Streetwise Professor

If you haven’t noticed by now that Obama is a narcissistic preener, you haven’t been paying attention, or you are an enabler.  But if you read the excerpts from some of Obama’s college letters to his girlfriend, you cannot avoid coming to that conclusion-or you are so far into the tank that you are beyond saving.

A few excerpts to follow.  Airsickness bags recommended.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.  Read this, and you can almost hear the fingers snapping:

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?

Don’t you share it too, dear reader?  Who knew that the Western tradition was “deeply  fatalistic”?  And this: “Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism.”  Any use of “bourgeois liberal” is a sure tell of a prog poser.

As for the rest: urp.

Even the decidedly sympathetic biographer, David Maraniss, cannot ignore the intense self-absorption:“Obama was the central character in his letters, in a self-conscious way, with variations on the theme of his search for purpose and self-identity.”  But he couldn’t decide on just which identity to choose, so he selected “all of the above”: “The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”  As Mariness says “The different path he saw for himself was to rise above the divisions of culture and society, politics and economics, and embrace something larger – embrace it all.”

But hey.  We all say and do things when we’re that age that we find embarrassing, and grow out of.  Most of us do, anyways.  But with Obama, it is still about him, all the time.  Case in point: the beyond unseemly preening about, and politicizing of, the decision to approve the raid that resulted in Osama’s death.  Look, any president would have made this decision, if for no other reason than that the decision to pass up on such an opportunity would have inevitably have been leaked, much to the political detriment of any president who did so.  But mainly because anyone would have considered it a duty.  A responsibility to all of those who who had died as a result of Osama’s war on the US.  Part of the job.

The SEALs who actually carried out the mission are called-and call themselves-“the Quiet Professionals.” A lesson to be learned from that, and an example to be followed.  Professionals do their job.  They don’t expect lavish praise for doing it.  Braggarts and boasters who expect adulation for doing their jobs don’t deserve praise, quite the reverse-and especially when they hog the credit for the courage and consummate skill of those who actually take the risks and accomplish things you or I-or Obama-could never do.  I can only imagine the intense loathing that Obama’s victory lap-which ran to Afghanistan and back-has engendered not just among the SEALs, but virtually everyone in the military.  (Not to mention that the victory lap included an obsequious reference to Karzai as “my friend”-when everyone paying the slightest attention knows he is anything but, and with friends like him we don’t need enemies.  And further not to mention the excuse the the trip just had to be made so that an agreement could be signed before Karzai traveled to Chicago for the NATO summit-which begins on 20 May, meaning that making the trip precisely on the anniversary of the Osama raid was not necessary to meet the alleged deadline.)

And it is also clear that Obama has not grown out of the juvenile beret-and-Galoises leftism that oozes from passages that Mariness quotes.  Only now he calls those he used to refer to as bourgeois as “bitter clingers” and “social Darwinists.”

All politicians are narcissists, to some degree, but Obama is off the charts.  A friend who knows tells me there is no cure for narcissism.  None.   Obama certainly provides living proof of that dreary assessment.