Recent postings at Clio's Psyche concerning what would happen if Obama was linked to #metoo (all names of conversation participants other than mine, altered)
me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
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Nov 17
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Paul Kinsmaun has said some
interesting things about Obama's relationship with his mother -- of how
he felt mostly abandoned by her -- that strikes me as rather pertinent right
now. One of the reasons #metoo is emerging right now is not only because we've
evolved but because this is a populist moment where victims, where violence
against women, where used, spurned women imagined together as an angry,
chasing, annihilating horde, can be used to discredit arenas of liberal power
-- Hollywood, Washington -- and as well the previous reigning societal
"philosophy" -- neoliberalism -- with any possible defence of why the
massive horrible prevalence, totally absconded from view. (There are actually a
number of them, all hopelessly politically incorrect/vile: one, as Ann Douglas
argues in her book on the 1920s, "Terrible Honesty," perhaps in
certain historical periods creativity requires the presence of the Terrifying
Father -- a predator, that is -- to back down the felt presence of intrusive,
smothering mothers on our lives [regarding the '20s, the Victorian Titaness].
In our own period, one was the dictator producer, enabled by the idea that if
you want to have resourcefulness and creativity and true love of Art in our
time, brash, bullysome HE had to be at the centre of it. Two, we may
delegate both Washington and Hollywood to serve out group fantasy needs to see
unvarnished, unapologetic pursuit of happiness both absolutely fulfilled AND
completely rendered. Emotionally unhealthy people in both places might have
picked up on our obvious cuing of them and moved as we "told" them to
and both enabled and destroyed people. Three, society in general might in the
late '70s entered a more problematic period where social growth [for beginning
after so many postwar years of seeming justified to seem spoiled] could no
longer be shared by all -- a rising tide of boats -- but granted some while completely
withheld to others, so that we felt considerable sacrifices of devastated and
lost lives were being sufficiently supplied to a hungry maternal maw, thereby
keeping her from rising and rendering from us, all of our growth... she was
occupied, and temporarily sated. Actresses being those who still must "put
out" on a casting couch, who are not generally associated with higher
education, and who represent the immodest, immoderate, working class wish
"to be a star!," could not maintain themselves as sufficiently
distinct from the designated out-groups in society... the occupations that if
you held them you would not like educated professionals find yourself garnering
increased respect these last forty years of information age competency and
with-itness, but made to seem as deserving whatever sign of disregard you might
want to administer to them -- restaurant workers, retail... all low-wage
earning jobs, for instance -- for already being in the way of the future; a
pest whose future depends on luck, random accident, rather than on
guarantees... on having a diligent manner of applying yourself; on having
a PhD.) As such, if there is any way that Fuchsman is right about Obama we need
to know if it is possible that Obama inflicted revenge on other women for his
mother's own crime of abandoning him, that we may have totally bleached from
our view in order to make our association with him an absolute guarantee of our
virtue during a time of our own prospering.
For if he too's got "a
history" too, that’s what populists will be on the hunt for, ultimately.
It would discredit our age, everything about it being unquestionable in
its virtue for it being so sane and civilized and decent while its opponents
rage senselessly, mindlessly on, and leave a lot of the great defenders of it
essentially dismantled from further speaking sane opposition to spreading
regressive populist movements across the world, for their not realizing that
part of their self-balance, their equilibrium, their ability to respond with
intelligence and vigor and quick wit, rested on a certain particular essential
figure retaining himself as an absolute emblem of virtue. I've seen it happen,
a spark of it... when the Gore marriage of two brilliant, empowered people
who love one another in a fully reciprocal way... devoted to the end of time,
was revealed to be myth, the leading feminist of her generation and possibly --
along with Solnit -- of our time, NYMagazine's Rebecca Traister, was left
as if struck by a blow. I think she might have realized for a minute that if a
curtain came up over certain other things she might have assumed, not though
knowing quite what they might be at that moment, she wasn't beyond losing all
grip; going insane.
