One of the things which always puzzled me was the rage that the elites evince toward the country which granted them the boons that they possess. Then I got it.
Take, for example, our president. I understand that his father took a powder, that he was raised by his grandparents who were typical white people, and that his mother’s name was Stanley.
Imagine going through school with that baggage. Nyah nyah nyah nyah, your mother’s name is Stanley!
Then being whisked to Indonesia, where, aside from the pain of having to change schools and friends, you can’t speak the lingo for a while, they have a different religion, and you don’t look like them. So you’re odd man out. Again.
Imagine junior high school with that going on.
- you’re not a proper Muslim, or
- you’re not really black, or
- you’re not white, or
- your mother’s name is Stanley
Imagine the teasing. Growing up is hell for almost everybody, but for Barack it must have been especially gruesome.
In his book he declared that rich white people deliberately brought their dogs over to his Harlem neighborhood to take a dump. And that’s true if you’re writing a book trying to establish your creds in the Rich White People Are The Despoilers of the Earth universe.
Because if you’re a rich white person you naturally want to walk your dog where you’re afraid to go just so it can poop on their lawns. But that’s how young Barack saw it (or said he saw it).
So he has a grudge.
But, then if you want to see a real grudge, consider this bit about Peggy Noonan.
I think Peggy is witty. I think her gracious. Most of all I think her kind (once,when Faulkner was at a baptism of twins, he was asked to contribute something, and so he went to the baptismal font and said, Babies: Be Kind!). I don’t always agree with her, and sometimes, as in some of her Palin evaluations, I disagree vehemently. It is obvious, though, from these reminiscences, that Peggy’s sin was not unkindness, nor dimwittedness, but shouldering her way in where she didn’t belong.
I know this sounds like a note passed by a seventh-grader, but as these writers went to school with Peggy, and as she is now 59, they are presumably long past their senior prom. The emphasis, I should add, is mine.
Awful as it sounds, I can’t help but wonder if I was part of a small group of people in high school that played a role in the creation of the Peggy Noonan who plagues us today. Could it be that WE were the ones that turned Peggy Noonan into the affected, superior, and snide far-right winger who never seems to go away?
Peggy and I were members of the class of 1968 at Rutherford (NJ) High School. She had transferred in from somewhere unknown at the start of her sophomore year.
Transferred in from somewhere? Well, so much for the melting pot.
My mother was a teacher at RHS and she was in her social studies class. Her recollections of Peggy–long, limp hair, a loner who didn’t say boo, a B student, someone living over a stationery store downtown, definitely not from the tonier side of WASP Rutherford.
Living over a store! What right had this wretch to come and breath our air?!
Those of us in the VERY small group calling itself The Resistance were, obviously, not among the “in group”–i.e., the football-cheerleader crowd. We were the “nerds” and artists, interested in pushing the envelope in a very conservative time and place: for example, I was editor of the paper
I was editor of the paper. Remember: this is a person pushing 60 and she is maintaining that Peggy Noonan, who has been a White House aid, a TV producer, and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, was not a pimple on the ass of her exalted position. The editor of a high school newspaper.
In fact, none of us trusted her. She was sneaky. She always seemed to have an eye trained on my boyfriend, the most talented artist in the school.
Well, of course. We have all heard of boyfriend. [please keep in mind: this person is 60 or close to it]
Was this early rejection by her radical high school peers the cause of her going off the deep end and becoming a right-winger of the most obnoxious and toxic sort?
Aha! YOU were responsible for Peggy Noonan having a rewarding and world-hopping career, disgusting though said career may have been.
If ever you wonder that Americans should have hoped and prayed that we should lose terribly in Iraq, or Vietnam before that, or that we would get hit by an even more ferocious terrorist attack so we could get what was coming to us, just re-read this piece by Monica Finch and Gloria R. Lalumia.
With some people, high school casts a long shadow. Don’t look for mercy or understanding from these people.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Tags: adolescent rage
Your point of view is that of a white person, as a brown person (hispanic) , son of migrants I know exactly what he went through.
No. You don’t. Not unless your mother was named Eduardo, because your parents really wanted a boy, and every single day of her life she was told they don’t want you by the very fact of her name, so she grew up yearning for the other. And then your mom got knocked up by somebody who is totally the other and all was splendiferous until dad went blithering off and then mom found another the other and hauled you off away from your friends to where you didn’t speak the language or understand the religion and you’re supposed to do both. And after doing that for awhile you went to live with your grandparents whom you dearly loved because they cared for you but you also hated because they are white.
Luke, I grew up in Tucson, AZ. There weren’t near the Mexicans (and what’s with this Hispanic stuff? You Mexican? Honduran? Salvadoran? Guatemalan? Columbian?) there then but my father’s lawyer was Mexican. Became a federal district court judge. We didn’t think like that then. This identity politics is, believe it or not, new. Looking back I can tell, just from their names, that my friends were Mexican, English, Scot, Irish, Russian, Jewish, Polish, Middle Eastern, and some I haven’t figured. Names like Arnesson and Canright and Kolenkark. Villaseñor and Kuluva and Karim. And those were the last names.
I knew people who weren’t like me. But I don’t hate them because they’re not. I don’t hate myself because I’m not like them. And I don’t need to hate anybody because he’s not sufficiently The Other.
That’s for starters.
Oh! And, Luke? About my having the POV of a white person. The Mexican guy I wrote about? My father’s lawyer? I knew him pretty well because he used to take me hunting. His father came from Sinaloa and opened a bar and general store in the mining town of Mammoth. His son, my father’s lawyer, worked in the store and the mines and went to the University of Arizona and became a lawyer and later a federal judge. And he would kick your ass if you said he wasn’t white.