Bugs and Barack
Thanks to a particularly vile infestation of tiny leafhoppers inside the house last night, I finished the 442-page autobiography of Barack Obama in record time. I started reading after lunch on Sunday when it occurred to me that I was finished with the books I had been reading and needed something new. Joel to the rescue.
In response to his off-the-top-of-the-head listing of books not buried too deeply in plastic storage totes, I selected three for further investigation. One was The Nurture of Children: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, one on Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes, and the third, Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. I chose the autobiography by Obama and read in it till weariness overwhelmed my morning coffee-sipping counter-measures, and I took a nap. Back to the book after that.
Biography and autobiography are some of my favorite genres. Obama's book was a good read. It was written while Obama finished law school at Harvard, and during the time he served as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was offered an advance by a publisher, so he took time off to write his story before plunging into practicing law. Obama had not yet sought or won any political appointments or elections.
The book has three sections with one-word titles: Origins, Chicago, and Kenya. Within these sections are long chapters with numbers serving as titles.
I have several strong impressions after reading the Obama story. One is that he had an extremely nonreligious upbringing. Around him, the most familiar spirits came in a bottle. Smoking and profane speech were commonplace among his family and friends in his growing-up years. Acquiring and abandoning spouses happened with alarming frequency with Barack's birth and step parents. He has many half brothers and sisters, but no full siblings. His father had multiple wives simultaneously, among them two Americans and at least three Kenyans.
His first brush with religion apparently occurred in the days between his graduation from college and his entrance into law school when he worked for several years as a community organizer in Chicago. Even then, he worked with many different churches in social causes before he ever attended the church that later became his own. The pastor there was the now-infamous Jeremiah Wright. On the first Sunday Obama attended, Wright preached on "The Audacity of Hope," also the title of Obama's recently published (and far more politically encumbered) book.
Barack was deeply touched by Wright's sermon and the altar call that followed.
The second strong impression of Barack Obama is that he is truly cosmopolitan, mostly because of circumstances he did not choose. In his story, I find surprising echoes of my own and the stories of people around me. As a child, he lived among Asians in Hawaii and Indonesia. His Luo tribal homeland is in Kisumu, Kenya, where his father's people lived. His mother lived, for a time, in Wichita, Kansas. Both her parents grew up nearby, in Augusta and El Dorado.
Hiromi is the Asian connection in our family. Shane's bride-to-be lived for years with her family in Kisumu, Kenya. We all live now within an hour's drive from Wichita. The ethnic common ground ends there, however, since we have never been immersed in African-American culture as has become Obama's primary public ethnic identity, and he, of course, is almost as far as can be imagined from a Swiss Anabaptist religious heritage.
I find it more than a little disturbing that, while our sons are as surely Japanese as Barack is African (more so perhaps because they grew up with their foreign father), they can far more easily lay aside the mantle of "differentness" than Obama can, although all of these cross-cultural/bi-racial children were raised in American society. It's as if "Blackness" is a much greater social burden than "Asian-ness." Yet African-Americans have greater numbers and have been in America much longer than Asians. I can only conclude that whites have been more suspicious and malicious toward African-Americans historically than they have been toward Asians, inhumane conditions for Chinese railroad builders and internment camps for WWII Japanese Americans notwithstanding. Shame on us.
Some of what Barack says about his efforts to sort out who he was and wanted to be are a little self-conscious and, by his own admission in the preface to the second edition of the book, perhaps slightly over-wrought. He wonders now how accurately he was able to describe, years later, what he was feeling at any given time, especially in recognition of people's tendency to interpret past events according to present understandings. I don't fault him for having found the sorting out process messy and imprecise, and I recognize in my experience and in that of people close to me some of the same ambiguity and struggle. However, I am profoundly grateful for the anchor I and my loved ones have in Christian faith and a stable, supportive family and community--all of which Barack lacked in his childhood.
Barack obviously has some of his father's breathtaking intelligence, charisma, and generosity. Some of his African siblings are also very accomplished individuals. A few of them have lived and studied in the West. From his mother's side of the family, he got a shot at respectable common sense (his grandmother), a strong sense of fairness (mother and grandfather), an adventuresome spirit (mother and grandfather), and a slightly naive willingness to venture beyond respectability on occasion (all of them, but most audaciously, his grandfather). As an aside, I suspect if he does indeed select Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius as his vice-presidential running mate as some speculate might happen, it will be a tribute to the influence of his rock-solid Kansas grandmother.
