“In Britain, a research team at King’s College, London, has declared that the female “G-spot” does not, in fact, exist.
In France, a group of top gynecologists led by Monsieur Sylvain Mimoun has dismissed the findings, and said what do you expect if you ask a group of Englishmen to try to find a woman’s erogenous zone.”
There was more to his column this morning, and I will finish reading it, but this was just funny. It does play on cultural and nationalistic stereotypes at the expense of Englishmen everywhere, but … still kind of funny.
On a side note, I know that most people reading this blog are not from Michigan, but having just been a front row observer in the Kwame Kilpatrick mess for most of the last several years, I am seeing and hearing some eery similarities in the months leading up to Kwame’s ultimate meltdown and in what our current president is saying.
I don’t know (or even have reason to believe) that Obama is the same type of “hip-hop” gangsta politician that Kilpatrick was; however, his years in Chicago are pretty much a mystery. The similarities that stand out are the relative inexperience, the push to the forefront of the political field in his chosen arena despite utter lack of experience, the pursuit of an agenda that is contrary to where the direction the constituents want to go, the “I won’t quit on you” language, and the apparent belief that he knows better than anyone else how to do the job, despite glaring evidence to the contrary. Granted, Kilpatrick had made a number of obvious (to me, anyway) missteps that this president has avoided. However, I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
When Kilpatrick was running for re-election, I made the comment to my uncle, who saw the former mayor on Belle Isle every now and then, that he was too young and too inexperienced to be re-elected, based on how he had handled himself during his first term. I suggested that his handlers should counsel him to wait – that if he kept going the way he was headed, he was going to crash and burn. My diagnosis was that he was going too far too fast, and that he was headed for disaster. My uncle said that he thought the mayor was doing fine, and that if he gets reelected, great. Out of respect for my now-80-year-old uncle, I have not said “I told you so.” (But I told you so!)
Obama is on a little higher-profile playing field than Kilpatrick was, and he was not raised in the City of Detroit under the Coleman Young regime the way Kilpatrick was. Kilpatrick’s mother, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, is, however, a U.S. Representative, although she only was elected to that position in 1996, while Obama’s mother was … I don’t know what. Again, pretty much most of his formative years are either deliberately shrouded in mystery/lies, or took place outside the United States where reliable and verifiable information is not available.
Still, Chicago-style politics and Detroit-style politics are different brands of the same game. There may be more cover in Chicago than in Detroit, which is (and has been for at least the last 50 or so years) more of an overgrown small town than Chicago, but the game is still the same. I don’t know whether Obama has been playing footsies with anyone other than his wife the way Kilpatrick was; watching him (the little time I spend doing that), I don’t see anything that suggests such a personality. Since the Tiger Woods fiasco, I suppose it could be said that you can’t really know about anyone’s life other than your own, but that’s a digression I don’t want to follow.
I keep coming back to the very first sin of all: Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. The Bible says that all sin comes down to three basics: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. There have been discussions, and good ones, about what that all means, but in thinking it through, it seems to me that the lust of the flesh is simply appetite – literally, what your flesh wants, whether it’s food (as in gluttony), sex, or corruption of anything that actually satisfies a physical (or simply human) need beyond what God intended. (There is an interesting exegetical discussion of this entire chapter here, but I wanted to parse this out myself first and see how I did!)
The lust of the eyes is a little trickier. Why say “lust of the flesh” and “lust of the eyes” if they both mean the same thing? If they mean something different, what is the “lust of the eyes”? If the eyes truly are windows of the soul, then maybe the lust of the eyes is a more spiritual lust or sin. Maybe it refers simply to spirit-lusts: fantasy, hope, ambition? The analyst suggests the following interpretation: “the tendency to be captivated by the outward show of things without enquiring into their real values.” [C. H. Dodd, The Johannine Epistles (Moffatt New Testament Commentary; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1946)].
The “pride of life” one is fairly easy to understand: the focus on one’s place in society or in the world. For me, anyway, it’s one of the easier ones to spot, although I think it’s possible to have the “pride of life” sin in reverse – have you ever met anyone who seemed to revel in how poorly they lived, how few possessions they lived with, or what a lowly lifestyle they maintained because they didn’t want to be “proud?”
Anyway, as I said: I’m not sure which of the three is Obama’s “Achilles’ heel,” but he surely has at least one. My gut feeling says that it’s the last, but I could be wrong. Now that I’ve read the Dodd analysis, I think it could be more of the second: ”the tendency to be captivated by the outward show of things without enquiring into their real values.”
I also did some additional reading over the weekend – it was kind of a bad weekend for reasons I’m not really sure about. You can read the whole thing here, but it was basically the whole Third-Culture Kid (TCK) thing – where I’ve been for the last 36 years. Here is the troubling quote:
“The answer to the question of how long it takes them [TCKs] to adjust to American life is: they never adjust. They adapt, they find niches, they take risks, they fail and pick themselves up again. They succeed in jobs they have created to fit their particular talents, they locate friends with whom they can share some of their interests, but they resist being encapsulated. Their camouflaged exteriors and understated ways of presenting themselves hide the rich inner lives, remarkable talents, and often strongly held contradictory opinions on the world at large and the world at hand.” [Emphasis added].
When you think about what we know (and don’t know) about this president, one thing we do know is that he was (is) a TCK – that leads to some serious questions about someone who is in essence a stealth president who is oriented toward camouflaging his true nature and hiding his “often strongly held contradictory opinions on the world at large and the world at hand.”
Before anyone takes me to task about being so against Obama, I had many of the same reservations about John McCain, who was born in Panama to (I think) military parents. His life seems to be much better documented, so there was more verifiable history on him than on Obama, but I had some of the same reservations, namely that he seems to be able to present whatever persona is required to allow him to fit in and succeed. All of us do that to some extent, and I know that with my own background, that is something I have to watch for.
But there is a different between a lack of practice or skill in being authentic and actively trying to keep one’s true nature and beliefs hidden from others.
Anyway, something to watch for in the coming months, I suspect.