Posted on 06/03/2011 1:23:47 PM PDT by pabianice
LONDON — For a long time Barack Obama’s mother was little more than the “white woman from Wichita” mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, “Dreams from My Father.”
Now, thanks to Janny Scott’s remarkable “A Singular Woman,” absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from “floating through foreign things,” as one colleague in Indonesia observes, “She was as type A as anybody on the team.”
That may seem a far-fetched description of a woman who was not good with money, had no fixed abode and did not see life through ambition’s narrow prism. It was the journey not the destination that mattered to Dunham. She was, in her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng’s words, “fascinated with life’s gorgeous minutiae.” To her son the president, “idealism and naïveté” were “embedded” in her.
Yet she was also a pioneering advocate of microcredit in the rural communities of the developing world, an unrivaled authority on Javanese blacksmithing, and a firm voice for female empowerment in an Indonesia “of ‘smiling’ or gentle oppression” toward women, as she wrote in one memo for the Ford Foundation.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Color me impressed!
/s
Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham was nothing more than the Rachel Corrie of her day, without getting herself killed.
Is it true this “White Woman From Kansas” used to take off her clothes and let others take pictures of her all naked like?
(Why yes. Yes she did!)
Don’t they have a word for girls like that back in Kansas?
(Why yes. They’re called sluts.)
Thanks!
She won a bunch of Gold medals in the Olympics using the alias “Mark Spitz”.
Look it up.
LOL!!!
LOL - classic!
Spot on, bravo!
Are Stanley Dunham’s nudie pictures in the book?
Obama’s mother was Maria Skiana
So much brilliance in this family ... I guess we won't be able to see his college transcripts either.
Ick. From a 2007 Chicago Trib article: “At Mercer High School, two teachers — Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman — generated regular parental thunderstorms by teaching their students to challenge societal norms and question all manner of authority. Foubert, who died recently, taught English. His texts were cutting edge: “Atlas Shrugged,” “The Organization Man,” “The Hidden Persuaders,” “1984” and the acerbic writings of H.L. Mencken.
Wichterman taught philosophy. The hallway between the two classes was known as “anarchy alley,” and students pondered the challenging notions of Wichterman’s teachings, including such philosophers as Sartre and Kierkegaard. He also touched the societal third rail of the 1950s: He questioned the existence of God. And he didn’t stop there.
“I had them read ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ and the parents went nuts,” said Wichterman, adding that parents also didn’t want any discussions about “anything to do with sex,” religion and theology. The parental protests were known as “mothers’ marches.”
“The kids started questioning things that their folks thought shouldn’t be questioned — religion, politics, parental authority,” said John Hunt, a classmate. “And a lot of parents didn’t like that, and they tried to get them [Wichterman and Foubert] fired.”
The Dunhams did not join the uproar. Madelyn and Stanley shed their Methodist and Baptist upbringing and began attending Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue.
“In the 1950s, this was sometimes known as ‘the little Red church on the hill,’ “ said Peter Luton, the church’s senior minister, referring to the effects of McCarthyism. Skepticism, the kind that Stanley embraced and passed on to his daughter, was welcomed here.” http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/chi-0703270151mar27-archive,0,2623808.story?page=3
Javanese blacksmithing instructions.
1. Heat something iron over a dung fueled fire.
2. Place said glowing hot item on anvil and beat with a hammer.
There, now we’re ALL experts on Javanese blacksmithing.
“To her son the president, “idealism and naïveté” were “embedded” in her.”
That’s not the only thing that was “embedded” in her.
Sounds like Stanley Ann Dunham’s parents wanted a boy. Or the nurse on duty got the name backwards - shoulda been Ann Stanley Dunham. Either way, massive confusion seems to be an inherited trait of that family’s DNA strain.
where’s the part where the left gives her a medal for dumping her kid and taking off?
Just do a search and they will show up. Three or four pix-it is obviously her.
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