Never mind the faux outrage, the excerpts of David Maraniss’ book are fascinating. Obama’s girlfriends from the 1980’s seem like really intelligent and interesting people. The journal entries are of a much higher caliber than anything I would ever do. The psychological insights into the president are more clear than you might expect. The whole thing is so weird to me.
It’s the setting, Manhattan in the 1980s. That’s a setting I know so well. I know how things looked, how they smelled. I know what was in the news. That’s when I learned what a city was. That old dirty crime-ridden New York? So many of us flitted in and out of that scene, doing this and that, drinking underage, going to clubs, scoring dime bags in Washington Square Park, working lousy dead-end corporate-starter jobs. My uncle was teaching at Columbia then. He’s still teaching there. My Dad worked there.
Meanwhile, back home in Princeton, Michelle Robinson was walking past me on Prospect Avenue, hanging at the Third World Center. Her brother was starring on Petey Carill’s awesome basketball team. She’s just a shadow in these journals. She’s the strong black woman at the beginning and end of his relationship with Genevieve Cook:
Early in Barack’s relationship with Genevieve, he had told her about “his adolescent image of the perfect ideal woman” and how he had searched for her “at the expense of hooking up with available girls.” Who was this ideal woman? Genevieve conjured her in her mind, and it was someone other than herself. She wrote, “I can’t help thinking that what he would really want, be powerfully drawn to, was a woman, very strong, very upright, a fighter, a laugher, well-experienced—a black woman I keep seeing her as.”
Thursday, May 23, 1985
Barack leaving my life—at least as far as being lovers goes. In the same way that the relationship was founded on calculated boundaries and carefully, rationally considered developments, it seems to be ending along coolly considered lines. I read back over the past year in my journals, and see and feel several themes in it all … how from the beginning what I have been most concerned with has been my sense of Barack’s withholding the kind of emotional involvement I was seeking. I guess I hoped time would change things and he’d let go and “fall in love” with me. Now, at this point, I’m left wondering if Barack’s reserve, etc. is not just the time in his life, but, after all, emotional scarring that will make it difficult for him to get involved even after he’s sorted his life through with age and experience.Hard to say, as obviously I was not the person that brought infatuation. (That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere!)
Genevieve turned out to be right. Very, very right.
The threads of the Obamas’ lives swirl around mine like this, which is probably why I was drawn to him in the first place. Princeton, Columbia, New York in the 1980’s, community organizing, Project Vote…
So many people say that they don’t know who Obama is; that he’s exotic or rootless. I don’t feel that way at all. I grew up with kids from Iran and Ethiopia and Nigeria and the Philippines and all kinds of other places. People I knew traveled all the time, to Europe, to Japan, to China, to Cambodia, to Africa. I even knew the pretentious Ivy League college party scene, and the pretentious living room faculty cocktail party scene, and the Upper West Side post-modernist obsessed drinking party scene. What did Obama think of T.S. Eliot?
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?
Unfortunately, I am familiar with that kind of talk even when people aren’t trying to impress a girl. It’s called being competitively intelligent in a world of sickeningly intelligent people. That’s what I grew up with and nothing could seem more American to me until I stepped out of that milieu and into our more normal communities. I quickly learned that my experience wasn’t typical at all. It was as American as apple pie, but it wasn’t typical.
Yet, of all the people I’ve known and seen come out of that elite culture, no one has seemed to me better-suited to be president than Barack Obama.