ishkabible

« Self esteem and delusion | Main | Freedom and security »

March 17, 2007

Barack Obama = Charles de Gaulle?

When Charles de Gaulle paid his first visit to embattled French Algeria after taking power in 1958, he stepped up to the microphone in front of a vast throng of Europeans and Arabs torn by murderous hostilities, stared out at them, and simply announced, “I have understood you.” The crowd exulted. Christians and Muslims alike broke into grateful tears. De Gaulle understands us! What more do we need?

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has yet to attain that level of oracular ambiguity, but his bestseller The Audacity of Hope shows this wordsmith’s facility at eloquently restating the views of both his liberal supporters and his conservative opponents, leaving implicit the suggestion that all we require to resolve these wearying Washington disputes is to find a man who understands us--a reasonable man, a man very much like, say, Obama--and turn power over to him. The politician has elicited such fervor among many white voters that Slate.com’s Timothy Noah runs a regular feature entitled “The Obama Messiah Watch” quoting “gratuitously adoring” articles. (Blacks have tended to be relatively more level-headed about him.)
. . .
Beneath this bland Good Obama lies a more interesting character, one that I like far better--the Bad Obama, a close student of other people’s weaknesses, a literary artist of considerable power in plumbing his deep reservoirs of self-pity and resentment, an unfunny Evelyn Waugh consumed by indignation toward his own mother’s people. He has been hiding out on the bestseller lists for the last two years in his enormously revealing, but little understood, 1995 “autobiography”--a more accurate term might be “autobiographical novel”--Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

When Obama briefly surfaced in the media in 1990 as the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review, Random House handed him a book contract. Originally, he intended to write a disquisition on race relations, but the puerility of his theorizing discouraged him. He turned instead to writing about what he finds truly fascinating: his relatives and himself.

Obama’s gift for restructuring the past into emotionally and aesthetically satisfying patterns made for an uneasy hybrid of fact and fiction, with composite characters, clearly made-up dialogue, and even preposterous dream sequences. Recently, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the tale of his one triumph during his four years as a young ethnic activist in Chicago--getting asbestos removed from a public housing project--excluded all mention of the veteran local agitator, Hazel Johnson, who might deserve more of the credit.
. . .
Obama has led a fairly pleasant existence, with most of its suffering and conflict taking place within his own head as he tries to turn himself into an authentic angry black man.
. . .
In reality, Obama provides a disturbing test of the best-case scenario of whether America can indeed move beyond race. He inherited his father’s penetrating intelligence; was raised mostly by his loving liberal white grandparents in multiracial, laid-back Hawaii, where America’s normal race rules never applied; and received a superb private school education. And yet, at least through age 33 when he wrote Dreams from My Father, he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race.
. . .
Instead, Obama falls under the spell of a leftist black nationalist preacher, Jeremiah A. Wright, who preaches African-American unity through antipathy toward whites. Reverend Wright remains a major influence on the presidential candidate. (The title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, is borrowed from one of Wright’s sermons.) Ben Wallace-Wells notes in Rolling Stone: “This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr.”

"Obama’s Identity Crisis: Although he presents himself as a healer of differences, the presidential candidate’s own racial struggle paints a conflicted portrait," by Steve Sailer, The American Conservative, March 26, 2007

Rev. Jeremiah Wright - Techonrati

"Obama Disses His Pastor," Get Rid of the DLC blog, March 7, 2007

The Obama Messiah Watch - Timothy Noah, Slate

Posted at March 17, 2007 09:57 AM | Categories: America , Bigotry , Politics

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://twoseasmedia.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/967

Comments

Post a comment