Obama's Muse

There’s an informative article in the Iowa City Press-Citizen by Mike Chasar on the poet Obama calls his muse: “Obama's bitter muse: Frank Marshall Davis.” To whet your appetite:

Interestingly, anti-Obama crusaders know more about Davis (whom they call "Obama's communist mentor") than Obama's own political party does. Like many individuals interested in combating American racism in the 1930s and 1940s, Davis worked with people affiliated with the Communist Party. He was never a card-carrying member himself; in fact, in "Livin' the Blues" he calls himself "a solitary rebel" who avoided joining any organization at all.

Nevertheless, the FBI assigned agents to track and harass Davis and his white wife when the two moved to Hawaii in 1949.

More interesting than Davis' association with supposed communists is the fact that his life doesn't, in fact, fit into the categories by which either the right or the left tend to operate. Davis, for example, was a Republican who voted against Roosevelt throughout the 1930s. He spoke as a heterosexual black man on behalf of gay rights. He openly linked Jewish and black experiences of oppression and raged against America's hypocrisy as it fought Nazi Germany while maintaining a race-based caste system at home.