In my previous book,
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
, I noted Ann’s desire to transport her son away from Lolo’s influence, but I missed her secondary motives for sending him back to Hawaii in 1971 and not going with him. Ann wanted an independent career and she wanted to be single without having to look after young Obama. Though she did not formally divorce Lolo until 1980, Ann lived the life of a Western swinging single in a Third World milieu. At first she went through an identity crisis reflected in the way she constantly changed her name: she was Ann Soetoro, then Ann Sutoro, then Ann Dunham Sutoro, then S. Ann Dunham. In short order, however, she hit her stride. Her best friend during the 1970s and 1980s was Julia Suryakusuma, the “feminist and femme fatale,” in the description of Ann’s biographer Janny Scott. Suryakusuma says of Ann, “We were both very sexual. We talked a lot about sex and our sex lives.” Renske Heringa says that Ann’s taste in men was strictly Third World and dark-skinned. “She never was really interested in white guys.” Suryakusuma, however, was married to a white man. Suryakusuma adds of Ann, “She used to say that she liked brown bums and I liked white bums.”
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While I was in Indonesia, I tried contacting Suryakusuma to find out more about Ann’s romantic tastes. Suryakusuma, however, refused to talk to me, possibly because I don’t possess a white bum.
Ann’s sexual adventuring may seem a little surprising in view of the fact that she was a large woman who kept getting larger. Her friends, however, said that Ann cut a very distinctive figure with her flowing batik skirts, Indonesian fabric shawls, locally-made sandals, and large hoop earrings. Moreover, Ann was a confident woman who did not hesitate to approach Indonesian men. She was a woman of power because she was American and had money and knew influential people at the Ford Foundation, the American embassy, and in Indonesia itself. Thus Indonesian men found her alluring as well as powerful, and over the years she had a succession of romantic relationships. One of them was with Indonesian journalist I. Made Suarjana, a reporter for the Yogyakarta newsweekly
Tempo
. Ann was forty-five when she met Suarjana; he was twenty-eight, just one year older than Ann’s son Barack. Suarjana describes his relationship with Ann as “a romantic-intellectual friendship.” They traveled around the country together, and Suarjana is thanked in the acknowledgements that accompany Ann’s published thesis. Ann was clearly the senior partner in their relationship. She assigned herself the task of teaching Suarjana English grammar. She gave him a four-volume set of books on the topic, and was not above asking him “how far did you study?” and administering surprise pop quizzes. Suarjana, however, is coy about the physical element in their relationship and it is not hard to see why; he was already married at the time. When Janny Scott asked Suarjana whether Ann would have liked to have married him, he replied that she knew from the outset that he was already married.
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Learning about Ann’s sexual adventuring in Indonesia, I realized how wrong I had been to consider Barack Obama Sr. the playboy. True, he was a polygamist, but polygamy is traditional in Kenyan Luo culture. Ann, by contrast, was the real playgirl, and despite all her reservations about power, she was using her American background and economic and social power to purchase the romantic attention of Third World men.
Although Ann typically dated younger Indonesian men, it would be wrong to say that she sent young Barack back to Hawaii so that she could pursue the life of a Western “cougar.” Clearly Ann’s bigger motive was her career. She fell in love with Indonesian peasant culture—specifically the culture of peasant blacksmithing. She once informed fellow anthropologist Don Johnston that if she could be reincarnated, she would come back as a blacksmith. What appealed to Ann most about the traditional blacksmithing industry in Indonesia was that it preceded colonialism. This was the world before the white man came. Ann saw it as her mission to preserve and affirm that culture, and show its viability even in modern Indonesia. She dedicated her life work to this, and chose it over the task of raising her son. In fact, studying the blacksmiths and writing and publishing her thesis about them took Ann most of her adult life.
