M2RB: Madonna
"Re-invent yourself."
- Madonna
We’re too busy inventing ourselves to be interested in the truth.
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.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012
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