Obama's memoirs - a treasure trove

Some of my friends are liberals. And when we get together, we drink, joke and argue about politics. One thing that always amazes them is the fact that I actually read Obama's "Dreams from my father". What surprises me is that not only they did not read it - but that apparently no one has read it, at least if you judge by the fact that so few people discuss Obama's policies in liu of what he wrote about himself. And the most amazing thing is that even Obama's opponents are so shy of mentioning the racist/crazy stuff that our first affirmative action president proudly expressed in his books. And again, they probably don't quote his books because they haven't read them. Honestly though I don't blame them - it's a tedious book written by a narcissistic racist obsessed with his feelings and it's very loosely based on facts. But nevertheless, it's a pretty revealing book - and one day I believe Americans will be astounded when it is revealed what kind of man they elected as their president.

But let's not jump ahead of ourselves. For a few weeks, American people were subjected to reports about Romney's alleged bulling of a homosexual. Interestingly enough, even the family of the gay kid disputed the original article, and some witnesses apparently were misquoted by Washington Post. Even yahoo, the left-leaning media outlet noticed that the story stinked to high heavens. Last but not least, this episode allegedly happened in 1965, nearly 50 years ago.

So, while we are reminiscing about the past, I think it is only appropriate to look at Obama, and see what were the "funny" things he did when he was young - say, when he was a university student at the Occidental college. And since no one in the media is ready to do this, I guess the work is being outsourced to the Hyphenated-American.

For now, I will ignore all the racist ideas that Obama so proudly shared in his memoirs, and instead concentrate on one episode which an attentive reader (Nabokov's favourite term) would find rather revealing of comrade Obama. This one story that I picked for this post is told by Obama's close friend and roommate Reggie, and he is telling it to a girl named Regina. Here it goes...

"Let me tell you, Regina, Obama and me go way back. Should have seen our parties last year, back at the dorms. Man, you remember the time we stayed up the whole weekend? Forty hours, no sleep. Started Saturday morning and didn't stop till Monday..."

"I am telling you, Regina, it was wild. When the maids show up Monday morning, we were all still sitting in the hallway, looking like zombies. Bottles everywhere. Cigarette butts. Newspapers. That spot where Jimmy threw up..." Reggie turned to me and started to laugh, spilling more beer on the rug. "You remember, don't you man? Shit was so bad, those little old Mexican ladies started to cry. 'Dios Mio,' one of 'em says, and the other one starts patting her on the back. Oh shit, we were crazy..."

Regina, the semi-fictional character in the Obama's memoirs is upset at Obama and his friend and tells them both the obvious truth...

"You think that's funny?" she said to me. Her voice was shaking, barely a whisper. "Is that what's real to you, Barack - making a mess for somebody to clean up? That could be my grandmother, you know. She had to clean up behind people for most of her life. I'll bet the people she worked for thought it was funny too".

It later became known, that Regina, a Black consciousness that led Obama to light, was apparently white. The good news is that rev.Wright, the mister "White Man's Greed Keeps the World in Need" (that's too a quote from Obama's memoirs - back from the days when Obama was proud to be a friends of a socialist bigot) is still real and very much black - and upset about them evil Jews who are leading his favourite pupil comrade Obama astray.

So, there is your "president", a privileged man who messes things up, and then giggles at the poor women who are forced to clean up after him. And apparently, according to the memoirs, this was because of his "perceived injuries" from the evil white people - the injuries so deep, that he was trying to escape "the white authority" by discarding morality, honesty, hard work and diligence as a "white thing". Mind you, this crazy train of thought is claimed by Obama, a man raised by a family of privileged white people. According to the memoirs, Obama is later convinced by the fictional black girl Regina (as well as some unnamed blacks men) that being an honest decent human being is not necessarily a trap set by the evil white people - but this dramatic discovery does not come easy to our genius-in-charge. Here is the appropriate passage:

I had stopped listening at a certain point, I now realized, so I wrapped up I had been in my own perceived injuries, so eager was I to escape the imagined traps that white authority had set for me. To that white world, I had been willing to cede the values of my childhood, as if those values were somehow irreversible soiled by the endless falsehoods that white spoke about black.

Except now I was hearing the same thing from black people I respected, people with more excuses for bitterness than I might ever claim for myself. Who told you that being honest was a white thing? they asked me. Who sold you this bill of goods, that your situation exempted you from being thoughtful or diligent or kind, or that morality had a color?

All this craziness is in the autobiography of a "bright" young man - a man who was supposed to bring Hope, and Change, and Reconciliation to our nation. I wouldn't be surprised if it took decades for Michele Obama to convince her husband that washing one's hands after using the bathroom was not a white man's conspiracy to destroy black identity. Or maybe, he does thinks it is a white conspiracy - we will never know - unless the media asks him at this next press-conference.
P.S. The episode describing a drunk Obama and his friends messing up the room in the dormitory, as well as his discovery that honesty, integrity and decency are not necessarily the evil white man's inventions are on pages 109-110 of "Dreams from my father".