Ann’s thesis is a lengthy response to and rebuttal of the work of a Dutch economist named J. H. Boeke, whose work dates to the early twentieth century. Ann refers to him simply as “a colonial officer named Boeke.” Boeke argued that traditional Indonesian culture is pre-modern while the West brought modern capitalism to Indonesia. Thus Indonesian culture is dualistic, reflecting pre-modern elements and modern Western elements. Ann disputed this portrayal of traditional Indonesian culture as pre-modern. She accused Boeke of perpetuating “the myth of the lazy native.” She even faulted current anthropologists for espousing similar ideas, what she termed “neocolonialism in bad disguise.” She sought to demonstrate the durability of traditional art and handicrafts in modern, postcolonial Indonesia. Her thesis ended up being more than a thousand pages, and it was published two decades after she first entered graduate school. In the course of writing it, Ann got to do the multicultural thing that she enjoyed. She traipsed around the world to New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangkok, Nairobi, Cairo, Dhaka, and Kuala Lumpur, not to mention all over Indonesia.
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In 1995, diagnosed with third-stage uterine and ovarian cancer, Ann Obama left Indonesia and returned to America. She was admitted to the Straub Clinic in Honolulu. Ann was in treatment for most of that year, but Obama never visited her in Hawaii. He was busy with his book tour, and running for the Illinois State Senate. Later Obama tried to make an issue of how his mother couldn’t get approval for her health insurance, even though the insurance papers were not properly filed, and ultimately the insurance company accepted the policy and paid her claim. Obama has also insisted that he tried and tried to get to his mother but, to his lifelong regret, he didn’t arrive “in time.” Actually there was plenty of time. He seems to have had no intention of getting there. Ann died on November 17, 1995, with her daughter Maya by her side. Ann didn’t do very well by her son; in fact, mother and son seem to have rejected each other. Even so, she had an enduring impact on Barack Obama, and it is a pity, in a way, that she did not live to see that impact carry him to the White House. For us, however, there is a different kind of pathos in seeing Obama thrust on the world stage, where his actions are shaped by years of neglect, abandonment, and trauma, with consequences for America and for the rest of the world.
CHAPER FIVE
OBAMA’S FOUNDING FATHERS
The American empire is in decline—economically,
politically, and in some ways culturally.
The empire is declining and the game is over.
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—Bill Ayers, May 2012 speech at the University of Oregon
T
his chapter is about Obama’s founding fathers, the ones who, after his parents, shaped him the most. We all have founding fathers and they help make us who we are. In my case, there was a college mentor, the literary scholar Jeffrey Hart. I was also influenced by the conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr., and neoconservative pundit Irving Kristol, theologian Michael Novak, economist Thomas Sowell, and of course Ronald Reagan. Countries also have founding fathers, and America is no exception. Obama’s founding fathers are very different from mine, but more important they are very different from America’s founding fathers. In fact, it is harrowing to think what George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin would make of Obama’s founding fathers, if the two groups could somehow encounter each other across the barriers of time.
There are two good reasons, at this stage, to consider Obama’s founding fathers. First, this group helps us to answer the question: Where did Obama learn chapter and verse of the anti-colonial ideology? Earlier we answered the objection that Obama could not have been influenced by his father because he hardly knew his father. We saw that Obama, like many abandoned sons, went in search of the missing father. Still, the objection is valid in one respect. Even if Obama got the general outlines of the anti-colonial ideology from his father, he still needed tutors and mentors to instruct him in the elaborate details of that ideology. This is where Obama’s founding fathers come in. They reinforced and made concrete the dreams of the father. Still, Obama makes it clear that none of his mentors was as important to him as his real father. Writing of people who influenced him, Obama says he could “respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own,” and yet he had to admit that they fell short of his father’s “lofty standards.”
2
Second, some critics of
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
fretted that I was painting Obama with too foreign a brush. As Tim Cavanaugh of
Reason
put it, “There is no need to go to Kenya” to locate anti-colonial and socialist indoctrination because for Obama “it was widely available at Occidental and Columbia.”
3
Writing more broadly, Shelby Steele observes that “Barack Obama is not an ‘other’ so much as he is a child of the 1960s. . . . Obama came of age in a bubble of post-sixties liberalism that conditioned him as an adversary of American exceptionalism,” and as president Obama has sought “to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.” This is also right. Obama is not alone on the left in attempting to make what Steele terms “a virtue of decline . . . as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.”
