Obama on TS Eliot

>I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time.

>Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak.

>Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)

>And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?"

- Barrack Obama as a College Senior in a letter to a friend on "The Waste Land" by TS Eliot

Say what you will, Sup Forums but you're never going to discover a letter like this from Trump's personal correspondence.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=upC8pX3RY0A
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The “The Waste Land is the most pretentious shit ever made by a human.

>social reality/order

Somebody this indecisive should never have been president.

This is true. Trump has no use for intellectual pursuits not related to money. He does not enjoy reading. He is a brute.

Philosophy is pretentious bullshit anyway. Being a deep thinker doesn't make you good at executing your ideas.

As Trump said, all talk, no action.

No, instead of outdated pretentious poetry Trump critiques on classic films instead

youtube.com/watch?v=upC8pX3RY0A

woops le broken link

working one:
youtube.com/watch?v=aeQOJZ-QzBk

There's no evidence he was ever in college.

well OP?

Are you serious? Of course he went to college conspiratard.

kek what an insightful analysis

>but you're never going to discover a letter like this
A letter full of trite shit ctrl v'd from a textbook?
>Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats
fucking kek, you might as well throw wordsworth and shelley in there

youtube.com/watch?v=oxyPQ4_Xeqc

Is he /our guy/?

I find it ironic that someone from serbia doesn't get The Waste Land simply though osmosis.

He's not being indecisive. He's talking about two different things.

You realize that this is what Eliot and by extension Obama are talking about, no?

It's the gap between the ecstatic vision of what the world could be and reality of what the broken world is.

It's why Obama says that he respects Eliot's brand of fatalistic conservatism more than the idealism of Bourgeois liberalism.

The point of this Errol Morris piece is to see what a billionaire thinks about a movie that details to him how empty the pursuits of his life are.

Trump is not really analyzing the film.

and barack obama will never have a ten figure net worth
but hey he wrote a letter once that demonstrates the intellect of a high school kid who just discovered foucault thats totally the same

It's only circumstantial. Considering he comes from a CIA family and then got pushed into being the president then one would normally assume he had gone to college.

It's just that there's no evidence.

This is not real. How is he speaking conversationally like a literature critic as a teen but he cannot make it through a sentence now?

>How is he speaking conversationally like a literature critic as a teen but he cannot make it through a sentence now?
His prose is actually much better now. This shit is clogged and stilted.

I mean, I went to college and he even came to speak more than once. My college would go nuts and probably invent at least 14 new things to send everywhere to publicize how the alumnus came from this place.

It's not Columbia or MIT, but it's full on Jewish/Islamic globalism new world order running shit for the government and other agencies.

it's fake, barack didn't write that shit, someone else did and they are pretending he wrote it now

No, it's definitely him.
>what I speak
See how fucking awkward that is? Sounds like the prose of someone who has read too many mlk speeches

This is simplified. The original is "if if if if if if if."

that's so stupid. is that really how you are gonna prove it's him?

im telling you, it's propaganda designed to make you sympathize with Barack and his legacy. just like that new netflix show coming out that's going to portray Choom Gang Barry as some kind of walking talking messiah in college who fucked white girls

the left lost the election and they are resorting to the outlets they still dominate in order to gather sympathy for their icons

This shit reads like elliot rodgers manifesto.

lel
angsty teenager tier

Hemmingway once wisely pointed out that having a big vocabulary doesn't do you any good if you can't say anything of substance. Obama's letter was pretentious word salad, just like everything else he reads off of teleprompters. It is no point to his credit that he is apparently so erudite and yet when it came to politics he has essentially failed at all bipartisanship, written some bad legislation, and murdered a bunch of people unilaterally. That has been the extent of Obama's time as president.

But he was able to write a mediocre analysis of The Wasteland in too many words. Good for him.

>t. someone with 6th grade level reading comprehension.

>can't into basic prose
>calls anyone else stupid

There's really no idea here.
Obama is saying he respects Elliot's respect for tradition and also his diagnosis of human progress.
I doubt he even understood wasteland nor the way Eliot wrote after becoming a Christian.

That's funny, reading this you,d never guess he'd be the worst president ever, destroy the middle class, and double the national debt.

You're right. I shouldn't assume.

Maybe you do have a critical mind. You've really given me a lot to think about.

