I Met Him In Chattanooga, And He Said He Was From Kenya, Or Maybe Indonesia. . . But I'm Sure It Was Him!
This Internet Article could easily be expanded to take up an entire book or two, but I will try to keep it short and readable. Before Postman Allen Hulton, there was another story where someone supposedly met the Young Obama, who said he was from Indonesia, and born in Kenya, and would be President one day. That person was the Freeper Race Bannon. Here are excerpts from his 2009 tale:
I believe with all sincerity and truthfulness. I am making nothing up here, except maybe a few words to keep a written dialog in readable form, but I believe I met Barak Obama in Hawaii in 1980 in Honolulu .
What strikes me most is what he said as to where he grew up: Indonesia . He told me he wanted to be President of the US someday. I remember lightly smiling and commenting that maybe by the time he gets to be 40 or so, America will be ready for a Black man to be President and I wished him luck. We spoke of the racial tensions I saw at home while growing up and I asked him if he ever saw that overseas or since he returned back to Hawaii . I don’t remember his answer, but we spoke more of his time overseas and his thoughts on life and philosophy of government. He made some strange comments to me, it was obvious he never set foot for any time on continental United States and I told him he better realize that he is making judgments about the United States when he himself never actually lived there. I told him, “ Hawaii aint the United States !”
He also told me something that I never forgot, for it caused me to do some other things in an effort to be nice to him and possibly a favor. We spoke of where I had been and the world as I saw it. I told him I had been to Africa , Mombassa specifically, and he said to me abruptly, “I was born there”. I told him he is not eligible to be president if that was true, but I remembered he said his mom was an American, so, maybe it was okay. But it was what I did after that makes this a true memory: I went back to the barracks and told others of this guy and suggested we all grab our photo albums and visit him again and show him pictures of Mombassa so he could see where he was from.
While I cannot swear it was Barak Obama, all the details I do remember of that chance encounter fit the profile of the man who some people claim is born in Kenya and others claim he was born in Hawaii . The man I met was about 18, thin, Mulatto, told me he was born in Mombassa, raised overseas, was living in Hawaii and hadn’t yet been to many places in the world outside of those places, mostly, hadn’t been to the mainland of America for any long time period if at all. And he openly told me he wanted to be President.
You can read the full story with all the embellishments here:
http://noiri.blogspot.com/2009/11/first-hand-witness-to-obama-admitting.html
Luckily, Mr. Bannon made a few boo-boos writing his story, and Blogger Barackrypal picked up on them, and busted him out:
http://barackryphal.blogspot.com/2011/08/jim-racebannon-bancroft-birtherisms.html
The stories have these things in common, like:
1. Indonesia;
2. Kenya;
3. The inability to remember the person’s strange sounding name;
4. The post de facto realization that it was Barack Obama;
5. The innocuous, casual nature of the encounter;
6. The ambiguous time frame of the meeting; and
7. The stranger’s intention to be President one day.
But, it is the last one that get’s my attention. Notice the similarities to the Postman Story in the “I will be President” element:
Hulton remembers asking the young man what his plans were for the future.
“He looked right at me and told me he was going to be president of the United States,” Hulton says.
“There was a little bit of a grin on his face when he said it – he sounded sure of himself, but not arrogant. I know how people will say things because they have an ambition, but it did not come across that way,” Hulton says. “It came across as if this young black male was telling me he was going to be president, almost as if it were the statement of a scientific fact that had already been determined, as if his being president had been already pre-arranged.”
Hulton says the claim made him speechless.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/postman-ayers-family-put-foreigner-obama-through-school/
I have not read any of Obama’s books or biographies, but a quick scan of the Intertubz has not revealed that he had any such thoughts at an early age. Assuming that this element is a totally invented one, the question arises, “Why???”
To be a run-of-the-mill King Incognito or Angel Unaware type folk tale, or even a flat-out lie, Obama does not need to be anything other than the future President. This common, but unnecessary, element of both stories seems to be some sort of subconscious elevation of Obama to divine status, where he has some astral plane knowledge of his destiny. This would fit in quite well with Obama being called “The One” or “The Annointed One” by many conservative pundits.
