Book: The Roots of Obama's Rage
Quotes of Book: The Roots of Obama's Rage
Author Shelby Steele, one of America's most insightful commentators on race relations, notes that whites have been looking for some time for a black leader who has credibility within the black community and yet can offer whites racial absolution. This should not be taken too cynically. Many whites genuinely espouse an idealism that seeks to move beyond race, and they recognize that it's going to take a black spokesman to make this case on a national level and help to get us there. Steele notes bluntly that this idealism cannot be divorced from a powerful sense of white racial guilt. We have to get beyond race because America's past racial history has become such an embarrassment. Now the black leader that whites are looking for does not actually have to issue indulgences in the manner of the medieval papacy; rather, by his words and deeds, he can signal to white America that whites are no longer on the hook for past racism. In Steele's view, whites have been eagerly, hungrily awaiting the black leader who would give them a chance, through their support of his leadership, not merely to say to others but to feel, in their innermost being, "Whew, I am not a racist." Steele speculated that whites may be willing to pay heavily both in money and in political support if such a candidate appeared on the horizon. He would truly be the anointed one.11 Obama's ingenuity was to recognize that this unique opportunity required a black man of a kind not seen in American politics before. Such a man would have to look black but act white. book-quoteObama benefited from Saul Alinsky's transracial strategy to assemble an effective coalition. Alinsky's goal was for the activist to reach America's white middle class because, as he put it, "that is where the power is." Alinsky had nothing but contempt for left-wing activists who treated the white middle class as a bunch of square, sexually uptight, gun-toting, small-minded racists. Yes, Alinsky wrote, the middle class is mighty screwed up. But it has become that way because it's desperate; its economic condition is deteriorating and so people turn to guns and religion to give them consolation. {Sound familiar?} Alinsky advocated that a successful activist must not disdain the middle class but rather join it. Certainly he wasn't calling for an embrace of the provincial values of the middle class. Rather, he urged that activists adopt the style and attitude of the middle class. If the middle class is "square," then be square. Don't wear the black leather jacket and the hippie bandana; wear a suit and tie. Don't come across as an angry misfit; come across as a nice young man who is only upset because of manifest injustice. Smile a lot; smiles are a great way to disguise rage and contempt. In this way, Alinsky argued, the activist could build a rapport with ordinary Americans and mobilize them on behalf of radical causes.10 book-quoteObama's narrative culminates in his month-long journey to Africa, where he talks to various relatives about who his dad really was, and then weeps at the man's grave. It's powerful stuff. But at first glance it's a little hard for the reader to understand Obama's depth of allegiance. His dad was, after all, a complete jerk. He married Kezia in Kenya and had two children with her. Before the second child was born, he abandoned his family to come to America. There he met Obama's mother Ann, got her pregnant, and then married her, but without telling her he was already married. When Obama was two, his father abandoned him and his mother to go to Harvard; there he moved in with a teacher, Ruth Nidesand. Eventually he took Nidesand back to Africa, married her, and had two children with her. But he also rejoined his African wife, Kezia, and had two more children with her. Later in life he took up with still another woman, Jael Otieno, and impregnated her. The two of them planned to get married after the child was born, but the marriage never took place. By the time he was done, Barack Sr. managed a grand total of three wives, one wife-to-be, and eight children. He was a terrible husband and a worse father; he neglected virtually all his offspring, and one of his sons has accused him of domestic violence. In the words of Mark Ndesandjo, who is the son of Obama Sr. and Nidesand, "I remember situations when I was growing up, and there would be a light coming from our living room, and I could hear thuds and screams, and my father's voice and my mother shouting. I remember one night when she ran out into the street and she didn't know where to go."11 book-quoteObama is also directing the U.S. government to invest billions of dollars in solar and wind energy. In addition, he is using bailout leverage to compel the Detroit auto companies to build small, "green" cars, even though no one in the government has investigated whether consumers are interested in buying small, "green" cars-the Obama administration just believes they should. All these measures, Obama recognizes, are expensive. The cap and trade legislation is estimated to impose an $850 billion burden on the private sector; together with other related measures, the environmental tab will exceed $1 trillion. This would undoubtedly impose a significant financial burden on an already-stressed economy. These measures are billed as necessary to combat global warming. Yet no one really knows if the globe is warming significantly or not, and no one really knows if human beings are the cause of the warming or not. For years people went along with Al Gore's claim that "the earth has a fever," a claim illustrated by misleading images of glaciers disappearing, oceans swelling, famines arising, and skies darkening. Apocalypse now! Now we know that the main body of data that provided the basis for these claims appears to have been faked. The Climategate scandal showed that scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were quite willing to manipulate and even suppress data that did not conform to their ideological commitment to global warming.3 The fakers insist that even if you discount the fakery, the data still show.... But who's in the mood to listen to them now? Independent scientists who have reviewed the facts say that average global temperatures have risen by around 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. Lots of things could have caused that. Besides, if you project further back, the record shows quite a bit of variation: periods of warming, followed by periods of cooling. There was a Medieval Warm Period around 1000 A.D., and a Little Ice Age that occurred several hundred years later. In the past century, the earth warmed slightly from 1900 to 1940, then cooled slightly until the late 1970s, and has resumed warming slightly since then. How about in the past decade or so? Well, if you count from 1998, the earth has cooled in the past dozen years. But the statistic is misleading, since 1998 was an especially hot year. If you count from 1999, the earth has warmed in the intervening period. This statistic is equally misleading, because 1999 was a cool year. This doesn't mean that temperature change is in the eye of the beholder. It means, in the words of Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, that "all this temperature variability on a wide range of time scales reveals that just about the only thing constant in climate is change."4 book-quoteAt Columbia, Obama wrote an article in a student weekly, Sundial, calling for an end to the U.S. military industrial complex. Obama's article was a response to the so-called nuclear freeze movement that was sweeping American campuses at the time. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth in the early 1980s, I remember well the paranoia of the freeze activists, who seemed convinced that the world was about to end unless their nuclear freeze solution was immediately implemented. Calling as it did for a reciprocal freeze in U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals, the freeze was a liberal cause, but apparently not liberal enough for Obama. For him the issue came down to the big, bad military industrial complex and its irrational, insatiable desire for more costly weapons. "Generally the narrow focus of the freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets."21 book-quoteIn July 2010, reports surfaced in the British press that the Obama administration favored the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber. This was an eye-opener, because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama administration publicly protested the decision. Obama reaffirmed his position on Megrahi's release when British prime minister David Cameron came to visit in July 2010. The president's public sentiments seemed entirely appropriate: Megrahi, after all, had been convicted in connection with the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am Jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, most of them American. But a few days after Cameron departed, the British press obtained a letter that the Obama administration had sent a year earlier to the Scottish government. The letter seems to show that Obama's public outrage was contrived. In fact, the Obama administration took the position that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland. This option, Obama said, would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish government officials interpreted the letter to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." So they let Megrahi go back to his own country, where he lives today as a free man. While the American press has downplayed the story, the families of the Lockerbie victims now know about the Obama letter and want to see it. Yet the Obama administration refuses to make the letter public, probably because of its incriminating content. Now why would a U.S. president take such a benign view of a terrorist striking out against America? book-quoteRather, the issue is whether it is right to have a mosque and Islamic center in virtually the exact spot where so many Americans were killed in the name of Islamic holy war. I don't think it is right, any more than I would support the idea of a neo-Nazi recruiting center at Auschwitz. My sympathies in this case are not with religiously deprived Muslims, but rather with Debra Burlingame, a spokesperson for a 9/11 victims group. "Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America's heart was broken nine years ago," she said.5 Some supporters of the mosque, such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, clearly missed the distinction being made here between the right to worship and how and where that right is exercised. Fareed Zakaria, writer and CNN host, recognizes the distinction; even so, he argues in favor of the mosque on the grounds that the folks building it are traditional Muslims who have condemned terrorism.6 Still, it's not clear why these moderate Muslims disregarded the sentiments of the 9/11 victims' families and decided on a site so close to Ground Zero. Undoubtedly radical Muslims around the world will view the mosque as a kind of triumphal monument. There is historical precedent for this. Muslims have a long tradition of building monuments to commemorate triumphs over adversaries, as when they built the Dome of the Rock on the site of Solomon's Temple, or when Mehmet the Conqueror rode his horse into the Byzantine church Hagia Sophia and declared that it would be turned into a mosque. Many Americans may not know this history, but the radical Muslims do, and Obama does as well. The radical Muslims would like the Ground Zero mosque built so it can stand as an enduring symbol of resistance to American power, and President Obama evidently agrees with them. book-quote
