Father to The One

Dinesh D'Souza's article "Obama's Problem with Business" in Forbes is the first I have read that pays proper attention to The One's reverence (see his memoir Dreams from My Father) for his namesake father.

The One was born of a bigamous marriage that lasted three years, saw his father once - when Obama Jr. was 10 - after his parents split up, and must know that Obama Sr. failed to find a role commensurate with his high opinion of himself in post-independence Kenya, and became an embittered drunk who committed vehicular homicide before being killed himself while once again DWI.

Given that any boy is likely to idealise an absentee father, that is a depressingly sordid place from which to draw dreams.

D'Souza's article is concerned mainly with the legacy of anti-colonialism that is the predominant theme in many of The One's public utterances. What is rather startling is that D'Souza seems to think people have not noticed.

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet. 

Maybe incredible to an American, but that's pretty much the way all self-styled socialists and most nationalists throughout the world have always seen the US of A.

D'Souza fails to address the real paradox, which is that even when conquering Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines - when Rudyard Kipling welcomed them to the club in the poem The White Man's Burden - Americans continued to cling to their self-image as heroic rebels against colonialism.

The sanctimonious President Woodrow Wilson, who ordered countless military interventions in America's "back yard" and extended the segregationalist Jim Crow laws into the federal government, lectured European heads of state on the evils of imperialism when he descended on the post World War I conference in Paris, bearing his Fourteen Points.

President Franklin Roosevelt . . . but why go on? The list of examples of American politicians and officials simply unable to see themselves as others saw them is almost limitless. It was in the US national interest to break up the European multinational empires in order to pick up the pieces, and that is what it did.

It was never the ace up the American sleeve that irritated foreign statesmen and diplomats - it was their unshakable belief that God put it there.

As one who also grew up expatriate, I can easily relate to The One's sense of apartness from his country. I find it less easy to understand why in his case it developed into alienation - into a world-view hostile to the entire history of the nation that has honoured him so highly.

Like most lefties, The One is defined by what he is against; I do not believe that what he is for is as intellectually defined as D'Souza seems to think. I doubt if it's very much more than the life-long quest of an abandoned child to win the loving approval of the absentee parent.  

Sadly, this has cluttered The One's mind with post-colonial rhetoric when the world has moved on, massively, and those parts of what used to be called the Third World that have hauled themselves out of hopeless poverty have done so by embracing capitalism and free markets.

On the positive side, The One has brought the US lefties out of the wood-work, to wriggle and twist in the light of public scrutiny. My expectation that he would do so was one of the reasons I voted for him. The other was to punish the Republican establishment, and I'm glad to see the Tea Party continuing to put in the boot.

P.S. Heather MacDonald disembowelled D'Souza's essay on Secular Right.  "Liberals engage in their own armchair psychologizing, of course. All the more reason for conservatives to forswear the tactic. But D’Souza’s screed is just the latest manifestation of the rebirth of the conservative hysteria that marked the Clinton era. The fact that both Clinton and Obama’s critics became obsessed with the person rather than his policies suggests that those critics have no faith in the public’s ability to grapple with abstract issues, rather than alleged personal failings." The only trouble with that argument is that the critics are quite right. The One was widely seen as a messiah, with his extremely murky political past air-brushed out of the narrative. Is it not fair enough to attack ad hominem when the man is the message?