Incidentally, I may have
mentioned it in another post but I'll say it again here: if anyone is wondering
how powerful men will find their way out of this fix, as more of their
rank get culled daily, it's to sacrifice their existence as independent,
self-actualized adults and agree in way some to become boys dependent on
their mothers again. That's what Zaretsky argues happened in the
1930s/40s: people surrendered their 1920s adulthood and regressed to
become Depression/WarYears boys loyal to their mother nations. By doing so,
they'll know they've basically placed themselves in the same space
conservatives are in (wonder why we aren't as interested in them as "bad
boy" predators, even as they're worse? here's why--)... who are each one
of them those whose childrearing was insufficient to ever allow them to part ways
with their parents' will and fully become individuated adults (and therefore
press for progress), and will feel that what had earned their being punished --
that is, presumption, personal enjoyment, "spoiling"... all held as
evidence of sinfulness from children of all parenting "styles" other
than the most recent one -- was no longer any part of their being. They won't
FEEL guilty, for they know their minds have placed them in a state where they
will sacrifice everything truly worthy about life to please and serve somebody
else, and we won't see them anymore as guilty either. The gaze will pass them
over... the gaze connected with populism and all its insistence that people
aren't individuated and distinct but part of an indistinct mass, will pass them
over. And all it will of cost them is the loss of their own individuality, as
quite permanently they will have sacrificed their own self-will and will do now
as their mother country directs. They'll become part of the mass of Bernie
Bros., or some such, very much willing to junk their careers, if you asked
them to. Watch for it. It'll be real: not a PR move -- their own
brains will be behind it, willing the most interesting parts of themselves
to be forever nudged out of prime spot, replaced by complete selflessness.
(Want to know why the 1930s felt like they deserved a Roosevelt... why in a
sense Obama, contra Fuchsman, could never have gone Roosevelt?: because along
with his provocative reforms came a mass who abstained from
the individuality we've resourcefully found ways to insist on, again and
again and again. [Incidentally, about Roosevelt... do you know about his love
for the dictator-love film dedicated to him, "Gabriel Over the White
House"?])
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Paul Kinsmaun
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Nov 17
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Patrick,
One of the things Obama learned from his mother was to control
his emotions, not to express anger or discontent. It has often made him
a self-contained individual, one who often keeps his distance from
others. You seem to me to make a leap from Obama's feeling abandoned by
his mother to that he might have wanted to seek revenge on women.
There are certainly many other characteristic ways Obama or anyone else who
felt abandoned might respond to being abandoned. Obama searched for and
found in Michelle Robinson someone who was rooted where his mother was not,
and whom he felt would not abandon him. As a father, what he has also
been intent on doing is providing being there for his daughters as he did not
feel happened for him with his parents. You should read some of what he
says about his being a father. It also seems to me you are asking a
question about Obama and women, but do no indicate what evidence might be
needed to find out if your suspicion is warranted or off base. I suggest
before you make further statements on Obama and women, you might read some of
the good sources on Obama. You should read Janny Scott's A Singular
Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother. The other is David
Marannis's Barack Obama: The Story. In psychohistory,it is always
important to have sufficient evidence at hand before making statements.
Paul . . .
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
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Nov 18
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Paul,
I do make one hell of a leap... and I have no idea if he has
"a history," only that he mostly certainly could have and we would
have ignored it, even if it was considerable. But in psychohistory perhaps
what one ought to do is begin to loosen the possibility of actually
undertaking an exploration, for someone, anyone, actually doing it, that we
might have shielded ourselves off of for our own equilibrium. You yourself
did research, but the Clio Psyche' reaction to your reveal of his abandonment
by his mother was initiated by your own willingness to accept the idea. You
admire Obama, but you didn't need him... you didn't need his relationship
with his mother to be exactly one way in order for you to do so (though do
you need his relationship with Michelle to be a certain way?... fits a bit
too neat. Traister did with the Gores). The way in which people reacted to
your research suggested to me that some others might however require
prompting, a preparation of the way, before they could even begin to on their
own find evidence contra their preferred estimation of him, or accept it if
others did so. If this is the case then first you need to prepare people to
begin to be sure, in this period where we were clearly weighted to assume
Obama as an upstanding gentleman and then mostly leave off him -- a perfect
guardian against all our identity troubles -- that we actually knew who he
was, that we actually wanted to know who he was, before you would even
undertake to do the research. A hegemonic estimation of him needs unsettling
first; otherwise "proof" won't be able to nestle in anywhere, for
the membrane they're trying to stick to is still steel and sure.
