Monday, May 05, 2008

BARACK OBAMA

The True Lesson of Dreams From My Father

Over on the homepage, I have a piece that I'm particularly pleased with, a look at the men who were in Barack Obama's early life, as described in his autobiography Dreams From My Father, and coming to a conclusion of how young Obama came to revere Jeremiah Wright.

I'd urge you to read the whole thing, but in short, by the time Obama had encountered Wright as a young man, he had already seen several male elders in his life become... well, no irony intended, "bitter," and ruled them out as role models and mentors. By contrast, Wright is portrayed in the book as one of the few older men who had not been beaten by life, who rose to meet life's challenges in a cheerful and spirited manner.

In the end, Dreams From My Father left me somewhat sympathetic to Obama; had his father been around, had his grandfather, his mother's second husband, or other figures in his life been different men, he probably wouldn't have been such a lost soul when he encountered Wright. Obama was ready to believe, and he was receptive to a message he might have rejected otherwise.

But here's what moves this from remote psychological analysis to thinking about the mindset of a man who might be the next president. When people ask how Obama could be blind to all of Wright's more outrageous and offensive statements, and how he couldn't see Wright for the kind of man he was, I think this helps explain it. In Wright, Obama saw what he wanted to see. He wanted a wise, shrewd, kind, funny, educated man who could show him the ways of the world (and Chicago politics), one who perhaps went a little too far every now and then, but who was overall a good person.

Instead, we see that Wright is a toxic figure, arguing that blacks and whites have different brain structures, that the American government created the AIDS virus for genocidal purposes, that U.S. policy can accurately be called terrorism, that the U.S. Marines can be compared to the Roman soldiers who tortured Jesus, who calls Italians "garlic-noses," who calls the Secretary of State "Condoskeezia" and "Con-damn-nesia", etc.

Here's where the example of Wright is truly disturbing when contemplating an Obama presidency. If Barack Obama looked at Jeremiah Wright and saw only what he wanted to see... how sure can we be that he wouldn't look at say, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and see only what he wanted to see?

05/05 08:49 AMShare