Neo Log Cabins

Jump down, turn around
pick a bale of cotton
Jump down, turn around
pick a bale a day
--Pick a Bale of Cotton, traditional

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
--Sixteen Tons, Tennessee Ernie Ford
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This graphic is typical: Obama strikes a penitential pose before Abraham Lincoln, who looks beneficently down upon his Mini-Me version. The construction is, Obama is forged from his hand and ready to do his bidding. Of course, Obama's family was never enslaved in America (though Muslim slavers were working tribal warfare in Kenya in the 18th century.) But this is press mythologizing, 2008-style.

We do not know what the next President can or intends to accomplish. At this point, all is rhetoric and supposition. Certainly human trafficking, bondage and sex slavery are problems worldwide, if the implication of an affinity between Obama and Lincoln is that Obama will somehow free oppressed groups. But that is certainly not his primary duty, and the dismal issue of general human bondage is secondary to the actual human bondage of our own making we shall have to confront as a fallout to the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©).

We are looking at the dialectic between the president-elect and the media, as it is between the two that the country will receive its action reports.

At this point, the hagiography of Obama prevails. Thomas Friedman speaks of Obama's "childhood of poverty" (Show Me the Money) and several pieces attempt to conflate Obama with Abraham Lincoln. A look at the facts versus the construction is helpful. It is unclear why the Lincoln correlate is being fronted.

Yes, Obama's father left after his first year and did not send child support. Obama's mother used Food Stamps for several years during Obama's infancy, when she dropped out of college in order to raise him (later returning to school when he was four.) During this time, she had the assistance of her parents, as well.

His mother later married an Indonesian man and brought Obama to Indonesia, where he attended a private school (madrassa). The story goes that he chose to return to Hawaii, where his grandparents proceeded to raise him, and during which time he attended a private Catholic school.

Fast forward to today, where Obama's children currently attend a private school in the chic Chicago suburb of Hyde Park. As writer Clarence Page says, it is unlikely Obama will begin the public school experience anytime soon (Obama's Private School Shopping Goes Public.)

His wife, Michelle, recently looked at new schools for her children -- two private D.C. academies. The last president to place his child in a D.C. public school was Jimmy Carter, and it seems unlikely that the Obama's will follow in his footsteps. As an aside, it is interesting that Obama does not favor tuition vouchers, which would allow poorer students to attend private schools.

The overlay of the "Log Cabin" mystique seems misplaced. Mr. Obama Sr. may have been a goat herder, but he was funded through an initiative signed by President Kennedy to be educated in some fine institutions of higher learning in this country. The portrayal of Obama as rising from a scene of abject poverty does not seem correct.

Ranger grew up in poverty, the son of a coal miner in rural Western Pennsylvania. That experience was dismal: one lived in company houses and shopped in company stores. If his mother had access to food stamps, the nutrition would have been better.

It was a typical immigrant experience. His grandparents emigrated from Czechoslovakia to become coal miners in Southwestern Pennsylvania. His father followed his father into the mines. No one paid to airlift his grandfather to America, nor paid his way through school. That was gained through the largess of Uncle Sam's ROTC program.

We will not get hard truths through honeymoon glasses. We are ready for some facts, untainted by the swoon of enamored writers.

Of course, it is brilliant propaganda, hailing as Senator Obama does from the Land of Lincoln.

--Jim and Lisa