Obama is just a bit more than 2 years older than me and when we would have both been in high school those who were avid pot smokers were called Stoners, for the simple reason they were stoned all the time. In short Obama's years as a high schooler and time at Occidental College while in thrall to "choom" is the equivalent of being sloppy drunk through the years he was supposed to be learning something.
But as someone in the same age group I know that being a pot smoking true inhaler gave you the status of being cool. The cool kids smoked weed and partied. Learning history and government and all those other boring, stupid things they make you learn in school was not high on the cool kids list. Getting high and being cool with all the trappings of cool was. I don't have to imagine the envy that Barry Obama generated among the non-cool kids, because I was a non-cool kid, as were my friends and for the most part, the boys I dated. The one who was on the more cool side, well let's just say it didn't end happily.
Which brings me to the idea that the non-cool kids were envious of the cool kids 'cause you know we all wanted to be as cool and popular as the pot smoking stoners. It wasn't as if we couldn't have crossed to the other side and tried to be cool too, but somehow the idea of having to let go of the morals and values we were taught in order to be cool was stronger than the want to be cool. It might have been cool to get high yet somehow for a great many of us there was a distinct understanding of what could happen if we took that route, it was in fact all around us, the lessons were easy to see in by late 1970s, all it took was the willingness to see the fallout from the hippie generation directly in front of us.
Make no mistake about it, Barack Obama is not from the hippie generation for all the talk of how those of the 60s are now running this country, Barack Obama is a product of the hippie generation. Myself and millions of others like me actively rejected the hippie and the beatniks idea of cool, and instead embraced the values of traditional America, Obama never got there, and there are very good reasons for that.
By and large the main influences on Obama's life were those of the hippie cool side of life. But not just any kind of cool. Obama's influences were not run of the mill kind of cool, though his high school friends may have been. No, Obama's real influences of cool were the intellectual harbingers of cool. Those intellectuals whose ancestors have roots in the American Transcendentalism/Liberal Protestant movement and their supporters who rejected the foundations of religious beliefs of New England Calvinism but not the resulting culture. Those early harbingers of cool were to become of that culture. Based in New England the movement was heavily associated with Harvard and Boston. It was closely affiliated with Unitarianism, which became the most common religious affiliation of Boston's elite. It is striking however to note that Unitarianism and it's offshoot Transcendentalism is an outgrowth of the Puritan strain of American culture and all of it's major figures were descendants of Puritans.
The key to Puritanism was the control of the behavior of the group members. Historian David Hackett Fischer (Albion's Seed) describes New England's culture and religious ideology as "Ordered Liberty" as "the freedom to order one's acts in a godly way-but not in any other." Ordered liberty then implies strong social control of thought, speech and behavior. Louis Taylor Merrill, a Chairman of the History Department of Beliot College, faculty member beginning in 1938, notes in the linked article the "civil and religious strait-jacket that the Massachusetts theocrats applied to dissenters". Those authorities, backed by it's clergy controlled nearly all aspects of daily life in the early Massachusetts colony. Books deemed offensive or blasphemous were confiscated and burned. Spying on ones relatives and neighbors was encouraged and there were many convictions for criticizing magistrates, the governor or the clergy. The Puritans may have come to America for religious freedom as we are taught in school, but for their own religious freedom, not that of others or of those who dissented from the leading magistrates and clergy. Obama's mother attended a Unitarian Church while living in Seattle, the East Shore Unitarian Church. When Obama's grandmother died her memorial service was held at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu.
What is striking about the culture of the Puritans is its moral fervor. Once liberalized into the Unitarian form and later the Transcendental form the Puritanism of New England went from being directed to keeping fellow Puritans in line to being directed at the entire country in line through various reform movements that were and still are very New England in tone. In time various posts will flesh this out historically more than this initial post can do. There is a reason American Liberalism often has such a religious tone to it. Those who oppose liberalism are not simply political opponents, they are evil and hateful.
Liberal Protestantism in the form of the Unitarian church never lost the moral fervor or the Puritan culture of imposing what was considered godly in that culture onto all of it's population. The moral fervor that lead Puritan preachers to rigidly enforce laws that upheld its culture was universalized and then aimed at correcting the perceived ills of a Capitalist society.While historians mark a definitive end to the Transcendental phrase of Unitarianism, the reality is a bit more complicated. Intellectually Transcendentalism took over the Unitarian church as well as having influenced society at a much greater rate than their small numbers would have indicated.The Unitarian church still claims those who identified as Transcendentalists as their own. The influence on American society is primarily through the American Educational system.
Orestes Brownson (1803-1880), whose religious wandering took him from Univeralism to Unitarianism to Catholicism, wrote that we must-
"realize in our social arrangements and in the actual conditions of all men, that equality of man and man that God had established but which had been destroyed by Capitalism"According to Brownson it was a Christians duty to
bring down the high, and bring up the low; to break the fetters of the bound and set the captive free; to destroy all oppression, establish the reign of justice, which is the reign of equality, between man and man; to introduce new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, wherein all shall be as brothers, loving one another, and no one possessing what another lacketh.Brownson is not unique in his belief system among Unitarians nor the Transcendental's. What makes Brownson unique within the Transcendentalist culture was that he removed himself and became a Catholic. The Unitarians and Transcendentalists were and continue to be extremely Anti-Catholic. Understanding this it should surprise no one that the Obama administration had mandated Catholic institutions to support birth control, sterilization and medication designed to abort a baby.
Once the religious roots of American Liberalism are understood and what that religion/politics considered the moral failings of the country overall, capitalism and slavery, it isn't very hard to understand why Barack Obama is seen as the culmination of over 180 years of work to reform American society, or why opposition to his policies are seen as deeply racist and evil. The rejection of the Orthodoxy of the ruling intellectuals and it's morals are reacted to in the same way as old time Puritans preachers and magistrates once reacted to affronts to it's religious heterodoxy. The fact that it bears little resemblance to actual Christian beliefs is of no matter, American Liberalism still very much resembles a religion, a religion whose roots are within the Unitarian church and it's first cousin, Liberal Protestantism who keep some remnant of their religion that they pay lip service to. Most often Evangelicals, they are the liberal side of that movement. Jim Wallis is case in point. The liberal side of the Protestant church is clear in it's belief that humans are all good, and it is institutions that make humans behave badly, Capitalism is a case in point. Destroy that which make good people be bad and than all will be good. This belief system refuses to allow personal responsibility to people, destroying large swaths of American culture and decimating black America.
It's the religion of the cool folks. It is cool to mock the traditionalists, including the traditionalists that believe the Constitution is to be followed not made malleable to fit the current liberal desire, an everchanging "truth"
And who would know better what's cool than the Master of Cool Himself, President Stoner.
