Courtesy
of David Maraniss’s new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack
Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or
even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite
gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to
put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand
Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as
“a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close
friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an
angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an
entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant
conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather supposedly killed by
Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism met his
actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang
drapes.”
David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can’t understand why boorish
non-literary types have seized on his book as evidence that the president
of the United
States is a
Grade A phony. “It is a legitimate question about where the line is in memoir,”
he told Soledad O’Brien on CNN. My Oxford dictionary defines “memoir” as “an
historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.” And if Obama
doesn’t have “personal knowledge” of his tortured grandfather, war-hero
step-grandfather, and racially obsessed theater-buff girlfriend, who does? But
in recent years, the Left has turned the fake memoir into one of the most
prestigious literary genres: Oprah’s Book Club recommended James Frey’s A Million
Little
Pieces,
hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a “heartbreaking memoir” of “poetic honesty,” but
subsequently revealed to be heavy on the “poetic” and rather light on the
“honesty.” The “heartbreaking memoir” of a drug-addled street punk who got
tossed in the slammer after brawling with cops while high on crack with his
narco-hooker girlfriend proved to be the work of some suburban Pat Boone type
with a couple of parking tickets. (I exaggerate, but not as much as he
did.)
Oprah was also smitten by The Education of Little Tree, the
heartwarmingly honest memoir of a Cherokee childhood which turned out to be
concocted by a former Klansman whose only previous notable literary work was
George Wallace’s “Segregation Forever” speech. Fragments: Memories of a
Wartime Childhood is a heartbreakingly honest, poetically searing,
searingly painful, painfully honest, etc. account of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s
unimaginably horrific boyhood in the Jewish ghetto of Riga and the Nazi
concentration camp at Auschwitz. After his memoir won America’s respected
National Jewish Book Award, Mr. Wilkomirski was inevitably discovered to have
been born in Switzerland and spent the war in a prosperous neighborhood of
Zurich being raised by a nice middle-class couple. He certainly had a deprived
childhood, at least from the point of view of a literary agent pitching a memoir
to a major publisher. But the “unimaginable” horror of his book turned out to be
all too easily imagined. Fake memoirs have won the Nobel Peace Prize and are
taught at Ivy League schools to the scions of middle-class families who take on
six figure debts for the privilege (I, Rigoberta Menchú). They’re
handed out by the Pentagon to senior officers embarking on a tour of Afghanistan
(Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea) on the entirely reasonable grounds
that a complete fantasy could hardly be less credible than current NATO
strategy.
In such a world, it was surely only a matter of time before a fake
memoirist got elected as president of
the United States. Indeed, the aforementioned Rigoberta Menchú ran as a
candidate in the 2007 and 2011 presidential elections in Guatemala, although she
got knocked out in the first round — Guatemalans evidently being disinclined to
elect someone to the highest office in the land with no accomplishment
whatsoever apart from a lousy fake memoir. Which just goes to show what a bunch
of unsophisticated rubes they are.
In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests
that the controversy over Dreams
from My Father
is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.”
We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that
actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with
nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented
baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to
make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an
encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is
moving beyond the old straightjackets of black and white, male and female, gay
and straight, real and hallucinatory.
The question now is whether the United States itself is merely the latest
chapter of Obama’s fake memoir. You’ll notice that, in the examples listed
above, the invention only goes one way. No Cherokee orphan, Holocaust survivor,
or recovering drug addict pretends to be George Wallace’s speechwriter. Instead,
the beneficiaries of boring middle-class Western life seek to appropriate the
narratives and thereby enjoy the electric frisson of fashionable victim groups.
And so it goes with public policy in the West at twilight.
Thus, Obama’s executive order on immigration exempting a million people
from the laws of the United States is patently unconstitutional, but that’s not
how an NPR listener looks at it: To him, Obama’s unilateral amnesty enriches
stultifying white-bread America with a million plucky little Rigoberta Menchús
and their heartbreaking stories. Eric Holder’s entire tenure as attorney general
is a fake memoir all by itself, and his invocation of “executive privilege” in
the Fast and Furious scandal is preposterous, but American liberals can’t hear:
Insofar as they know anything about Fast and Furious, it’s something to do with
the government
tracking the guns of fellows like those Alabama “Segregation Forever” nuts,
rather than a means by which hundreds of innocent Rigoberta Menchús south of the
border were gunned down with weapons sold to their killers by liberal
policymakers of the Obama administration. If that’s the alternative narrative,
they’ll take the fake memoir.
Similarly, Obamacare is
apparently all about the repressed patriarchal white male waging his “war on
women.” The women are struggling 30-year-old Georgetown Law coeds whose starting
salary after graduation is 140 grand a year, but let’s not get hung up on
details. Dodd-Frank financial reform, also awaiting Supreme Court judgment, is
another unconstitutional power grab, but its designated villains are
mustache-twirling top-hatted bankers, so likewise who cares?
One can understand why the beneficiaries of the postwar West’s expansion of
middle-class prosperity would rather pass themselves off as members of way
cooler victim groups: It’s a great career move. It may even have potential
beyond the page: See Sandra Fluke’s dazzling pre-Broadway tryout of Fake
Memoir: The High School Musical, in which a 30-year-old Georgetown Law coed
whose starting salary after graduation is 140 grand a year passes herself off as
the Little Rigoberta Hussein Wilkomirski of the Rite-Aid pick-up line. But
transforming an entire nation into a fake memoir is unlikely to prove half so
lucrative. The heartwarming immigrants, the contraceptive-less coeds, the
mustache-twirling bankers all provide cover for a far less appealing narrative:
an expansion of centralized power hitherto unknown to this republic. In reality,
Obama’s step-grandfather died falling off the chair while changing the drapes.
In the fake-memoir version, Big Government’s on the chair, and it’s curtains for
America.
~~~~~
So, what's real? You'll have to decide for yourself because, quite simply, no one is going to tell you.
Don't forget the Cherokee out east. What's her name...? :)
Stay safe.
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