Origin of the Nightmare

A dog that chases its tail will be busy.

--George Clinton, Atomic Dog

President Obama’s usage of the decidedly un-presidential phrase “talk about me like a dog,” in a speech the other day seemed to baffle a goodly number of my non-Southern white friends, some of whom concluded that the president was cribbing Jimi Hendrix.  Aside from my guess that the president probably doesn’t know who Jimi Hendrix was, Hendrix himself was cribbing an old phrase of unknown origin common among  southerners well before either man was born. (For the record, to “talk about someone like a dog,” means to bad-mouth a person severely.  The phrase has also morphed into “to dog someone out.” The latter has an additional—and interesting—meaning:  to betray someone.)

Victor Davis Hanson and Dinesh D’Souza, however, are intent on reviewing the attitude crystallized in the phrasing, along with the thinking fueling that attitude. 

Hanson:

We know Obama got into Columbia; we have no idea what he accomplished there — or whether his undergraduate transcript merited admission to Harvard Law School. Obama may have charmed his way into Harvard Law Review, but in brilliant fashion he seems to have guessed rightly that once there he would be singularly exempt from the usual requirements of quantifiable achievement.

A part-time visiting law professorship at the University of Chicago Law school rarely leads to a permanent tenure-track position, much less a tenured billet– and never without a body of published articles and books. In Obama’s case those protocols simply did not apply. He was not only offered whatever he wanted, but as Justice Kagan reminded us, Obama was courted by Harvard Law School as well.

(…)

Obama seems aware that a particular cadre of influential white liberals has traditionally accorded him deference not warranted by actual achievement, but rather by his projection of a progressive persona, as crudely outlined by a Biden or Reid [when both articulated how different President Obama is from the everyday “Negro,” whom these Democrat politicians implied  are usually dirty and inarticulate]  — and that this by now is a normal course of events rather than an aberrant experience. Hence his anger that all that has at last begun to end.

D’Souza’s main theme is one that is well-known to anyone who has been paying attention since Barack Obama arrived on the national scene: that he has adopted the life’s work of his father:

What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams[of anticolonialism) he received from his father.

(…)

Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors.

(…)

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa.

(…)

As [Obama Sr.] put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."

There is a good reason that many Africans of that generation--educated in Europe and America--are socialists, aside from the desire to repudiate the capitalism to which most of the hated European colonial masters subscribed.  They were actively indoctrinated.

Most readers know that my origin and life circumstances are a mirror image of the president’s—some things are frighteningly similar; others radically dissimilar in obvious areas.  However, for continuity's sake, here it is again: courtesy of the Mboya Airlift, our Kenyan Luo fathers arrived in America in 1959 to receive an American education, married and produced children with American women, divorced them, and, upon graduation, returned to their homeland.

Both of us were partially raised by the generation prior to that of our parents--in his case, his maternal grandparents; in my case, my maternal grandmother’s sister and her husband.

When Philip Ochieng and Barack Obama, Sr. arrived in America, their mentors were people like radical Progressives Cora and Peter Weiss, who—via the innocuously coined African American Student Foundation-- funded much of the tuition, travel, care and feeding of the Kenyan students selected for the Airlift.  (My mother says that when she and my father were in college, their non-African--read: white--social circle included nothing but communists and socialists.)

And herein lies a crucial difference as to the reason that my life turned out differently than Obama’s: both of our biological fathers are socialists and atheists.  However, in Obama’s case, his mother’s immediate family consisted of socialists and atheists as well.  Mine does not. 

Here’s another difference: neither my great-aunt, great-uncle, mother nor American father ever implicated that I was so innately different—so alien-- from them, that it was necessary to turn me over to a monster like Frank Marshall Davis for “parenting.”  By that very act, the Dunhams indicated to their grandson that they believed him to be inferior because of his black African heritage.  It is unbearable even to imagine the things instilled into young Obama's spirit under such tutelage.

Coupling this with his mother’s abandonment, one may see how his attitude toward white people developed.

