Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Monday, May 2, 2011
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Saturday, March 28, 2009
If I Had Read This During the Election
I would have been insufferable.
So I just finished Barack Obama's 1994 memoir Dreams from my Father. There is plenty to say about it, but I think I'll start with this:
It is, literally, the only book ever published by a President before that President entered politics (or even, seemingly, thought of entering politics).
This grants Dreams from My Father a particular resonance. Indeed, with all the fatuous cries during the campaign of "who is Barack Obama?" those shouting such vaguely hysteric attacks failed to recognize that Barack Obama, moreso than any Presidential candidate before him, provided the answers to that very question long before he was a national figure and long before he had anything to gain from concealing or spinning his own past.
To be sure, it is an autobiography, and few literary genres are so untrustworthy as autobiographies. Obama himself tells the reader in the book's introduction that characters have been combined from real people in his life and that events have been compressed or extended for narrative, and I feel certain that, here and there, self aggrandizement has crept into the story.
But, at the same time, it is a remarkably humane book. Obama pulls no punches with himself, often casting himself as the flawed character in his own story. There is real wisdom in his telling and it doesn't for a moment feel forced or false. Even without his later achievements, this book would have stood a good chance of leaving Barack Obama remembered as an extraordinary man.
So, first things first: Obama was asked to write the book just after he was named the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. It was supposed to be a personal story of race in America, but it became something more than that over the couple of years it took for him to write it. It became a paean to an outsider's world, a lonely guy story. It is a revealing and lyrical exploration of living between two worlds, of and other than both.
By now everyone knows the outlines of the tale. Obama is born in Hawaii to a White mother from Kansas and a Black father from Kenya. Before Barack is even a couple of years old, his father leaves and returns to Kenya. He will only see him once more during his life - when he is ten years old, and only for a week or so. Obama spends most of his life trying to carve an identity for himself, both as a man and as an African-American, and he is forced, eventually to come to some new synthesis when his father's life and his father's failures are finally revealed to him when he travels to Kenya to, for the first time, meet his relatives after his father's death in a car accident.
It's a compelling story, but it is an even more compelling book. Obama has what so few politicians have - he has the gift of actual literary talent. He is an extraordinarily good writer, both in terms of his ability to describe and set a scene or a character and in terms of his keen understanding of narrative structure. In fact, though a memoir, the book is consciously novelesque and reads quickly and engrossingly like the best bildungsroman.
I say that had I read this book during his campaign I would have been insufferable. That is perhaps because, as an English major, I am stunned and honored to have a President capable of a book of this quality. Perhaps no President since Lincoln has had so firm a grasp on the written word, and America cannot suffer for its leaders knowing how to wield their language well. As hard as I fought and cared and hoped that he would become the 44th President of the United States, I find myself anxious for the end of his tenure as President so that he can get back to writing. I would love to read a novel by the author of Dreams from My Father.
So I just finished Barack Obama's 1994 memoir Dreams from my Father. There is plenty to say about it, but I think I'll start with this:
It is, literally, the only book ever published by a President before that President entered politics (or even, seemingly, thought of entering politics).
This grants Dreams from My Father a particular resonance. Indeed, with all the fatuous cries during the campaign of "who is Barack Obama?" those shouting such vaguely hysteric attacks failed to recognize that Barack Obama, moreso than any Presidential candidate before him, provided the answers to that very question long before he was a national figure and long before he had anything to gain from concealing or spinning his own past.
To be sure, it is an autobiography, and few literary genres are so untrustworthy as autobiographies. Obama himself tells the reader in the book's introduction that characters have been combined from real people in his life and that events have been compressed or extended for narrative, and I feel certain that, here and there, self aggrandizement has crept into the story.
But, at the same time, it is a remarkably humane book. Obama pulls no punches with himself, often casting himself as the flawed character in his own story. There is real wisdom in his telling and it doesn't for a moment feel forced or false. Even without his later achievements, this book would have stood a good chance of leaving Barack Obama remembered as an extraordinary man.
