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Published: June 22, 2012 Updated: 11:17 a.m.
Mark Steyn: Obama the first Invented-American president
By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
Courtesy of David Maraniss' 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
nonliterary 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.)
File:
This undated file photo released by Obama for America shows President
Barack Obama as a young boy, and his father, also named Barack Obama.
ANONYMOUS, AP
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 Menchu").
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 Menchu 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
straitjackets 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 Menchus 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 &
Furious scandal is preposterous, but American liberals can't hear:
Insofar as they know anything about Fast & 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 Menchus south of the border were gunned
down with weapons sold to their killers by liberal policy-makers 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.
©
MARK STEYN
