Maya Angelou at Westpoint.

Now I bet there's a headline you thought you'd never see.

On Wednesday (28/5/14) US President Obama gave a big foreign policy speech in front of the graduating class at the West Point military academy which I've still not seen. I will need to get around to looking at it though mainly because I was under the impression that Obama doesn't have a foreign policy. Instead he seems to view big world events such as the wars in Afghanistan, Syria and beyond simply as threats to the re-election chances of his Democrat Party that need to be avoided. However I gather one of the main thrusts of his speech was a shift away from hard US military power towards soft cultural power.

In the hours prior to Obama's speech it was announced that Maya Angelou had died and Obama's message was almost drowned out by figures of America's political left including the White House's own Twitter account paying gushing tribute. If - like most people - you are not familiar with her work Maya Angelou was a moderately talented American diarist of the mid-twentieth century.

The majority of Angelou's fame though came from the fact that she had an extremely brutal upbringing in America's racially segregated south. This involved her being raped as a child and seeing her rapist killed by her relatives before dropping out of high school to become a drug addict and prostitute. Angelou's style of writing was very good at conveying simple emotion which allowed her to rally America's emotionally repressed white liberal left to "the plight of the negro" helping generate support for the burgeoning civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King during the 1960's. In short Angelou is a perfect example of a soft power tool which is why her books were so heavily promoted and she was allowed to trade on that reputation for the rest of her career.

Although the way Angelou's work was used during the civil rights era was generally quite positive the way it was used in later years - particularly in Africa - actually ended up being quite damaging. This is particularly true when groups such as women and Black people of all nationalities whose suffering she was intended to highlight were encouraged to look to her for inspiration. As a victim of tremendous abuse in order to survive Angelou had to find a way to rationalise that abuse and that led her to almost crave more abuse. So encouraging oppressed people to follow Angelou's example strikes me as encouraging them to tolerate their oppression rather then finding a way to end it. This is obviously hugely attractive to politicians like Hillary Clinton who require a large section of the population to continue being oppressed so they will vote for leaders who claim to understand their suffering.

The thing that really gave me a headache about the turn of events though was that Rihanna revealed herself as someone who has been inspired by Angelou and there are certainly similarities between the lives of these two of life's victims. Mainly though this highlighted to me that the US' soft power efforts that Obama wants to increase currently seem focused on using one of the most famous women in the world to remind everyone that the Americans can behave like complete dicks.


17:10 on 30/5/14 (UK date).