>There's really no idea here.
Be aware that this letter was sent as part of a conversation between him and another student. You are missing parts of the context for this.

Eliot isn't a caricature. You're beliefs about what he represents and believes are shaped my your modern desire to see him as an intellectual conservative (of which there are relatively few from the modern period).

I think you need to get over your childish aversion to admitting that someone can both understand and disagree in principle with something that you may believe.

I'm not the poster you first replied to, newfag.
>your modern desire to see him as an intellectual conservative
He most certainly was one, bordering on fascist. Obama says as much in this letter.

I think history will remember things differently, user.

It's possible Sup Forums normalizes and is able to force its belief structure on the world but the pendulum has reached an apex and will begin swinging back in the opposite direction.

Eliot's early poems are really good, but The Waste Land is trash.

I'd go so far as to see he was just trolling to see if he can convince dumb people that there is something kind of deep meaning in it.

>Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism

Ironic that the largest manifesation of bourgeois liberalism happened under him

That nigga is the platonic fucking form the bourgeois philisitne

all of eliot's stuff is shit lad
read milton, coleridge, and yeats

>He most certainly was one, bordering on fascist.
>He was part of my team!

Haha, whatever you say user. I will remind you though that he thought that the fascists of the thirties were nothing more than totalitarianism with a new name and against the very nature of the christian spirit.

>Haha, whatever you say user
It says as much in Obama's letter.
>He was part of my team!
I'm not a fascist.
>he thought that the fascists of the thirties
How is this relevant? I didn't even say he was a fascist, let alone a 1930's fascist.
also stop the reddit spacing

Yeats is great, but his later poems started to veer off into modernist territory. He was essentially trying to copy Eliot near the end of his life.

Kipling is the patrician Sup Forums poet though.

nah the poet of Sup Forums is based samuel johnson

fake and gay

obama-entp
trump-estp

trump is no intellectual but he's a go-getter, he gets shit done. obama is more of a reader, a contemplater, but apparently he's still corrupt af

He's not saying anything

>It says as much in Obama's letter.
Read it again. In the letter it says he did not support Hitler and Mussolini as opposed to Yeats and Pound and there is much historical evidence for this including his own writings in the late 20s.

>I'm not a fascist.
I'm interested. Where do you think your ideology rests?

>How is this relevant?
You literally said he was almost a fascist which I completely disagree with.

>also stop the reddit spacing
Man, you really need to get off your meme addiction.

>Read it again. In the letter it says he did not support Hitler and Mussolini as opposed to Yeats and Pound and there is much historical evidence for this including his own writings in the late 20s.
And what does this have to do with my statement?
>You literally said he was almost a fascist which I completely disagree with.
It doesn't matter what you agree with. The man was a reactionary with hints of anti semitism.

I went to college with hundreds of yacht club faggots who talked like this.
It was insufferable.
So much wind and nothing of substance being said.
Literary criticism is cancer and has no place in institutions of higher learning.

Unless they're a roleplaying faggot, you'll find that no one really stutters in the written form. Hell, I stutter not as excessively as Obama does but, if I wrote this reply the way I'd probably say it out loud.. yikes.

More jackdurden.com propaganda Bull shit

>ywn catch Trump being a psuedo-intellectual to impress some shitlib professor
bummer

There's no doubt that Eliot was a conservative and an intellectual.

My point was that he is definitely not the modern conception of a conservative. He shares some traits but you must understand the difference between elitist British toryism and modern populist conservatism, no?

Also, don't forget. I'm interested in hearing your personal assessment of your own political ideology.

It's a brutal world.

Books are for nerds

A conservative is a conservative. Back then, today's trump populists would have been considered far left, if anything.
Anyway, he was only an American roleplaying as a tory.
>I'm interested in hearing your personal assessment of your own political ideology.
Why?

/thread

>shilling this hard for Obama

user, talk data, not feels. The media and the universities rode this guys jock cuz he is menanin enabled, his agenda flew in the face of the electorate's desires, so he tried to put his leftist agenda through by fiat. That's not the way our government is designed. Thank God Hillary lost.

It's obviously WH Auden or Joyce Kilmer

>Joyce Kilmer
lel

>A conservative is a conservative.
Completely false statement.

What is considered "conservatism" now is completely different than establishment conservatism of the past. Alexander Hamilton was a conservative, and there is no one less populist than him. The only unifying factor is the fact that trump appeals to certain (and importantly not all) social traditions. There very little traditional about trump's rhetoric.