So, surrounded by callousness, lack of empathy and no grace, who was left to latch onto?  The one who wasn’t there, of course.  (That his father abandoned him also is beside the point.  It was easier for Obama to see Obama Sr. as the victim of a white-dominated world, justify the abandonment and, even take up the elder Obama’s cause where he left off.)

So it may be that Barack Obama believes that all of the gifts which white liberals have conferred upon him are his just due with criticism being, conversely, manifestly unjust. All he's trying to do is administer "justice!"  And in dispensing that justice, in “taking back” that which was "stolen," Obama can finally obtain love from his Third World “family,” something he never received from his biological family.

Of course, a humongous monkey wrench will be thrown into all of this armchair shrinking should our president’s real birth certificate ever surface.  Relax.  I think he was born in Hawaii; I just don’t think that the birth certificate has Barack Obama, Sr. listed as the father.

A fine mess the Left has gotten us into, wouldn’t you say?

(Thanks to Barb the Evil Genius, Est Quod Est and Instapundit)

 

Comments

[Pink Freud]

It is wonderful to see you pop into Neo's site. I remember you (and your robust character) well from LGF and I was pleased to be directed over to your blog from a post on Ace's not too long ago. Your writing and insights are so very interesting, and I am glad I've found you again.

Congrats on the publication and successful sales of your book!

[baldilocks]

Very sweet! Thank you.

[Ric Locke]

As regards our President's birth certificate, I have a slightly different idea. This is kind of long, but follow the reasoning:

Hawai'i, like any tourist area, is well accustomed to visitors from other countries. Local officials, including birth registrars and clerks, deal with foreign nationals on a daily basis. This is especially true because it's a "tropical paradise", which attracts romantic couples. Birth of a child to a couple of foreign nationals, or to a foreign national and an American citizen, is not a new experience for anyone in the State. Such officials are also quite familiar with intervention from ambassadors, consuls, trade officials, and other representatives of foreign powers on behalf of their nationals.

One of the most vigorous and active -- one might almost say "pushiest" -- of foreign diplomatic corps is Her Majesty's Foreign Service. British subjects (and, at the time of Obama's birth, Commonwealth citizens) can and could expect levels of service from HM FS that an American citizen can only dream of from the US State Department and Consular Service. (In fact, /Americans/ can often get better treatment from the FS than they can from US diplomats!) The British maintained a consulate in Hawai'i until the early Fifties, a leftover from liaison with American Pacific forces in WWII, and kept a trade mission there for some years afterward. One of the things HM FS is especially alert about is citizenship issues. It would be a rare birth registrar, especially in a fairly major hospital, who had not had a visit from a British diplomat at one time or another in his or her career about the birth of a child to British subjects or Commonwealth citizens.

Barack Obama Sr. was there as a tourist, with a Commonwealth passport issued in Kenya -- you may still have your father's, as a memento. Stanley Ann Dunham was an American citizen, but a minor. Any even halfway alert representative of Her Majesty's Foreign Service, if asked to intervene, would have insisted that their child be at least entitled to choose Commonwealth citizenship at majority, and most of them would have insisted that the child held Commonwealth citizenship. If the registrar didn't know that, he wasn't paying attention -- and if he did, he would almost certainly have gone along.

So I would give long odds that the long-form birth certificate either leaves the question of baby Barry's citizenship open or flatly declares him a Commonwealth citizen. Now, under US law as presently interpreted, all that is irrelevant; Barry was born on US soil, and is an American citizen automatically whatever the birth certificate says (I have met a German couple who ran into that situation, and got livid about it; it caused them no end of trouble with the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.) But if the birth certificate doesn't /say/ that, imagine the howls!

[baldilocks]

Wow, Ric! That one is definitely a first and it is very logical.

Same circumstances with me (Mom was 19), except--and this is a key exception--I was born in one of the lower 48, which knocks out that whole island-tourist issue.

Fascinating.

[GringoTex]

I had never heard the term before. It turns out that in Google Books, searching for ”talk about me like a dog” and for “talked about me like a dog” yield a total of about 50 hits. Most are black sources. Jimi Hendrix, Langston Hughes, Bernie Mac.