Last night as I was reading the Obama story, I took my book to bed with me at a decent time, and decided to read there until I got sleepy. While I was doing so, an annoying number of little brown leafhopper-like insects found and bombarded me. I shooed and slapped and swatted them away as best I could. When I got sleepy (I know I've gotten there when I drop the book twice in close succession.) and turned off the light, the real fun began. Those abominable bugs crawled into my ear and my nose, and bombarded every bit of exposed skin and hair, which is why I did a lot of angry thumping on my head, often fishing the remains of squashed bugs out of my hair. All this unwanted activity thoroughly awakened me, and I couldn't go back to sleep, even after I got up and turned on the bathroom light, hoping it would lure the little beasts away from our bedroom. After nearly an hour of unsatisfactory results, I got up and went to the living room to read. They continued to assault me there. It finally dawned on me that I needed to stop worrying about wasted electricity and turn on the overhead light in the dining room so they would congregate there instead of around my reading lamp in the living room. Still later, (the best ideas are hard to come by at unearthly hours) I thought of leaving the light on over the kitchen sink. I was too lazy and sleepy by then to bother with positioning a dishpan of soapy water beneath it, to catch the little buggers. Around 3:00 I returned to bed and slept fine for what was left of the night.
The tiny brown leafhoppers that were my nemesis must hit their peak population at this time of the year. I think they enter our house through the window air conditioner. In an online report of insect numbers counted as part of a data-gathering project in the 1930's, researchers had to abandon the leaf-hopper count on a night around July 20 when they got past 500 and had so many insects get into the eyes and mouths of the counters that they had to flee. I sympathize.
Even if your level of interest in politics is as in-the-cellar as mine is, or as in-the-gutter as some people's is, Obama's very thoughtfully-narrated story is worth reading for what it reveals about life--not his only, but everyone's. Obama shows himself to be a reflective man, and I wish you a bug-free environment in which to read Dreams from My Father and see this for yourself.
In response to his off-the-top-of-the-head listing of books not buried too deeply in plastic storage totes, I selected three for further investigation. One was The Nurture of Children: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, one on Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes, and the third, Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. I chose the autobiography by Obama and read in it till weariness overwhelmed my morning coffee-sipping counter-measures, and I took a nap. Back to the book after that.
Biography and autobiography are some of my favorite genres. Obama's book was a good read. It was written while Obama finished law school at Harvard, and during the time he served as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was offered an advance by a publisher, so he took time off to write his story before plunging into practicing law. Obama had not yet sought or won any political appointments or elections.
The book has three sections with one-word titles: Origins, Chicago, and Kenya. Within these sections are long chapters with numbers serving as titles.
I have several strong impressions after reading the Obama story. One is that he had an extremely nonreligious upbringing. Around him, the most familiar spirits came in a bottle. Smoking and profane speech were commonplace among his family and friends in his growing-up years. Acquiring and abandoning spouses happened with alarming frequency with Barack's birth and step parents. He has many half brothers and sisters, but no full siblings. His father had multiple wives simultaneously, among them two Americans and at least three Kenyans.
His first brush with religion apparently occurred in the days between his graduation from college and his entrance into law school when he worked for several years as a community organizer in Chicago. Even then, he worked with many different churches in social causes before he ever attended the church that later became his own. The pastor there was the now-infamous Jeremiah Wright. On the first Sunday Obama attended, Wright preached on "The Audacity of Hope," also the title of Obama's recently published (and far more politically encumbered) book.
Barack was deeply touched by Wright's sermon and the altar call that followed.
The second strong impression of Barack Obama is that he is truly cosmopolitan, mostly because of circumstances he did not choose. In his story, I find surprising echoes of my own and the stories of people around me. As a child, he lived among Asians in Hawaii and Indonesia. His Luo tribal homeland is in Kisumu, Kenya, where his father's people lived. His mother lived, for a time, in Wichita, Kansas. Both her parents grew up nearby, in Augusta and El Dorado.
