erratic behavior. Despite her own financial success, Michelle Obama continues to preach austerity and self-sacrifice to others. Speaking before a working-class audience in Ohio on February 29, she urged her listeners to eschew corporate law or hedge-fund management, which was odd, because most of them did not have a high-school diploma, let alone a university degree: But she did not leave corporate America. She did leave the corporate law firm that hired her out of Harvard Law School, but there is no reason to believe that idealism drove that decision. The major law firms make partners out of a fifth of their new hires, who slave for years for the opportunity. Michelle Obama was not partner material for a top firm. She took more than a year to pass the Illinois Bar Examination, a substandard result, and - as her thesis makes clear - lacked the command of written English required for legal success. Her skills were better suited to the hospital position she eventually filled. Not only did she sell out, but she sold out for mediocre results. Bitterness over the meager price that the white power structure offered for her soul nags at Michelle Obama. At the Ohio speech cited by NRO's York, she complained, "The salaries don't keep up with the cost of paying off [student loans], so you're in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids ... Barack and I were in that position. The only reason we're not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books ... It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids." But it was not only Senator Obama's writing income, it was Michelle's $200,000 salary increase and corporate directorships following his election to the US Senate that made the family prosperous. And it wasn't just piano lessons and summer camp, but a mansion in the Chicago suburb that represented an adequate price for Michelle's soul.
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#1. To: Tauzero (#0)
I'm so glad we have a self-made man in the White House who grew up on a pig farm in Crawford, Texas, chopping down dwarf cedar trees to help keep the wood-burning stove going so the family could every now and then enjoy a hot meal.
“I would give no thought of what the world might say of me, if I could only transmit to posterity the reputation of an honest man.” - Sam Houston
Do not eat cake.
It is truly a heart-warming story. Much like Old Yeller. I am afraid sensitive people would cry their eyes out if they made a movie about it.
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. Isn't Hillary's thesis at Wellesley still inaccessible to the public?
To reason, indeed, he was not in the habit of attending. His mode of arguing, if it is to be so called, was one not uncommon among dull and stubborn persons, who are accustomed to be surrounded by their inferiors. He asserted a proposition; and, as often as wiser people ventured respectfully to show that it was erroneous, he asserted it again, in exactly the same words, and conceived that, by doing so, he at once disposed of all objections. - Macaulay, "History of England," Vol. 1, Chapter 6, on James II.
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