In her latest pensée, Mary Grabar tackles the Big Questions about Obama:
When I heard that a major part of Barack Obama’s resume included a stint as a “community organizer,” I asked myself what the term meant.
“Now don’t panic, I said to myself…it’s only a two-word phrase, and both words are in English, and you’re a professor of that, so you should be able to figure this out…!”
It’s sort of like “activist.”
“But it’s even more like ‘desk organizer,’ so maybe after college he rented out his pockets to poor scriveners who needed a place to store their pen nibs, rocker blotters, and celluloid eyeshades!”
I had always wondered what the job description for “activist” was. How do you apply? Where do you apply?
And are they hiring? Because this tenure thing doesn’t look like it’s going to work out..
It was unlike any of the jobs I had had, whether it was pouring beers, serving fish fries, cleaning toilets, pruning in snow-filled vineyards, or marking grammatical errors on freshman essays.
At what point during Mary’s employment history do you think the Peter Principle kicked in? I’m guessing it was somewhere between working the deep fryer at H. Salt, and giving the toilets a sparkling rim job, although I do admire her willingness to perform the cold weather agricultural work that Mexicans won’t do (to say nothing of helping to make New York State Wine what it is today).
The people I had grown up with worked with blow torches, trowels, and brooms, or stooped over sewing machines all day. If you made it, you were a secretary or supervisor at Kodak. If you were really ambitious you went to the community college or state university and became a nurse or an engineer. You could ask your cousin to put in a good word for you with the supervisor at Kodak or General Motors, but whom would you ask to become an “activist” or “community organizer”?
It’s almost like this Obama guy is saying he’s too good for nepotism!
I imagine if someone like Barack Obama had come to Beach Street in Rochester, New York, in the 1960s where my neighbors relaxed on their lawn chairs on front porches and stoops after a hard day in the factory, and said, “Hi, my name is Barry Obama, and I am a community organizer,” the unanimous response would have been, “A what?”
“A community organizer. I’ve come to organize you, your community.”
This would have immediately raised suspicions
Oh I don’t know…Remember when you were a kid, and you’d hear that tinny music playing outside, and knew that the Community Organizer was coming? In our house, my sister and I would instantly rush to our mother and beg for some change from her purse, then we’d race each other into the street, hoping we’d be in time before he turned the corner. And then all the neighborhood kids would run outside and gather around his truck, and he’d step out with his white uniform and big smile, and start arranging us into us into cadres…
While her husband went upstairs, Mrs. Tischenko would have said, “Our grass don’t need no cutting.”
Because he’s black, you see, so it would be natural to assume he was looking to do odd jobs. Remember, this was the Sixties — too late for hobos, but too early for Latin American day laborers
Mrs. Shulman would have said, “We don’t need you’se guys to tell us how to organize ourselves.”
Then she would have returned to playing the plum role of “Lady with Poodle” in the Rochester Community Theatre production of “Dead End.”
That certainly would have been the opinion of Antonio who owned the one-man barbershop at the corner and Otto who had half the market for the candy trade for Carthage School #8. “Are you telling me how to run my business?” each of them would have asked. The Schmidts’ brindled mutt would have made his way off their porch across the street. “Demon,” as he was called, a sneaky cur around adult strangers, especially those in suits, would have walked stiff-legged across the street while Barry made his speech on social justice and equitable distribution of goods, until he was interrupted by the sting of canine fangs in his calf.
Nope. Nothing inflammatory about that imagery. Go on, Professor Grabar, you were fantasizing about Barack Obama visiting your old neighborhood…?
Barry would have been sent running, which would be a good thing for him because right about that time Mr. Tischenko would be coming downstairs with the rifle.
This playlet has been brought to you by Red Man Chewing Tobacco. “Each Bag Packs a Whole Levee Full of Flavor and Dead Civil Rights Workers!”
So the term “activist” was a foreign one for me.
Like the words, “french fry” or “Negro.”
I only started hearing it in graduate school in relation to what we as teachers of freshman composition were expected to do: train our charges for “social activism.”
California State Standard Curriculum: English 101.
Week 1: Students will read “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” by Flannery O’Connor, and boycott grapes.
Week 2: Students will read “Hills like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway, then break into small groups and get beaten senseless by Alabama State Troopers.