So this is my prompt: #metoo might not only be getting its
impetus because this is finally a time for victims, for feminism, for
progressive emergence, but because populists know that the previous age of
liberalism was undeniably a predatorial one (and I think if was necessarily
so, for societal growth always being "problematic," cruel, after a
few decades of postwar permission has finally ended... the deMausian
idea/conception of stages). The two seemed necessarily connected: there would
be ongoing advancement in our recognition of the humanity of previously
stigmatized peoples, but there would also be enlarged permission in how you
could stigmatize, how you could destroy, OTHER different sorts of people.
There would be an increasing mass of people who come to know themselves as
possessed of an individuated, professional identity, with money and status to
effect great change in the world as well as to enjoy their own lives
immensely, and to flesh our their own developing identity (consumerism is
good!), but there would also be a large mass of people who would know only
disenfranchisement and instability and who would find that not only was no
one was listening, that no one cared, but they made sport of their
discombobulated condition -- see the showcased liberal in "Manchester by
the Sea," for an example. Populists, who whether of the Chris
Hedges/bernie bros. sense or rightwing Breibart sense, know that the
professional liberal class no longer controls the narrative anymore... there
is massive dissent within, as well as outside. And they know that they have
worked to deprive the populace of any way of accepting their "rule"
-- as Zaretsky has argued, feminists and homosexuality advocacy groups have
worked to ensure Freud is out, and so the only explanation for adverse
behaviour is simply evil -- if they can be made to be shown to be a
particular kind of way... that is, the way they are beginning to seem now, as
brutal repeat mass victimizers of women AND of children, all while having a
whirl of fun. And it occurs to them, right now, that as they watch former
supporters of the Clintons, former makers of films which upheld identity
politics liberalism rather than populism (Weinstein), former politicians of
the Clintonian mold, former liberal comedians, go down, that they could
shortcut to the ultimate takedown of a whole political era if they took down
only one particular person during this #metoo awakening.
If we are to continue functioning as effective
psychohistorical commenters on this very dangerous era, we need to think deep
on the requirements we may have made on Obama that might have shielded us
from doing certain kinds of research on him, shielded away others from doing
certain kinds of research on him. David Mannanis... does he strike us as the
kind of person who would find evidence that would completely betray his own
preferred image of Obama? If there were reports by women that Obama had
abused them, is this something he would have made sure to note, or would he
have elided it. If he, like pretty much everyone on the left, would have
elided it -- his brain not allowed him to see it -- the women who experienced
these harassments would have taken note -- here is about our best defender,
and even he wouldn't see it! -- and never said a further word. They knew they
would be destroyed if they ever said anything, as an angry mob went at them
for trying to disturb the perfect solution to their troubled existence as
liberals individuating almost admittedly over other people's backs. If the
likes of the wonderful, self-aware Gloria Steinem could have seen Clinton(!)
as not truly a victimizer of women, we should ourselves caution people when
advising them to take note of previous respected biographers of Obama; what
they found. Without having read their works, it strikes me as very likely
they would not have seen what a generation of #metoo activists would now be
able to see, if Obama has any kind of a similar history with women as these
other powerful men who felt abandoned by their mothers are proving to have
had. (Also, just as a note: I've never believed the Obamas were more
emotionally healthy than the Clintons were. This not by research but just by
my sense of them. I think the Clintons came out of more nurturing
backgrounds, yet Bill's, truly wonderful Bill's, was adverse enough for it to
have likely lead to his raping women and destroying them.)
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
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7:58 AM (2 hours ago)
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And for example, are we prepared for this about Elie Wiesel.
Commentary's reaction suggests, maybe no:
I know I will be vilified for this, but Listman’s tale is hard
to believe. She not only describes behavior on Wiesel’s part that no one, in
his half-century as a major world figure, has ever even whispered about; she
seems to know he thought she was religious and was underage and would
therefore never report his offense against her. How could she know what he
had thought, what she had looked like to him? The fact she is free to
advance these wild speculations as though they were truth impeaches her
credibility.
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