Obama: The Trustafarian President

Sat 11/08/2014. It took me a little while. ... I was a trustafarian, as was my father before me. When I googled the word just now, I got “a rich young person who adopts a bohemian lifestyle and lives in a nonaffluent area”. ... Right? That’s our beloved president’s exemplary biography, no? ... And of course he didn’t really live in a slum, but he certainly pretended to. ... Which is really characteristic, more than not, of the typical trustafarian....

But the part that confused me was the “rich”. Through a term-and-a-half I just thought of him as the self-described “community organizer” who had nothing but communist and terrorist friends and, apparently, thoughts. Although his befriending of Ebola seems beyond even Bill Ayers — whose name I couldn’t remember, so I googled “obama bomb thrower friend” and Ayers was the first hit. ... But my wife finally cleared things up, by asking the perennial rhetorical question: “who bums around Hawaii as a youth?” ... Doing that is costly, see? Most of us couldn’t afford to bum around Hawaii....

I always assumed my beloved parent’d bequeath everything to a cat hospital or interstellar peace or something. However, my revered father definitely devoted tremendous energy to pretending to be poor, not so unusual I suppose amongst the trustafarians but, unusually, did his best to make his children the offspring of the poor, with shoddy dangerous public schools and crummy clothes and low rent treats. ... I was certainly convinced. As I grew older I realized he’d keel over someday — probably — and I might get some cash, but I never believed it until the end. ... For most of my time, that is, I was a faithful trustafarian: not only did I pretend to be poor, I believed it! ... So much so that I was scornful of their kind long before the word appeared (after 2000?). ... And so it is I was so obtuse about the Obama story.

But that’s it: the pretentious “community” background, his early “struggles”, his Reverend White’s weird blacker-than-thou religion, and the apparent inability to understand anyone with less than a few million. ... Even the eery noblesse oblige Ebola attitude: the Doctors Without Borders are Obama’s people, working for international peace and showing-off their unparalleled compassion. They shouldn’t be punished for giving their incredibly valuable time and effort, as if they were regular people. ... His mother probably knew their mothers! ... He could’ve played at their estates....