Tory conservatism is concerned primarily with the continued stability of the social hierarchy and government. Trump's goal is (at least in his rhetoric is to overturn that social order) and I think it's very dubious to try and claim that Trump isn't the face of modern conservatism at this point.

>Why?
Because I'm interested to know who I'm talking to so I don't have some stereotype in my mind.

I'll go first if that would make you feel better. I'm closer to that Toryist traditionalist conservatism than anything in the modern era though I care very little about religion or the social restraints that most of those conservatives desire to impose.

I'm mostly interested in the maintenance of domestic order and international peace because I know what hell actual destabilization and war can bring to this world in a way that I don't believe the american public adequately understands.

Funny you should mention Hamilton, he's precisely the person I usually use to describe my views.
Anyway, you're misunderstanding me. I was merely defending my view that Eliot could be labeled conservative, even extremely so. Any more on this point would be semantics

And I think your point about Trump misses something important. You're right that he's the "face" of modern conservatism and not a real conservative, but that doesn't mean that modern conservatism is so far from tory conservativism. Most of his supporters chose him not because they agreed with all of his policies, but because they saw the need to pick and choose what they believed to be the most important ones. Immigration reform, for example.

Also, no true conservative could support the present establishment. A true conservative should wish to change it before it changed the face of the nation completely. Trump was elected to his purpose.

>Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)

CONSERVASHITS BTFO

BASED BARRY

because it isnt real . its just some crap they made up to try to make it seem like he was in college in america. hes just some guy from kenya they found and put in the government

>I think you need to get over your childish aversion to admitting

He says, responding to a "1 post by this id" anonymous stranger on Sup Forums.

>Also, no true conservative could support the present establishment.
I disagree and you may attempt to bar me from considering myself a conservative because of it but I have no racial or "cultural heritage" sort of motivation that would make me desire a trump presidency. Immigration and multiculturalism do not disturb me. The Italians and Irish were hated as immigrants in the same way Latinos and Hispanics have been. I predict in 40 years that they will be completely assimilated and would prefer to have a larger population than to chase some misplaced pipe dream of pure bloodlines.

The modern iteration of liberalism can be annoying, but I see the Obama administration as a very positive administration and largely conservative in the way I care about and I think much of the hand waving about his corruption, or dilution of the american culture or whatever it is Sup Forums talks about all the time is nonsense.

There are two things I consider the most important. Economic policy and International Policy and I vastly prefer Obama's administration and the modern democrats to what I have seen of the incoming trump administration.


The modern republican party seems to me to be full largely of opportunists with no real sense of patriotism that are simply attempting to capitalize on their power to line their coffers.

I don't agree with everything that the liberals do but I at least think their motivations are pure and that they will listen to expert opinion.

>nd you may attempt to bar me from considering myself a conservative because of i
No attempt necessary. You're no conservative.
>cultural heritage
This is pretty much what Eliot and modern conservatives have in common. If you do not believe in this, you are simply not a conservative at all. Or else literally everyone who wishes to maintain a government is conservative.
>The Italians and Irish were hated as immigrants
As they should have been. This country has always sacrificed culture for the sake of business. These poverty ridden foreign hordes were a major hindrance on our politics as well.
> pipe dream of pure bloodlines.
This straw man isn't even worth addressing.
>but I at least think their motivations are pure
What nonsense. The party that replaced Sanders with an opportunist's opportunist is pure?

Obama was mostly a terrible president, objectively. I only liked his ecological efforts, basically. In any case, I don't need my president to be a wordy intellectual who reads pottery and writes pretentious drivel about it.

I am interested to hear that Yeats apparently supported Hitler. Always loved his poetry, never heard this tidbit before.

>Trump has no use for intellectual pursuits not related to mone
*that we know of. Ever noticed how he keeps certain parts of himself extremely private? He glosses over the moments where this becomes apparent as much as possible.

We know he read Hitler's speeches. That's interesting. I suspect he's more well-read than he chooses to reveal, despite his obvious ADHD qualities.

>No attempt necessary. You're no conservative.
I disagree, but it hardly matters. Labels are usually just for convenience anyway and I've called myself conservative, fascist, communist and anarchist at different times in order to fit different narratives that I make for myself in conversation.