So, first things first: Obama was asked to write the book just after he was named the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. It was supposed to be a personal story of race in America, but it became something more than that over the couple of years it took for him to write it. It became a paean to an outsider's world, a lonely guy story. It is a revealing and lyrical exploration of living between two worlds, of and other than both.
By now everyone knows the outlines of the tale. Obama is born in Hawaii to a White mother from Kansas and a Black father from Kenya. Before Barack is even a couple of years old, his father leaves and returns to Kenya. He will only see him once more during his life - when he is ten years old, and only for a week or so. Obama spends most of his life trying to carve an identity for himself, both as a man and as an African-American, and he is forced, eventually to come to some new synthesis when his father's life and his father's failures are finally revealed to him when he travels to Kenya to, for the first time, meet his relatives after his father's death in a car accident.
It's a compelling story, but it is an even more compelling book. Obama has what so few politicians have - he has the gift of actual literary talent. He is an extraordinarily good writer, both in terms of his ability to describe and set a scene or a character and in terms of his keen understanding of narrative structure. In fact, though a memoir, the book is consciously novelesque and reads quickly and engrossingly like the best bildungsroman.
I say that had I read this book during his campaign I would have been insufferable. That is perhaps because, as an English major, I am stunned and honored to have a President capable of a book of this quality. Perhaps no President since Lincoln has had so firm a grasp on the written word, and America cannot suffer for its leaders knowing how to wield their language well. As hard as I fought and cared and hoped that he would become the 44th President of the United States, I find myself anxious for the end of his tenure as President so that he can get back to writing. I would love to read a novel by the author of Dreams from My Father.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
A Mirror with a Memory
Errol Morris did a photographic retrospective of the Bush presidency this week, using the photos and insight of several photographers from the Whitehouse Press Pool. Some of them are iconic and already familiar. Some of them are really stunning and revelatory. Check it out. (And don't just look at the pictures - read the damned article).
Friday, January 23, 2009
The Special This Evening is Waterboarding
Found myself at a dinner with a friend of mine and some of her coworkers.
At one point, apropos of nothing, my friend turns to me and says:
"You're a republican, right?"
I fell off of my chair and was unable to see or taste for several minutes. When I recovered, still in shock, I told her that I "was the most liberal creature she'd ever encountered. I would," I said, "grant trees the right to vote and animals representation in congress. "
she laughed. I continued, feeling on a hot streak.
"I want the government to pay for breast implants and for Obama to swear an oath on a gay baby."
This, it developed, was not the crowd for this sort of thing.
All of my friend's coworkers, I would soon discover, were of the 'double Guantanamo and put the environmentalists there' persuasion. The evening continued in a predictable fashion.
I wish I had been cool about the whole thing - aloof, suave, confident in the resounding victory of my ideology. I wish I'd weathered the "Obama won because the people are so uninformed and it's only a popularity contest," and the "Bush made us safer than we were eight years ago," and "torture is a subjective thing," and, worst of all, the "double standard of the media and the way they reported about Palin" with more aplomb.
As it was, it was all I could do to reassure them all that the coming socialist utopia would have a place for them, too.
Someone at the table eventually was successful in steering the topic to the Superbowl, and I admired them for it. Me, I was itching for a fight and would have liked nothing better than to get to gloat about the potential supreme court appointees. I had already suffered through being told that I only believed what I did because I was clearly a defense attorney (I'm not) and that I didn't understand America as I came from L.A., which was nearly Mexico anyway (that's stupid). I had a hardon to yack about the end of the war in Iraq and Planned Parenthood and the Kyoto treaty and all the other bugaboos of the conservative heart, but I ended up discussing whether or not Kurt Warner would make the hall of fame. (I argued yes, but that he didn't really deserve it. This was only vaguely controversial).
In the end, a man at the end of the table bought drinks for everyone. Everyone, that is, except for me.
I absorb your catcalls. I'll settle for winning the culture wars.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Obamamerica, Day One
Eight years ago, the Onion ran an article about Bush's inauguration. The headline, a quote from the Onionverse's Bush inauguration speech, read "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over."
Who knew then how prophetic the little satiric newspaper would be?
