Eric Stone's story: " ME AND OBAMA'S MAMA"

Stanley Anne Dunham Suntoro

David Seaton's News Links
The Internet is nothing if not serendipitous. My wife, who is a painter and a graphic artist, was running a search in Google images, using the string, "kitsch". An amusing photograph of a little statue of Chairman Mao accompanied by the "see no, hear no, speak no" monkeys turned up and she followed the link, which led her to the blog of a writer, Eric Stone.

"Hey, take a look", cried my better half, "you'll be interested in this, here is somebody who says he knew Obama's mother". She was right, I was interested.

The personage, the myth of Barack Obama has been so carefully stroked, stoked and crafted, that to bump into anything spontaneous, unrehearsed and untainted by manipulation anywhere around it is a real find. Like a collector of rare beetles or old 78s, I was galvanized.

Here are some quotes, if you want it uncut, you can read it here.

(snip) I met Ann Sutoro when I was working for Asian Business magazine and interviewing people for a cover story on what the private sector can do to help alleviate poverty. She was an economic anthropologist working for Bank Rakyat Indonesia, the rural development bank of the country. She was in charge of the bank's microfinance program.(snip) I liked her, a lot, the moment I met her. We became friendly and for several years, whenever I was in Jakarta I'd give her a call. We'd have a drink, a meal, hang out talking in her beautiful house in Jakarta. She had a great, quirky, sense of humor, was kind and decent to a fault and was just plain whip smart, one of the sharpest people I've ever known. I envied her her job, admired her tremendously and always looked forward to seeing her.

She died of cancer in 1995 and it was a tremendous loss. I've thought of her often over the years. Whenever the subject of great things to do with one's life comes up, I always trot out the story of Ann Sutoro.(snip) Today, I was trying to think up a subject for this blog entry and (...) I thought I'd write about a few of the world's best jobs, so Ann immediately popped into my head. Just for the hell of it, I googled her, not really expecting to find much, if anything. What I found out is that she was Barack Obama's mother.

There's much that I like and admire about Obama. But, as with all politicians, there is also much about him that makes me suspicious and nervous. But I do know one thing for sure. He comes from a very good family. At least on his mother's side.

I know nothing at all about Eric Stone so I read further. The entry preceding the eulogy to Ann Suntoro was also a eulogy, one to the late Albert Hoffmann, the inventor/discoverer/synthesizer of LSD. Mr. Stone writes:

The first time I took LSD was in September 1966 (I was fourteen), about two weeks before it became illegal in California. I had traded a UCLA professor a bag of mediocre Mexican pot for a dosed sugar cube. Over the next three and a half or so years, I probably took acid between two and three hundred times. It was easy to lose track.(...) here's what LSD did for me.

It made me, mentally, stronger. I guess in the Nietzschean sense of "what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger." I don't fully believe that. Some of the things that don't kill you, can maim you. But still, in some of my most formative years I dealt with a lot of really strange and challenging stuff in a wide variety of circumstances. No matter how bizarre the world around me got, or at least the world as I was seeing it, I learned to cope with it.(...) It helped give me a great deal of tolerance for things that might otherwise strike me as weird, strange, abnormal. I hardly think of anything as abnormal or normal anymore. When something seems weird or strange, I find it more interesting than threatening. That helps my powers of observation.(...) Who knows if I killed off a bunch of brain cells or not? Maybe I could have been smarter or saner. I don't know and I don't care. I'm smart and sane enough as I've ever needed to be. Either that or deluded enough to think that I am. And so far at least, I've escaped the attention of the nice men in the white coats.

I am a dues paying member of my generation and anything smokable I smoked in those years, but so many people I knew at that time were so badly damaged by acid that I gave it a wide berth. I would say to any kid even today, especially today, "never swallow a chemical somebody hands you in discotheque." Acid still makes me nervous after all these years.

After reading Mr. Stone's lysergic panegyric, I began to think that the eulogy to Obama's mother was a plant by the Republican National Committee. Don't think the Roves of this world aren't already circling around in sky on all of this. Attacking the Obama myth has got to be their strategy, because there is hardly any record to attack.

I wonder why there is so much myth built around Obama's father, a minor Kenyan civil servant who had seduced a 17 year old girl and hardly stayed around longer than necessary to engender the candidate, somebody Obama hardly ever knew and why on the contrary there is so little interest among the Obamites in Obama's mother, who seems a truly remarkable woman, if a huge flake. Time magazine ran a gushing cover story about her and said:

Obama's mother was a dreamer. She made risky bets that paid off only some of the time, choices that her children had to live with. She fell in love—twice—with fellow students from distant countries she knew nothing about. Both marriages failed, and she leaned on her parents and friends to help raise her two children.

"She cried a lot," says her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, "if she saw animals being treated cruelly or children in the news or a sad movie—or if she felt like she wasn't being understood in a conversation." And yet she was fearless, says Soetoro-Ng. "She was very capable. She went out on the back of a motorcycle and did rigorous fieldwork. Her research was responsible and penetrating. She saw the heart of a problem, and she knew whom to hold accountable."(...) Born in 1942, just five years before Hillary Clinton, Obama's mother came into an America constrained by war, segregation and a distrust of difference. Her parents named her Stanley because her father had wanted a boy. She endured the expected teasing over this indignity, but dutifully lugged the name through high school, apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town.(...)In the expat community of Asia in the 1980s, single mothers were rare, and Ann stood out. She was by then a rather large woman with frizzy black hair.

She and her daughter sometimes lived in garage apartments and spare rooms of friends. She collected treasures from her travels—exquisite things with stories she understood. Antique daggers with an odd number of curves, as required by Javanese tradition; unusual batiks; rice-paddy hat(...) Before her death, Ann read a draft of her son's memoir, which is almost entirely about his father. Some of her friends were surprised at the focus, but she didn't seem obviously bothered. "She never complained about it," says Peluso. "She just said it was something he had to work out." Neither Ann nor her son knew how little time they had left.

Being a huge flake shouldn't be such a problem, if every man and woman in the United States of America who had or has a flakey mother votes for Obama he'll be a shoo-in, he'd have my vote for sure, I would enter my late mother in a contest for flakey American women and give away weight and a head start. Mind you Barack Obama's mom had real cause.

Hell of thing, name a little girl "Stanley", hell of a thing. It's no joke to do something like that to a kid. I knew a girl once, a very intelligent, very pretty girl, raven hair, crazy-blue, Celtic eyes, whose father, a rich, brutal, lace curtain, black-Irish, son of a bitch, named her "Michael".... hell of a thing, hell of a thing. Like child abuse, maybe worse.

Obama tells his story very nicely, but I think he is leaving a lot out.

Is any of this important?

Everybody has got family. you can't choose them. I hear that McCain's father was not only a distinguished admiral, but also a nasty drunk. There must have been a lot of pressure on Johnny three sticks as a kid... so what. He's done so many things: good things, bad things, that the story he tells means very little, his story is just there... yez pays yer money and yez takes yer cherse.

However Obama is his story, the story he tells, because he has never really done anything except tell his story and create his myth. The feeling I get is that Obama's mother was pretty flakey and that is his sore point, not dreams of absent Kenyans. Just another weird, unhappy American childhood. There always seems to be a nice little story to cover everything. It is his desire to push his mother's story to the background that is his weakness, not really the story itself. It is that weakness that will be explored in months to come. DS