[baldilocks]

Yep. Have heard the phrase for as far back as memory serves.

[David Perkins]

This is way simple. The president is, as he admits, a mongrel. Half aggrieved racial minority and half unwashed radical leftist hippie, albeit a generation behind, but well qualified to hang with bernadine and bill nonetheless.

He is jimi hendrix, without the talent.

The B side of that 1969 record is "if 6 was 9".. It contains a little rap section.. "white collar conservative flashin down the street, points his plastic finger at me", etc.

i would bet my entire evil corporate empire that obama had that single in his record collection at some point in his life.

Too many of the union thugs he was talking at 'got it' when he grinned and said that lyric, they talk about me like a dog... The union thugs weqre old white guys... They got hendrix, and obama clearly meant for them to get hendrix, when he said it. They would not have gotten the more cukturally deep aspects of that expression. But they got hendrix.

[David Perkins]

Look at the crowd obama was talking to. Union folk, seemed to me from the camera shots it was a very white and older crowd. Obama had a huge grin when he said 'they talk about me like a dog'.. And the audience got it... i think what they GOT was hendrix... Not to mention tne B side of 'stone free' from 1969 was 'if 6was 9', a song with a little rap section by jimi, "white collar conservative flashin down the street, pointin his plastic finger at me", etc.

If hendrix was just a coincidence and obama was instead touching a piece ofmthe culture he did NOT grow up in, well i'd be surprised.

As he says, he's a mongrel.. Half aggrieved racial minoriy, half unwashed radical leftist hippie.

He IS hendrix, without the talent.

[David Perkins]

Comments vanishing. Moderated? No indication. I tried a couple, signed into twtr, repeated one, still no luck. Love your work, keep it flowing. :-)

[baldilocks]

Moderated?

Moderated. :)

[Ric Locke]

Yes. I don't recall what State you were born in, but it was almost certainly far enough from a British consulate for that to not be an issue. Also, I think your father's attitude might have been a bit different from Obama Sr's. Did he intend all along to go back to Kenya, or did that decision come later? It would make a difference as to whether or not calling in British diplomats might come to mind.

As for the "like a dog" thing -- as a white Southerner of *ahem* a certain age, I can testify that yes, it was common usage and the basis for a whole family of insults. BHO probably had to get to it via Hendrix; I see nothing in his past that might lead to familiarity with Southern vernacular otherwise.

Regards,
Ric

[baldilocks]

Illinois,

My maternal family hasn't lived in the South since the beginning of the 20th century, but have been hearing that dog thing for year.

Obama is merely trotting out his blackness.

[Dave perkins]

Moderated, eh...:-) that means the one i wrote about the birth cert didn't make the cut...?

Btw pardon my crap typing. On the ipad, because you cannot feel the "keys", you are always looking at the keyboard and that means you don't notice errors until you finish what you're writing. Then it's too laborious to correct them.

In normal computer life i am in fact an accomplished typist. :-)

[baldilocks]

Your other comment is there; it just may be above the replies. :)

[littleoldlady]

I think he was born in Hawaii; I just don’t think that the birth certificate has Barack Obama, Sr. listed as the father.

YUP! That's what I've been saying all along!

(How come no one is looking for his "parents'" marriage certificate?)

[KingShamus]

W-w-w-wait a second here. Just who the hell is Barry's daddy then?

I had no idea when this clown got sworn in that we were actually electing a freakin' corny 1970's era soap opera plot.

My God. Obama is "Days of Our Lives" in the flesh.

2012 cannot come soon enough.

[Samantha]

It's amusing seeing people so confused by the saying "talking about me like a dog". Folk from the West Indies are very familiar with the phrase. My first response upon hearing him say it was, dude you ain't all that. You see, usage of the phrase during my childhood carried a connotation of the talked about individual having been wronged. Our President's chickens are simply coming home to roost is all.

Regarding birth certificates, next year I will be old enough to run for POTUS were it not for the existence of an inconvenient birth certificate.