Several years ago my husband was gathering up all the random books in the house that matched a list of "textbooks" that were eligible for buy-back and he saw that my copy of "Dreams from My Father" and decided that he could get two birds with one stone, so to speak: get the book out of the house AND get some of his money back. We got the buy-back price on it even though the first 20 pages were missing because I was using them to pick up dog turds when I took the dogs for walkies. Long story short, I don't have my reference copy to quote chapter and verse about the now-famous composite girlfriend, so I must content myself with Obama in his own words (as opposed to DFMF), via Vanity Fair:
In one letter, he told Alex that it seemed as if many of his Pakistani friends were headed toward the business world, and his old high-school buddies were “moving toward the mainstream.” Where did that leave him? “I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups,” he wrote. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”
I think the key word here is "absorb", although as a reader, one slams on the brakes at "large dollops of envy." I stand by my conviction that this man only wrote the parts of DFMF that were about Africa, which were capital "B" boring. The first part of this exerpt talks up Obama as cosmopolite: he'd lived in these exotic places and that "polyglot world" of Hawaii. But Obama is rather famously uniglot, except for that Muslim prayer-thingy (Mare-see bo-coo!). I wonder how he "absorbed" anyone's culture without learning any lingo other than (bad) English. And what does "make them mine, me theirs" mean?
Aside: He is the death-knell for pronoun agreement in English. What Bill Clinton was to the definition of "sex", Barry is to English grammar. End aside.
But, we're happy to note, Barry has matured. In his extended interview with Dave Marannis, the author of the upcoming bio we're all waiting with bated breath for, SINCE 2007, Dear Leader explains his search for "commonality" among people:
“There is no doubt that what I retained in my politics is a sense that the only way I could have a sturdy sense of identity of who I was depended on digging beneath the surface differences of people,” Obama said during an interview. “The only way my life makes sense is if, regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is this commonality, these essential human truths and passions and hopes and moral precepts that are universal. And that we can reach out beyond our differences. If that is not the case, then it is pretty hard for me to make sense of my life. So that is at the core of who I am.”
I know I'm convinced by this, even though it's non-sensical. In conflating his own sense of identity and trying to find the "commonality" of all people, he basically admits that he has no sense of identity. But we shouldn't spend too much time grieving for this lack (except to the extent that thinking he's American should really be a qualification for the U.S. President) because it's a total pack of lies anyway. If you want to find out what all people have in common, if that is your core and what makes your life make sense, you don't spend 20 years warming the pews of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church.
I read through the whole excerpt, and wished I had done so at bed time. It isn't nearly skeptical enough, and like everyone in the piece, it goes where Barry wants it to go. I suppose this is the most interesting bit for the general (liberal) reader, Barry's love life before Michelle, but it reads like a bad Woody Allen movie, with none of the Jewish jokes. Which is interesting- conspicuously absent from all of Barry's meanderings about "other cultures" he seems really uninterested in what's right around him.
Cue the Wizard of Oz, please.
Monday, May 7, 2012 at 04:09PM