I wonder if some of Obama’s opponents have bought into their own hyperbole, to the point where “Barack The Magic Negro“, as Rush Limbaugh has called him, has truly become magic to them on some subconcious level??? I expect more of these type of “I Met The Young Obama” stories to arise, much like the flying saucer stories arose a few decades before. About which Carl Jung said:
In the threatening situation of the world today, when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake, the projection-creating fantasy soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets…. Even people who would never have thought that a religious problem could be a serious matter that concerned them personally are beginning to ask themselves fundamental questions. Under these circumstances it would not be at all surprising if those sections of the community who ask themselves nothing were visited by `visions,’ by a widespread myth seriously believed in by some and rejected as absurd by others.–C. G. Jung, in Flying Saucers
Could this also relate to the numerous irrational Birther beliefs that are so evident to those of us who follow this issue? Consider this discussion of the flying saucer phenomenon, from ALIENS AND ARCHETYPES with TERENCE McKENNA:
MISHLOVE: Well, that suggests to me that if we look at some of the most bizarre, most anomalous cases that we have, such as UFOs, we begin to ask ourselves not so much what are they, because that’s a mystery, but what is their function? How are they affecting us? That’s like holding up a mirror to ourselves, and it tells us a great deal about the basic mystery of our mind and our reality.
McKENNA: Yes, this is the so-called postmodern approach — to ask the question, not what is the UFO, but what is it doing to us? Jacques Vallee pioneered this approach. And the answer is fascinating. What the UFOs are doing to us, to global society, is they are eroding faith in science by casting directly in the path of science a kind of gauntlet, a challenge: “Crack this” — almost as if the cosmic giggle had shown up at the bachelor party of science to spoil the bash, in the same way that the resurrection of Christ posed a tremendous problem for the intellectuals of late Roman antiquity, because they had no place in their world view for someone rising from the dead. They were Greek materialists, atomists essentially.
In that same way, the UFO challenges the assumptions of science, and I think in that sense Jung was really onto something when he saw it as coming from the unconscious. It is like an object coming from the unconscious with a compensatory function — to turn us away from the rational and toward the intuitive; to turn us away from the paternalistic, Apollonian, solar, masculine view of things, and toward a kind of watery, lunar, mysterious, intuitively felt feminine force — almost as though the UFO is a manifestation of Gaia as mother goddess. Science, as the proudest — pardon the word — erection of the rational mind, then is challenged by something from an entirely other dimension, an entirely other realm, that concretizes for us the culture crisis. And that’s why I’ve gotten into UFOs; I think they are important for a resolution of the culture crisis. They concretize the struggle between the paternalistic-masculine and the lunar-feminine, between a dominator society and the kind of partnership society that we require to survive.
http://www.intuition.org/txt/mckenna.htm
You can’t really consider these I Met The Young Obama stories to be Urban Legends because we are getting them first hand. They are not coming from the un-named second-cousin of a friend of the writer. Neither are these Folk Tales strictly speaking, because once again, we get them from named sources. However, they may morph into such with subsequent re-tellings. For now, that leaves them to be either flat out lies, or subconscious expressions from somewhere deep in the psyche. Or, a combination of both.
When I consider some of the debates I have had with intensely irrational Birthers wherein well-settled legal certainties are trumped by their gnostic-like knowledge, the subconscious approach may be worth pursuing. Some Birthers do seem to have convinced themselves that they are right. Sooo, I will try to keep my subconscious mind open. Can a person do that???
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
UPDATE!!! After publishing this, I discovered that Loren of The Fogbow had already published an Internet Article that had two more instances related to a variant of the Prescient President, I think should be called the Annointed President These fit more into the Urban Legend mode, since they are third-hand re-tellings at least:
Tom Fife: “Well, I think you are going to be surprised when you get a black president very soon…You don’t believe me, but he is real and I even know his name. His name is Barack. His mother is white and American and his father is black from Africa. That’s right, a chocolate baby! And he’s going to be your President.”
Tim Dowling’s Friend: A friend whose identity I have forgotten pointed to a teenaged, thin fellow who certainly was Barack Obama and asked me: “Do you know that he is being groomed for the Presidency?”
Here is the link to the whole thing, which I found at Obama Conspiracy Theories:
http://www.thefogbow.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=7215&hilit=mailman&start=1075#p356806
Note 1. The Image. This is Shoe Shine Boy by Derrick Woodford, (American, b.1957), oil on canvas, 30″ x 24″. It may seen here, and is apparently still for sale:
