— by Odysseus
President Barack Obama recently saw fit to give America parenting advice. He shared with us an apocryphal story about how he and Michelle chose to dissuade their daughters from getting a tattoo. In doing so, by analyzing this story (true or not), we get a rare glimpse into the psychology of the President.
President Obama is so well shielded by an incurious press and a tightly-controlled message that our insight into his motives and beliefs is reduced to something similar to “Kremlinology”, the cold war practice of attempting to ascertain the motives and inclinations of influential figures in the Soviet leadership, based on piecing together knowledge of personal habits and few public statements. It is only in “humorous”, unguarded moments, the President gives us insight into his true character and beliefs. Once again, here, we learned something.
Mr. Obama has said that he dissuaded his daughters from getting tattoos (incidentally, frowned upon by Islam and by Judaism) by threatening them with getting the same tattoo for both himself and Michelle on the same portion of his anatomy that they might get on theirs. He expanded this threat by promising to pose for a family picture with the identical tattoos.
The President is like so many members of his generation. He is uncomfortable as an adult. He cannot even conceive of himself as being the parent, the responsible party, with actual authority or even responsibility. He will not simply forbid his daughters from getting a tattoo or impose his parental authority to shame them from going against his wishes because he does not keenly feel the authority to do so. Rather, he proposes to do something he thinks will disincentivize the behavior. He identifies with the desire for rebellion against parental authority and cannot bring himself to admit his role as a parent. So, like so many aging hippies, he competes with his own children to be the “most rebellious”. In essence, he says to them that there is nothing they can do that is so rebellious, so contemptuous of society, so self-destructive or abhorrent that he has not already done it or would be willing to do it just to top them.
How terrifyingly adolescent from a man who claims the mantle of President.
Whether he actually would get tattoos, shoot heroin or go out in public wearing clothes that would embarrass a street prostitute is irrelevant. More important is that he either sees this as a suitable way of guiding his children’s growing social conscience or as humor. This is so because it reveals his own internal competition with his children for the role of rebellious youth, a role he and his generation cannot bear to relinquish. It is the worst curse that could be visited upon them to become the old and, thereby, the guardians of tradition. Intellectually, they revile anything traditional, anything time-tested, anything revered. They have lived their lives to tear down everything hallowed, sacred, trusted or respected. Theirs is an ideology of perpetual revolution and resentment.
Even when recognizing a behavior or choice as deleterious to the children they hold dear and even while attempting to find some way to protect their daughters from self-harming actions, they cannot bring themselves to relinquish the role of youthful revolutionary and to assert parental authority. All they can do is be manipulative and think they can prevent the behavior through “one-upsmanship” reminiscent of their own high school social interactions.
They cannot recognize that their ideology, the prescriptions, and solutions of their own youth are now hoary and passé. Any successes of their ideologies were recognized by our society years or even decades ago. They are still fighting battles long settled. Where the hippies and baby boomers were right, society has changed. In those areas where society has not changed, it is because their ideas were simply wrong. Whatever benefits there were to be gained from the social movements of the 1960s and 70s, have been gained already. It is where their ideas were unworkable, incompletely conceived or simply daft that those ideas have failed to become the new norm.
By clinging to outdated revolutionary ideals, they fail to see that the world has moved on. Through an unwillingness to part the long hair from their eyes or remove the trendy sunglasses, they cannot perceive that imposing their “revolution” on today’s world is every bit as stubborn, stolid, and dogmatic as the grand old institutions that they opposed in their youth.
What remains of America from before the social movements of their youth remains because it has value. Continuing to push for the most outlandish of their visions of utopia, formed in the inexperienced, blinkered, hot-house of college life is merely arrogance and destructive in its effect.
Should Sasha and Malia wish to rebel against authority and do something shocking to their parents, they should become outspoken Republican advocates of free market enterprise, reduced central government, and individual responsibility. Let’s see Mr. and Mrs. Obama join them in that!