Hiromi is the Asian connection in our family. Shane's bride-to-be lived for years with her family in Kisumu, Kenya. We all live now within an hour's drive from Wichita. The ethnic common ground ends there, however, since we have never been immersed in African-American culture as has become Obama's primary public ethnic identity, and he, of course, is almost as far as can be imagined from a Swiss Anabaptist religious heritage.
I find it more than a little disturbing that, while our sons are as surely Japanese as Barack is African (more so perhaps because they grew up with their foreign father), they can far more easily lay aside the mantle of "differentness" than Obama can, although all of these cross-cultural/bi-racial children were raised in American society. It's as if "Blackness" is a much greater social burden than "Asian-ness." Yet African-Americans have greater numbers and have been in America much longer than Asians. I can only conclude that whites have been more suspicious and malicious toward African-Americans historically than they have been toward Asians, inhumane conditions for Chinese railroad builders and internment camps for WWII Japanese Americans notwithstanding. Shame on us.
Some of what Barack says about his efforts to sort out who he was and wanted to be are a little self-conscious and, by his own admission in the preface to the second edition of the book, perhaps slightly over-wrought. He wonders now how accurately he was able to describe, years later, what he was feeling at any given time, especially in recognition of people's tendency to interpret past events according to present understandings. I don't fault him for having found the sorting out process messy and imprecise, and I recognize in my experience and in that of people close to me some of the same ambiguity and struggle. However, I am profoundly grateful for the anchor I and my loved ones have in Christian faith and a stable, supportive family and community--all of which Barack lacked in his childhood.
Barack obviously has some of his father's breathtaking intelligence, charisma, and generosity. Some of his African siblings are also very accomplished individuals. A few of them have lived and studied in the West. From his mother's side of the family, he got a shot at respectable common sense (his grandmother), a strong sense of fairness (mother and grandfather), an adventuresome spirit (mother and grandfather), and a slightly naive willingness to venture beyond respectability on occasion (all of them, but most audaciously, his grandfather). As an aside, I suspect if he does indeed select Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius as his vice-presidential running mate as some speculate might happen, it will be a tribute to the influence of his rock-solid Kansas grandmother.
Last night as I was reading the Obama story, I took my book to bed with me at a decent time, and decided to read there until I got sleepy. While I was doing so, an annoying number of little brown leafhopper-like insects found and bombarded me. I shooed and slapped and swatted them away as best I could. When I got sleepy (I know I've gotten there when I drop the book twice in close succession.) and turned off the light, the real fun began. Those abominable bugs crawled into my ear and my nose, and bombarded every bit of exposed skin and hair, which is why I did a lot of angry thumping on my head, often fishing the remains of squashed bugs out of my hair. All this unwanted activity thoroughly awakened me, and I couldn't go back to sleep, even after I got up and turned on the bathroom light, hoping it would lure the little beasts away from our bedroom. After nearly an hour of unsatisfactory results, I got up and went to the living room to read. They continued to assault me there. It finally dawned on me that I needed to stop worrying about wasted electricity and turn on the overhead light in the dining room so they would congregate there instead of around my reading lamp in the living room. Still later, (the best ideas are hard to come by at unearthly hours) I thought of leaving the light on over the kitchen sink. I was too lazy and sleepy by then to bother with positioning a dishpan of soapy water beneath it, to catch the little buggers. Around 3:00 I returned to bed and slept fine for what was left of the night.
The tiny brown leafhoppers that were my nemesis must hit their peak population at this time of the year. I think they enter our house through the window air conditioner. In an online report of insect numbers counted as part of a data-gathering project in the 1930's, researchers had to abandon the leaf-hopper count on a night around July 20 when they got past 500 and had so many insects get into the eyes and mouths of the counters that they had to flee. I sympathize.
Even if your level of interest in politics is as in-the-cellar as mine is, or as in-the-gutter as some people's is, Obama's very thoughtfully-narrated story is worth reading for what it reveals about life--not his only, but everyone's. Obama shows himself to be a reflective man, and I wish you a bug-free environment in which to read Dreams from My Father and see this for yourself.
posted by Mrs. I at
9:14 AM
2 Comments:
Correction: Judith Rich Harris's book is The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do.
By
Anonymous, at 7/22/2008
Thanks. I had originally listed only the subject of the book and then decided to list the actual title. Obviously, I quit before I got the changeover right.
By
Mrs. I, at 7/22/2008
Post a Comment
<< Home