>cultural heritage
My view on it is that cultural heritage does not need protecting. It is something virtually impossible to destroy without literally erasing all evidence of it which no one is attempting to do. The things modern conservative seem insecure about are in my mind idiotic. Nothing can destroy your personal belief in god but your own self. Nothing can destroy the poignant works of the past so long as they are available. The one overriding protector of this that I never wish to see violated is the freedom of expression, and freedom from censorship. If anyone seeks to violate it, you will see me oppose.

>As they should have been.
Yeah, we definitely disagree here. Like I said, I have no racial motivation and would much prefer a larger population in 2060 to a slim white majority in 2060.

>The party that replaced Sanders with an opportunist's opportunist is pure?
Relatively speaking, yes. It's a two party system after all. Of the two I think liberals generally are less interested in money.

>This straw man isn't even worth addressing.
I think largely that race politics are a distraction used by the rich to keep the poor from realizing how much they have in common with one another. As to whether that's a bad thing is up for debate. It certainly does disrupt any class warfare but I can't help but find anyone that falls for it as central policy to be a bit of a rube.

Well, anyway. It was an interesting conversation. I'm going to go read V. now before bed

Straight to the heart of the matter: Kane was unhappy because his wealth isolated him. He chose a woman as a possession, not for her character or because either of them loved each other, so he became more lonely and sad. Making an effort to find the right woman and real intimacy and love would have helped him. Instead he chose to withdraw further and lose himself in wistful memories of childhood.

Perfectly sound, straightforward analysis.

It's interesting that nobody commented on what a symbolic choice for review this film was for Trump, a man who could have let his wealth isolate and stifle him like Kane, but who clearly has made wiser choices.

>It's the gap between the ecstatic vision of what the world could be and reality of what the broken world is.

Sup Forums has no trouble getting this

>It's why Obama says that he respects Eliot's brand of fatalistic conservatism more than the idealism of Bourgeois liberalism.

What fucking changed, eh

>The point of this Errol Morris piece is to see what a billionaire thinks about a movie that details to him how empty the pursuits of his life are.
>Trump is not really analyzing the film.

If that's what Morris intended to say then he's a dumbass and a prick, because clearly Trump is neither miserable nor dysfunctional, like Kane clearly was.

It's not an *academic analysis. It's straightforward, like Trump himself.

>My view on it is that cultural heritage does not need protecting. It is something virtually impossible to destroy without literally erasing all evidence of it which no one is attempting to do. The things modern conservative seem insecure about are in my mind idiotic. Nothing can destroy your personal belief in god but your own self. Nothing can destroy the poignant works of the past so long as they are available. The one overriding protector of this that I never wish to see violated is the freedom of expression, and freedom from censorship. If anyone seeks to violate it, you will see me oppose.
Then you do not understand what is meant by culture. We have less in common with our progenitors than the British have with theirs, and there is a reason for this. Read Eliot's essays on literary influence.
> Like I said, I have no racial motivation and would much prefer a larger population in 2060 to a slim white majority in 2060.
And who says I prefer a white majority?
>Relatively speaking, yes
Then say what you mean. You cannot call something pure and then go on about relatives.
>I think largely that race politics are a distraction used by the rich
This is the trite opinion of a rube. The elites in both parties are in favor of multiculturalism. Have fun with the stereotypical book that you felt you had to mention think largely that race politics are a distraction used by the rich n.

Before I go, I must implore you to go look up Errol Morris before you start spouting nonsense.

Also, as a side note. Citizen Kane is painfully literal and didactic movie with very little substance or craft. It is popular because it is extremely simple to understand and uses some techniques that most people hadn't seen at the time.

Please calm down before you start claiming trump is an analytical genius.

>nigger intellectuals

One more. You responded quick.

>Then you do not understand what is meant by culture.
The tools to resurrect any vision of any number of cultures are contained in nearly every library in the United States. You need only read and reflect.

>And who says I prefer a white majority?
I literally cannot conceive any other possible reasonable motivation for being so anti-immigration.

>Then say what you mean. You cannot call something pure and then go on about relatives.
This is a very pedantic point. Instead of addressing the key point you're bringing up semantics.

>This is the trite opinion of a rube.
I again disagree but you already knew that, didn't you?

>Have fun with the stereotypical book
Stereotypical of what? Faux intellectuals? Liberals? And here I thought I was reading it because Pynchon is funny.