Thursday, October 11, 2012

New Photos From Occidental Years Show Real Obama

The New Yorker blog features new photos that verify my take on what our 44th president acted and looked like as a sophomore at Occidental College. Readers will note the real Obama, the young revolutionary extremist with a soft spot for Islam, that I got to know as a participant in Occidental’s radical student politics.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/barack-obama-at-occidental-college-photographs.html#

Curiously, the photos show Obama wearing a band on his left ring finger that WND alleges to read “there is no God but Allah.” 

http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/obamas-ring-there-is-no-god-but-allah/

The photo I find to be most historically significant is the one that shows details from of the anti-apartheid rally of February 18, 1981, the rally that debuted Obama’s famous first skit in Obama’s Dreams from My Father. In contrast to Obama’s story, the banner above the event proclaims the somewhat more complex cause of “Affirmative Action & Divestiture NOW.” The photo features many of the real life figures who would become composite characters in Obama’s autobiography. These include my white ex-girlfriend, Caroline Boss, the radical student leader who improbably lent her grandmother’s name - and much of her scintillating personality - to the big-boned, black “Regina” character.

For the record, I view these photos from the perspective of an accident victim looking at a long ago car wreck. Caroline and I had parted ways just weeks before this rally. As I recall, the split was painful enough to cause us to temporarily adopt the roles of imaginary divorce lawyers, lawyers who combed through our conflicting feelings and amicably laid out the details of what became our eventual, imperfect separation.

For many years, young Obama was simply a footnote in my own intellectual autobiography. He was an early witness to the process in which I abandoned my expectation of a Communist revolution, dropped my old Occidental College friends, and eventually became a Republican business owner. In contrast, Obama held tight to his Occidental College friends and their causes.

“Decades later,” Margot Mifflin writes in response to these photos, “Obama would spur a new generation of students into political action, forging a connection between sixties radicals and media-savvy millennials.” Mifflin, of course, is only telling part of the story. She leaves out the part where at least one of Obama’s friends was not so pleased by the impact of affirmative action and never quite forgot what it was like to sacrifice everything he had for scholarly achievement only to learn, at the end of the process: “Sorry, you’re white.”

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

3 comments:

Stephen Banicki said...

This is a joke right. Here is some insight into Romney's foreign affairs! http://bit.ly/TnUfuG

John C. Drew, Ph.D. said...

It wasn't so funny when I realized how affirmative action was going to harm my life. What's your story?

Redwood509 said...

http://hillbuzz.org/doom-antidote-evidence-that-democrats-are-in-last-days-of-pompeii-mode-10132012-10132012
There’s speculation here in Chicago that Obama couldn’t wait until 2016 for health reasons. Most people on the ground here think Obama has “The Slims”, and that his health will have deteriorated to the point that by 2016 he’d be a gaunt, walking skeleton with all the telltale signs of depending on daily anti-viral cocktails. Others — like me personally — believe Obama has Parkinsons and this, too, would have been far too obvious by 2016 for him to win a national election. He’s already disoriented, bewildered in public, and unable to function on even a basic level without a TelePrompTer. He’s either got “The Slims” or Parkinsons or a serious narcotics addiction…so the man who is the current president of the United States is either sick or a junkie and Democrats needed him in office as quickly as possible (so, Hillary be damned).


Read more http://hillbuzz.org/doom-antidote-evidence-that-democrats-are-in-last-days-of-pompeii-mode-10132012-10132012

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