Women and men

I had not planned to post anything today, but AnnaBelle's recent piece, Dreams from our mothers, deserves your attention.

First, she tells a moving bit of personal history, a family story that addresses issues of racial and sexual politics. She goes on to connect that history to Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father -- a book written (as AnnaBelle notes) by a son clearly resentful of his father's absence.

Why all this demonizing women and chasing after fathers who clearly don’t give a damn, as in the case of Obama’s father? Why didn’t he write a book about his mother’s great sacrifices and the dreams she gave up because she was the only parent willing to do the work of raising him?

Instead, Obama, like so many others in our culture, paid little attention at all to Stanley Ann’s contributions and sacrifices, or his Grandmother’s for that matter, choosing instead to focus on his obviously lazy grandfather and his absentee father, while the women toiled to support them all.

We're playing psychohistorian here, an avocation some hold in disrepute. Yet writers since Herodotus have attempted to understand the thinking of the notable. The most interesting parts of Shakespeare's history plays involve psychological insight, as opposed to the dry recounting of who-stabbed-whom. The proper study of man is man -- the mind of man.

As we study Barack Obama, we can't ignore the fact that he spent his life surrounded by, and controlled by, women. His father evaporated into legend during his infancy. He was raised by a mother and grandmother. The only sibling he knew while growing up was his sister Maya. His only children are daughters.

I can't blame him for formulating an idealized vision of his absent father, even though I've read little good about that man. The younger Obama's recent speeches decrying absentee fatherhood in the black community have angered many within that community, yet they make perfect psychological sense.

On this score, Barack Obama has my empathy.

I tend to have a romanticized view of my own father, who died before my seventh birthday. He was a brilliant scientist associated with the space program; he was also a semi-professional jazz pianist and a gifted painter. He introduced me to Beethoven and Bach, to the Renaissance masters, to reading, to politics, to history, to the dream of space travel -- to everything I revere.

Yet Mom once cryptically told me that my father and I might not have gotten along, had he lived longer. Apparently, he was not an easygoing person. His penchant for insulting those he considered intellectual inferiors (i.e., most of the human race) injured his career and caused needless rancor. (And if you make the obvious crack, you're a dolt.) Over the years, I've toyed with the idea of tracking down people who knew him -- only to think better of the project. Best to keep my romanticized portrait intact.

Unlike AnnaBelle, I can understand why Barack Obama wrote a book titled Dreams From My Father, as opposed to a similar volume about his mother (an admirable woman in many ways). A boy who grows up surrounded by the feminine will always see the female not just as That Which Nurtures but also as That Which Confines. We seek the lost king. That's the lesson of the Arthur legend -- at least, that's one of the lessons.

On that level, I get Obama.

What I cannot understand is this: Why did Barack Obama countenance a primary campaign which history books will damn as sexist? Although the paranoia directed at Hillary Clinton was driven primarily by "Clinton Derangement Syndrome," misogyny also played an undeniable role. Some of the insults directed at Hillary were also directed at Ann Dunham -- and at Malia Ann and Natasha Obama, and at my mother, and at yours. Yet Barack Obama could not find it within himself to denounce those among his followers who called Hillary a "cunt" and a "bitch."

Why?