Obama As A "Third Culture Kid" - what that means & why it is helpful to understand it to "get" Obama

Obama As A "Third Culture Kid"

A reader writes:



http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/obama-as-a-third-culture-kid.html

"The temporary bargaining chip is the tax cuts for top brackets. Everytime the GOP wants to extend it another two years, they'll have to give something in return for it."

"We already did. We now have more troops in Germany than we have in Iraq."

"It's not magically illegal because of an opinion. There are laws to be followed, and congress passed laws making things legal that you may not like. That doesn't make them illegal."
"Again, legal. Many supreme court decisions have found so."
""shredding the Fourth Amendment,"
" and an ever increasing police state as "increasing accountability"?"
"Again, legal. Many supreme court decisions have found so."

Much of the hue and cry over SS and Medicare being destroyed came out of a panel whose ideas were just that: ideas. The ideas were not adopted.

He spoke of his birth in the working class, and of the sordidness
and wretchedness of his environment, where flesh and spirit were
alike starved and tormented. He described his ambitions and ideals, and
his conception of the paradise wherein lived the people of the upper
classes. As he said:

"Up above me, I knew, were unselfishnesses of the spirit, clean and
noble thinking, keen intellectual living. I knew all this because I read
'Seaside Library' novels, in which, with the exception of the villains
and adventuresses, all men and women thought beautiful thoughts,
spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed glorious deeds. In short, as I
accepted the rising of the sun, I accepted that up above me was all that
was fine and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to
life, all that made life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail
and misery."

Ernest went on to his rise in society, till at last he came in touch with
members of the upper classes, and rubbed shoulders with the men who
sat in the high places. Then came his disillusionment, and this disillusionment
he described in terms that did not flatter his audience. He was
surprised at the commonness of the clay. Life proved not to be fine and
gracious. He was appalled by the selfishness he encountered, and what
had surprised him even more than that was the absence of intellectual
life. Fresh from his revolutionists, he was shocked by the intellectual stupidity
of the master class. And then, in spite of their magnificent
churches and well-paid preachers, he had found the masters, men and
women, grossly material. It was true that they prattled sweet little ideals
and dear little moralities, but in spite of their prattle the dominant key of
the life they lived was materialistic. And they were without real morality—
for instance, that which Christ had preached but which was no
longer preached.

"I met men," he said, "who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in
their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons
with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met men incoherent
with indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at
the same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each
year more babes than even red-handed Herod had killed.

"This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman was a dummy director
and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans.
This gentleman, who collected fine editions and was a patron of literature,
paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black- browed boss of a municipal
machine. This editor, who published patent medicine advertisements,
called me a scoundrelly demagogue because I dared him to print in his
paper the truth about patent medicines. This man, talking soberly and
earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness of God, had
just betrayed his comrades in a business deal. This man, a pillar of the
church and heavy contributor to foreign missions, worked his shop girls
ten hours a day on a starvation wage and thereby directly encouraged
prostitution. This man, who endowed chairs in universities and erected
magnificent chapels, perjured himself in courts of law over dollars and
cents. This railroad magnate broke his word as a citizen, as a gentleman,
and as a Christian, when he granted a secret rebate, and he granted
many secret rebates. This senator was the tool and the slave, the little
puppet, of a brutal uneducated machine boss; 45 so was this governor
and this supreme court judge; and all three rode on railroad passes; and,
also, this sleek capitalist owned the machine, the machine boss, and the
railroads that issued the passes.

"And so it was, instead of in paradise, that I found myself in the arid
desert of commercialism. I found nothing but stupidity, except for business.
I found none clean, noble, and alive, though I found many who
were alive—with rottenness. What I did find was monstrous selfishness
and heartlessness, and a gross, gluttonous, practised, and practical
materialism."