After Obama's inauguration, I think the entire globe let out its breath for the first time in years. We barely got out alive.
In any case, Obama's speech seemed, at times, a thinly veiled rebuke of the Bush years and an only lightly coded message to America and the world that that whole nonsense - the anti-science, the fanaticism, the extra-legality, the unilateralism, the arrogance, the warmongering, the anti-environmentalism, and the anti-regulatory attitude - were all in the past and an aberration at that. Add to this the subtle charge that it was time for America to grow up and leave behind its reckless teenage years and the speech seemed to cover the next four years like a blanket. The rhetoric was not high flying most of the time, but the sentiment was intense and grounded in a way that felt reassuring, even in its sobriety.
I, for one, feel, for the first time in years and years, in awe of my country and civilization. Nothing will come off quite as well as I might dream it will, I'm sure, but everything is going to be better (it would have a hard time being worse).
I've never been so close to buying a flagpole.
America on, bitches.
p.s. how cool is Barack Obama? check out the new Whitehouse website, where you can, among other unprecedented transparencies, read the actual text of any and all executive orders, see the name and appointment of every single person nominated for a job by the executive branch, and read the actual text of the agenda the pres. plans to pursue while in office. I know it makes me a nerd and a wonk, but I get all curfluffled over ethics and civics. Oprah can have her grand love stories and tales of overcoming hardship - give me the simpler and deeper pleasures of an open and responsive democracy any day to get me all misty eyed.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
A Dollop of Something Else
I'm at a walk-in clinic yesterday and I'm checking myself in. The girl behind the counter is entering my information into the computer and I'm just sort of standing there, handling the tchotchkes scattered around the counter top. Also on the counter, next to an industrial size box of facemasks (sinister), is an industrial size bottle of hand sanitizer.
This reminds me of a vignette from Barack Obama's book where he describes the first time he met George Bush. This was just after Obama had been elected to the senate and he was invited to the White House to meet the president. So he goes and Bush is there to greet him outside the White House. They shake hands. Immediately after they shake hands, and without so much as a word or a glance to anyone nearby, Bush reaches out his right hand to an aide and the aide squirts a big dollop of hand sanitizer into the president's hand. He rubs it all in with his other hand and then invites Obama in.
This is a really rather funny little story about Bush. (Why couldn't he just keep his paw out of his mouth for the next twenty minutes and then use the sanitizer after Obama left the room?) How was I to know I was telling it to a Palin-kateer?
It really isn't funny enough to relate in great detail, but suffice it to tell that the conversation took an odd turn. Governer Blogejevich was mentioned and the phrase "shows who Obama associates with" slithered across the counter at me. Forget that the two men hate one another or that Obama's people are the ones who got the feds on the case when they found out what Blagojevich was up to. Forget all that.
I just wanted to tell a funny little story about Bush and hand sanitizer. Was I mad to expect that one could tell such a story to an attractive young woman who sits behind a giant bottle of the stuff every day?
This reminds me of a vignette from Barack Obama's book where he describes the first time he met George Bush. This was just after Obama had been elected to the senate and he was invited to the White House to meet the president. So he goes and Bush is there to greet him outside the White House. They shake hands. Immediately after they shake hands, and without so much as a word or a glance to anyone nearby, Bush reaches out his right hand to an aide and the aide squirts a big dollop of hand sanitizer into the president's hand. He rubs it all in with his other hand and then invites Obama in.
This is a really rather funny little story about Bush. (Why couldn't he just keep his paw out of his mouth for the next twenty minutes and then use the sanitizer after Obama left the room?) How was I to know I was telling it to a Palin-kateer?
It really isn't funny enough to relate in great detail, but suffice it to tell that the conversation took an odd turn. Governer Blogejevich was mentioned and the phrase "shows who Obama associates with" slithered across the counter at me. Forget that the two men hate one another or that Obama's people are the ones who got the feds on the case when they found out what Blagojevich was up to. Forget all that.
I just wanted to tell a funny little story about Bush and hand sanitizer. Was I mad to expect that one could tell such a story to an attractive young woman who sits behind a giant bottle of the stuff every day?
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