They said that right there at the orientations and in the books. We were to pass on the tradition of the tenured professors who themselves had been “activists” in the day: burning draft cards, carrying placards, trashing deans’ offices, giving inflammatory speeches, and sometimes throwing bombs.
Fine, just so long as I don’t have to read “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” again.
They would speak proudly about how they brought about “social justice.” They did this by inspiring many who lived in “ghettoes” to make their own neighborhoods and adjacent neighborhoods look like the wastes of devastation the activists charged they were in their speeches.
Translation: If black people are allowed to move in next door to Mrs. Tischenko, they won’t cut their grass and the whole neighborhood will turn into Harlem.
It probably sounds better in the original Slovenian.
So inspired, the masses set about to achieving social justice by smashing windows, looting stores, and overturning police cars. Once the buildings went from being plain or rickety to burned down, these communities needed the help of “community organizers,” which apparently is the job of Harvard-trained lawyers.
Despite the professor-induced rioting, your 3-page paper on “The Lottery” is still due first thing Monday.
Ghetto-child Barry Obama, facing the slings and arrows of racism that all who have the color of his skin suffer in America rose from the depths of poverty, neglect, and hunger through his brilliance and sheer determination and got a law degree from Harvard.
Not.
See what she did right there? Made you think she might actually stop being an asshole for one second, then she pulled a 180 and completely confounded your expectations! That’s the kind of elegant literary device that only Temporary Associate English Professors and passe sketch comedy characters can pull off.
We all know his story: private schools, a nurturing (white) mother and (white) grandparents, solicitous professors.
Hey…the professors don’t get their own parenthetical skin tones? What gives?
In addition to the official government affirmative action programs and private school minority scholarships, I can tell you from sixteen years in academia that liberal professors and administrators practically genuflect in front of any articulate black male, even today, more than two decades after Obama’s own academic career.
Well, geez, after all the tax money I’ve poured into Obama’s education, that bastard better mow my lawn!
Barry Obama had many such academic mentors and one namely is Bill Ayers, a white guy from a wealthy family who in his leisure time (of which he had much, not having to mow lawns or deliver newspapers) liked to throw bombs in order to bring about “social justice” as a member of the Weather Underground.
Wait…Bill Ayers was Obama’s faculty adviser in school? (“Now, I’ll be bombing my office on Tuesday, but not Wednesday…”) I think in the comic book business, they call this “retconning.”
Obama has acted like he has only a passing acquaintance with Ayers, as someone living in the same neighborhood, even claiming in an interview that he thought he was an “English professor.” But it seems that Obama may be hiding a lot of connections, like how Ayers and similar like-minded revolutionists of the 1960s, helped get Barry Obama a job as a “community organizer.”
Ahhhh…it’s all connected! I can just imagine his initial briefing from Bill Ayers at the Weather Underground’s underground lair:
“Barry, your mission is to organize self-reliant barbers, candy store owners, and secretaries at Kodak so they’ll become fatally dependent upon the Federal teat. As an articulate black man, you’re certain to be embraced by Rochester’s plentiful supply of rifle-toting Leo Gorcey imitators.”
Steve Diamond, law professor at Santa Clara University , offers a fascinating account of Obama’s connections that the New York Times has not seen fit to print and that National Public Radio has not deemed worthy of one of their “in-depth” stories.
They also seem disinterested in my expose showing how the Queen of England and the Illuminati are selling opium to the lizard people who run the Trilateral Commission.
The professor also offers along the way little lessons about the various schools of communism and which type Obama allies favor.
We favor Trotskyism because that’s totally the party school.
It’s a rare treat these days to get a professor writing prose that is enjoyable and educative.
Well, it’s rare at Townhall…
It used to be that way back in the 1950s before the radical theorists took over the academy.
And the Beatniks with that constant bongo music! It’s driving me mad!
It should be quite convincing of what you already suspected about Obama, which as one of my neighbors from Beach Street might have put it, “You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows over the smell of a rat.”
Actually, even in the original Slovenian that one doesn’t make much sense.
I can tell you from sixteen years in academia that liberal professors and administrators practically genuflect in front of any articulate black male
One suspects that inarticulate female Slovenians have not received their fair share of genuflection.
Left by herr doktor bimler on June 24th, 2008