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So where did Obama learn this? He learned it in America as much as he did in Kenya, and this is hardly surprising, because he encountered all of his founding fathers in America. Their influence on Obama shows how anti-colonialism is not confined to the Third World. Rather, anti-colonialism came to America during the 1960s. We will see through Obama’s mentors how anti-colonialism was imported into America. Mainly it came from three sources: the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and liberation theology.
Obama drank deeply from these anti-colonial springs not just in college, but from his early years in school and also in his later activist years in Chicago. While other Americans—Bill and Hillary Clinton come to mind—were influenced by anti-colonial ideas in the faculty lounge, these ideas were casually absorbed and could easily be moderated or even jettisoned in later life. For Obama, however, anti-colonialism was embedded in his mind from earliest childhood to adult life. That’s what makes Barack so different from Bill: Barack can’t shake off his convictions, even when political advantage would seem to dictate that he should, because they are too much part of his psyche.
So who were Obama’s founding fathers? In Hawaii, he came under the influence of the former Communist Frank Marshall Davis; at Columbia, he encountered the Palestinian radical Edward Said; at Harvard, Obama’s mentor was the Brazilian socialist Roberto Mangabeira Unger; in Chicago, Obama befriended the revolutionary preacher Jeremiah Wright and also the former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Together Obama’s mentors make up quite a group. Never before has America had a president tutored and mentored by a Communist and part-time pornographer; by a “professor of terror” who advocated armed resistance against America and her allies; by a socialist so radical that he was ejected by the foreign socialist government he served in; by an incendiary theologian whose philosophy can be summed up in the phrase “God damn America”; and by a former terrorist who, like Osama Bin Laden, attempted to blow up the Pentagon and other symbols of American power.
How did Obama discover his founding fathers? With the exception of Frank Marshall Davis, Obama didn’t accidentally encounter them; he sought them out, because he was looking for surrogate fathers who thought the way his father did. If Obama wanted to become a revolutionary like his dad, he needed to hang out with real revolutionaries. Yet Obama later recognized that he needed to erase some of these figures from his biography. Obama mentions two of his five founding fathers—Frank Marshall Davis and Jeremiah Wright—in his autobiography, but as we will see, he downplays and distorts them. Obama refers to Davis merely as “a poet named Frank.” Obama certainly doesn’t let on what Davis and Wright really believe. Obama tells us only what he wants us to know.
We can see this from the example of Frank Marshall Davis. Dawna Weatherly-Williams, his close friend and next door neighbor, says that in his radicalism Davis was “way ahead of his time.” She was surprised at Obama’s abbreviated description of his relationship with Davis: “I am sure he influenced Barack more than Barack is saying.” This remark is quoted in David Remnick’s biography of Obama,
The Bridge
, but Remnick ignores it and insistently downplays the ties between Davis and Obama, writing that their relationship was “neither constant nor lasting, certainly of no ideological importance.”
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Yet if Remnick is right, why would Obama recall Davis so vividly and affectionately two decades later? Remnick seems eager to downplay Obama’s ties to Davis because of Davis’s Communist and radical associations.
Obama first met Davis in 1971 when he was ten years old. Davis was then in his mid-sixties. The two of them, the old man and the young boy, remained close until Obama left for college. Obama was introduced to Davis by his grandfather, Stanley Dunham. Recall that Obama had just been sent back to Hawaii by his mother to be raised by his grandparents. Stanley Dunham, a bit of an oddball, decided that since Obama was black he needed a black role model. And so he found Davis, who lived in a cottage near the Waikiki beach. On a regular basis, Stanley Dunham would take Obama to see Davis. Dunham and Davis would drink whiskey or smoke dope and play Scrabble. This would go on for hours. And Obama would sit in the corner and listen to Davis deliver his anti-American diatribes. Sometimes Obama would privately seek out Davis for advice on racial matters on which he could not trust his grandparents. And this close rapport between Davis and Obama continued for eight years, until Obama left Hawaii for Occidental College in Los Angeles.