A Magna Cum Laude graduate of Harvard Anthropology, who I know from high school for a very deceptive and dishonest person, and who is, like his classmate Obama, a pathological liar, once told me that Nietzsche said, “a married philosopher belongs to the realm of comedy.” I don’t know if Nietzsche really said that. It sounds true, but what is almost certainly true is the idea that an intellectual who is required to support the pretenses of an American politician belongs to the realm of tragedy. Obama came from Harvard, too. This doesn’t make him an intellectual President, any more than my early failure at school means that I am not an intellectual, but I keep to myself and work on problems of truth, Obama was the effective salesman of a counterfeit and a farce. What the article about Black English code-switching by Obama says to me most loudly is that Linguistic Anthropology can be used to finesse the sale of jargon, self-regard and dogmatic ideology. In other words, I disagree with the authors of the article, and see in its substance and style nothing wonderful or evidence of talent. Curiously, I know in advance, it doesn’t matter that I love Zora Neale Hurston’s work, or that I have lived in the environments where the struggle with tragedy produces Black english, and that I take pride in my partial grasp. All that will ever matter is that I am white because role reversal is at the root of the union ticket being played by the political centrality Obama sold, notoriously in Seattle where he was cheered by fashion. Obama supposedly mastered the Black preacher style, and reached "duh people," effectively pulling off communicating confidence to white people in their own language, too.
America has a misunderstood history, especially if people think that our society protects freedom of speech or cares about it, rather than punishes it. The fear of rejection and disapproval for speaking truth of any kind is very widespread. Speaking truth whether to the powerful or to the powerless is considered reckless endangerment. It has never not been so. Elijah Lovejoy was a white man killed for printing Abolitionist views by an angry mob. If this had been in our times, the leader of the mob scene would have been Barack Obama. This is easily proved. I no longer feel morally obligated to print the reasons and texts that provide the substantiation, a fact of self-suppression which is more an achievement of the Obama Generation than Obama himself, but still a feather in his Napoleonic cap. What Obama evidently succeeded in doing was impressing by code-switching that his language was authentic and that he was real, whatever that means in the age of Hollywood mania where reality is forever and always the achievement of the silver screen.
Examining his first principle rival, Hillary Clinton, you find a woman in politics who would switch views conspicuously and argued famously that hypocrisy was a time-honored strategy of consensus building, citing Abraham Lincoln. Obama’s two-tongued switcheroos isn’t identified the same way, it isn’t catering to the conceits of public spoonfed lies, but rather the canny knack of a shrewd, slick, ever-admirable huckster. I remember Obama’s campaign well-enough to be able to cite the case where he bragged about “gangbangers” at his church, the church of Rev. Wright, whose false notions about AIDS covered up the truth in a notorious and weird concession to the right of the masses to be suspicious, but the buck stopped there. AIDS was about victimizing the Black man again, they claimed, while Midwest writers pouted, refuted and waved the issue on, nevermind the reality that Obama was an upload designed by the true authors of the attack, a fact that will probably never be allowed into American history, because Trump has decided that there will be a wall against that presentation and the person who knows best, tortured in the crime, is going to pay for that wall.
The article and reasoning of Alim and Smitherman is a case in point. They claim Obama was a gifted orator who mastered America's racial language codes. Their writing is fancy with the footwork of Linguistic Anthropology. It enters this new field and domain into politics in favor of Obama, which is weird enough in a society where most of the information about the murder of JFK, which was 1% assassination, and 99% robbery, is found in the language of the criminals who put together their sly presentation, known to be a Texas Schoolbook found at Fulton School (an actual place, not a pun intended to impugn Dr. Fulton, our wise professor) and the University of Pittsburgh. For decades even talking about what the evidence contained would get one’s home raided, privacy smashed, loved ones raped, bystanders murdered, the victim who must pay for the wall put on the streets in seizures, jailed with slanderous charges, tortured for reporting being tortured, locked in psychiatric facilities, jeered as a white, and told never bite the hand that feeds you. Questioning the policy meant insulting those who serve under the Flag of derision, Semper Fi.
Thos. Mann, in a different era, talking about the same form of life, wrote a passage shockingly true about Barack Obama, as well. His prophetic words stand out throughout American history as the most impaling truth ever written, “When I say “the people,” he wrote in This Peace, published in 1938, “I include all of us; we have all been hoaxed and befooled, driven wantonly to and fro between hope and despair, been made the pawns in a shameless game.
The fault is ours -,” Mann continued,”-though perhaps it is to our credit that we were not politicians enough to see through it. Despite all that had gone before, including the transparently disingenuous and disgraceful comedy of non-intervention, carried out by England in favour of Franco, we could not credit the possibility of such heaped-up knavery and maneuvering. Our simplicity was culpable. What else could it be but hypocrisy, to behave as though one believed in those pulings about “our brothers in Sudetenland,” when everybody knew that it was not a question of the brothers, but of the Skoda works, Czech industry, Rumanian oil, Hungarian grain.”
We are bidden to accept that the truth is forbidden and the victims asked to pay for this wall by Joe Biden, Donald Trump and of course Obama, who gave people a little clap on the back for their tolerance and progress in the land of make believe and in the name of Black people getting ahead. I read the Alim article, but I still think the missing truth is more conspicuous than copula absence.