Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren told the Boston Globe last week that she wants to win the Senate race so that she can "bring an outsider’s perspective to solving the nation’s problems". And who better to bring an outsider's perspective than a Harvard professor, a member of the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion and the chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel.
When Warren's Cherokee claims became a little too embarrassing, The New Yorker ran an article asking, "Who is a Native American?" as if the question of who the hell were you parents were some imponderable paradox like "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" or "How much debt can government amass before Washington D.C. becomes a black hole whose gravitational pull will suck in the economies of the entire planet?"
If Warren's assertion that she is an outsider meets with as much mockery as her assertion that she is a white aborigine, then The New Yorker may run yet another article, "Who is an Outsider?"
Elizabeth Warren's whole purpose in claiming to be an Indian woman was to claim outsider status. Unlike the other blue-eyed, blond-haired law students, she was an outsider, a member of a proud people who once roamed the plains hunting buffalo and writing corporate liability legislation before they were rounded up and forced to teach law at Harvard U.
Outsider status is prized by insiders. The more of an insider you are, the more outsider flair you need to add to your identity. And no man or woman is better proof of that than the completely unqualified candidate sitting in the White House, who began his national coming out party at the DNC 2004 convention by announcing, "My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin- roof shack."
Obama's outsider biography proved to be as phony as Warren's Cherokee claims, but it served its purpose, introducing him to the Democratic Party and the country at large as the ultimate outsider. A man whose father grew up in a shack with a bunch of goats, but whose son is, as his future V.P. described him, "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean".
Biden was presumably very impressed by Obama's ability to remain bright and clean after being around goats all day. So was the nation which did its best to get that nice young man away from all the goats and under a proper roof in the White House.
Obama might have spent as much time around goats as Warren spent around the Cherokee that she claimed to have wanted to meet so badly, but he was determined to remain an outsider. Eight years after the convention, where he declaimed, "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America" and four years after the election that took him from the tin-roof shack of the United States Senate to the White House, he was still complaining how hard it is to get voters to support someone with his unique outsider biography.
Obama's books exploring his outsider identity, his speeches tediously summoning up the moonlit night that a dimwitted hippie fell in lust with an abusive Kenyan polygamist to produce a child who would base his entire career on his DNA, and his victimization parade which leaves daily from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to tour MSNBC, CNN and the Washington Post recounting to sympathetic reporters how hard it is out there for an outsider; are the goats and tin-roof shack all over again.
We have spent more time, vicariously, in that tin-roof shack than Obama's father ever did. We are forced to relive it each time Obama screws up in some grandiose fashion and the media tells us that we want him replaced with someone competent only because we hate outsiders. Suddenly he's no longer at the golf course or a lavish foreign soiree, but back in the tin-roof shack, complaining that we won't let him get ahead.
When Obama and Warren pose for a photo, we are told to see, not two law professors with Harvard on their resumes, but two outsiders, two tragic persecuted souls forever trapped on the wrong side of the American glass ceiling, forced to toil in the menial depths of government, while the rest of the country rakes in hefty five-figure salaries and gorges itself on cans of Spam.
The Outsider alliance of Obama and Warren benefited Warren Buffett, the ultimate outsider, who like so many billionaires is a strong supporter of the outsider administration and has even lent his brand name to its classless class warfare. With trust-fund babies protesting at Occupy Wall Street and the second-richest man in America promoting class warfare, the outside truly is the inside.
The Wall Street bailouts allowed Warren Buffett to buy many goats worth of companies, and he's passed along some of those goats back to the White House. Last September, Buffett headlined a fundraiser for Obama at the perfect outsider venue, the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan. Actual roof included.
Hollywood stars, the ultimate outsiders, have swarmed to fundraisers for Obama and Warren, finding mutual kinship as rebels with a cause. Together, the billionaires of Wall Street and the millionaires of Hollywood, outsiders in a country divided between those who are out of work and those worried about losing their jobs, are banding together against the coupon-clipping wage-earning insiders who run the country.
They are here to take back America, from the people they already took it back from in the last election. From the people who want to be able to earn a living without having to be an outsider-insider with dabs of Cherokee, Kenya and Harvard Yard green.
There's a lot of talk about getting rid of the insiders, but the outsiders who claim to be insiders are even more pernicious than the insiders. Claiming to be outsiders gives insiders the inside track on seizing power and then playing the victim, while their follow outsiders swarm the barricades and clamor for special treatment.
The current raft of outsider-insiders, includes actors who play politicians, politicians who act like actors, billionaires who push class warfare, blue-eyed Cherokees, Nobel Peace Prize warmongers, fighting on behalf of outsider groups, like gay marriage advocates and illegal aliens, whose agendas are backed by some of the largest and well-financed lobbying groups in the country. Meanwhile, the entire mob of East Coast and West Coast outsiders keeps crowding in the flyover country insiders out of their own country.
Outsiders have become the new insiders. Nothing can be done without consulting an outsider or including an outsider. The legitimacy of the entire country rests on political conventions where a graduate of some Ivy League college can get up on stage, namecheck the goats and the shack, and describe his own biography as the fulfillment and validation of America's existence to people who no longer feel all that secure in their belief that their country has a right to exist. The goats and shack have become more important to the nation's legitimacy than the Constitution.
There's no such thing as being too much of an outsider. The more of an outsider you seem, the more valuable your identity is, the more crowds will thrill when you wrap yourself in the flag and vow to destroy the country in the name of your neo-American values.
To get anywhere in life, you must be an outsider. You must dig for your Cherokee roots beneath a white birch tree, locate some Pow-Wow Chow recipes, and present them to Harvard in lieu of your admissions essay. It doesn't really matter whether they are genuine, what matters, as with all academic subjects, is that you are paying fealty to the farce and playing the game.
It doesn't matter if it's real or not, it shows that you are an outsider. Who but an outsider would write an entire book dealing with one's own "outsiderness"? Everyone feels like an outsider sometimes, and your outsider status will be proof that you can relate to all the actual outsiders who don't feel like they are represented in a government run by Harvard graduates with paper degrees and iron decrees.
A splintered nation, a divided land, is a land of outsiders. The more that the outsiders play their game of Divide-and-Conquer, the more people look for outsiders to represent them. The more that they are told that America is illegitimate because it is a nation of insiders, the more willing they are to prove the charge wrong by electing an outsider. An outsider who's exactly like the insiders, only worse.
It's hard out there for an outsider and in a nation run by insiders who pretend to be outsiders, we are all outsiders.
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