In the tradition of mocking the Special Olympics, making an enemy of the Catholic Church, and insulting elderly white women, when speaking at a General Electric plant in Waukesha, Wisconsin last month, Barack Obama totally contradicted Nancy Pelosi’s free-spirited approach to being unemployed.
Talking to manufacturing workers and reiterating points from his bogus State of the Union address, Barry quashed Nancy’s “be an artist or a photographer or a writer” suggestion when he made fun of college students choosing art history as a major. Talking to trade workers, the president suggested that skilled jobs in manufacturing had superior earning potential to a college degree in liberal arts.
The president lamented that a lot of “young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career,” which is true.
But then, clearly in an attempt to get a few laughs, after mentioning “Cheeseheads for Obama” Obama the Cheesehead said, “But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”
Based on the chuckles, he was clearly pandering to a blue collar crowd. The president continued:
Now, [there’s] nothing wrong with an art history degree — I love art history. (Laughter.) So I don’t want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. (Laughter.) I’m just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need. (Applause.)
Question: Does “nothing wrong with an art history degree” mean that the President of the United States thinks that creative types will never be able to make an honest living with an art degree?
Also, wasn’t it Obama, who apparently has a low opinion of jobs in the arts, that funneled $50 million in stimulus funds to the National Endowment of the Arts to preserve jobs in state arts agencies and regional arts organizations?
Didn’t his wife Michelle attend a ribbon cutting ceremony for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing in May of 2010? And wasn’t it Mrs. Obama who also said, “We want all children who believe in their talent to see a way to create a future for themselves in the arts community, be it as a hobby or as a profession?”
Put Barack Obama in a GE plant and he forgets all that flowery “create a future…or as a profession” artsy stuff.
Moreover, this whole skilled trade vs. college education blather is a bit confusing, because the week before Obama’s GE anti-art history speech, the president and first lady hosted a White House College Opportunity Summit to promote new measures to help students from poor families get into college.
As usual, Barack Obama didn’t really mean what he said during his GE comedy bit.
We know this because an Obama sycophant named Ann Collins Johns, who just so happens to be an art history professor at the University of Texas, let the president know on the White House website how she felt about his comments, but not before she prefaced her criticism by saying that she “loves Obama.”
Ann explained to the president that art history professors “challenge students to think, read, and write critically.” Professor Collins Johns also informed Mr. Anti-Arts and Humanities that although her specialty is medieval and Renaissance Italy, the discipline of art history is very “inclusive.”
The “think, read, and write critically” part is probably a skill set Obama would prefer that future voters not have. The evil European white male/medieval/Renaissance part probably didn’t sit all that well with Obama either. But Ann’s inclusiveness clarification is what probably pulled Professor Johns’ email out of the dumpster.
Thanks to his Waukesha wittiness, the president is already on the good side of the GE workers. Now, in an effort to retain the affection of the teachers’ unions, Obama responded and offered his apologies to the professor in a handwritten note.
Barack Obama’s plea for forgiveness was an effort to make amends for backhandedly mocking liberal arts as a viable college major and for making points about job market options to manufacturing workers, many of whom likely chose to forego higher education.
In the note Obama expressed regret for making “off the cuff…glib” remarks when encouraging young people “not predisposed to a four year college experience” to pursue technical training.
The Obama-loving professor found out that her discipline brought “a great deal of joy” to her hero’s life – joys that, if not for art history, he would otherwise have been denied.
But the big news from the mea culpa is that America, who until now knew nothing about Barack Obama’s scholastic background, found out that at Punahou School in Honolulu, art history was one of the president’s favorite subjects! Who knew?
That means that in addition to riding around Hawaii in the Choom wagon, Barry Soetoro spent lots of his “total absorption” time appreciating famous paintings like Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus and Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which is where the president/art history buff/ fine art connoisseur probably got his inspiration and vision for America.
Image: Courtesy of: https://visual-arts-cnwl.wikispaces.com/Access+-+Life+drawing
