Getting Around to 2016: Obama's America

Everybody makes patterns, builds narratives. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote Joan Didion. We make sense of—and for—our own lives in doing so.

Also, in doing so, we all make fiction, partly for aesthetic embellishment, partly from misapprehensions, misperceptions, partly from plain errors in facts, forgotten memories. Anybody who has read biography or autobiography is unsurprised by this news.

To digress a bit: when certain kinds of mental illness strike, the story an ill person constructs may seem entirely logical, to a point. And if you were to say to a person in the midst of a paranoid episode, “But that doesn’t make sense because . . .,” the person might pause, caught momentarily by the correctness of your logic or your facts.

However, it doesn’t take long for such a person to find an even larger, more inclusive, more frightening narrative that now encompasses the original story. And that new, more frightening narrative might even include you, the one who tried to be “sensible.” You might be seen as an unwitting agent of the “forces beyond our control.”

Such a state of mind may truly be a living nightmare. It’s The Blob of storytelling, growing larger and more powerful as it consumes objections.

Mental illness aside (I think), there is a particular sort of storytelling that I have seen all during my academic career: constructing “truth” out of little.

F.O. Matthiessen, a twentieth-century literary critic, famously spun an exquisite paragraph about how Herman Melville employed the phrase “soiled fish of the sea” to explore the irony of “dirty” creatures being constantly washed in the depths of the ocean. The trouble is that “soiled” was a misprint; the phrase should have been “coiled fish.”

In other words, working with false information, even great, well-intentioned scholars find ways to make error seem important, and more importantly, seem true.

So can scientists, theologians, and politicians. Especially if their data—their facts—are seen through the eyes of pre-existing ideology.

Now we all are likely to see what we want to see. Again, unsurprising news. A car salesman who believes his SUV is best, a mother who believes her child is superlative, an academic who has spent his life fine-tuning his theories as he gathers more and more information—all these folks are subject to error in their “storytelling.”

Case in point: I heard many people argue that the Freudian psychological pressure on President George W. Bush was three-fold, resulting in the Iraq War: (a) he wanted to prove he was as good as or better than his father, President George Herbert Walker Bush;  (b) he wanted to “finish” the job on Saddam Hussein that his father had not; and (c) he wanted to “get” the Iraqis who had threatened his father’s life.

Personally, I never really bought this theory, though it has its appeal. I focused on the neo-cons who surrounded and advised him. But that’s me.

All this leads, I hope, to a simple point I wanted to make about Professor Dinesh D’Souza, whose theories about President Barack Hussein Obama are based on his belief that President Obama is profoundly indebted, almost subservient, to his Marxist/Communist Kenyan father.  

The recent movie 2016: Obama’s America made from D’Souza’s book The Roots of Obama’s Rage has the patina of scholarly method and logic, but, like those shaky Freudian readings of Bush 43, this narrative is a fictionalization of Obama’s “rage” over colonialism/imperialism, first of all, and of intellectual and political “influences” that work, in D’Souza’s mind as if human beings were absolutely determined (have we all seen Gattica?).  D’Souza’s movie is a laughably flawed, pseudo-academic exercise in ideology.

Now, are there threads of “socialist/Marxist” philosophy in modern American politics, as well as the academy? You bet. But threads do not make a “whole cloth” of Socialism/Communism(!) in modern America, nor in President Obama.

Really. Let’s think: Tim Geithner and Leon Panetta, socialists out to destroy our American way of life? Obamacare, which employs the medical insurance industry WAY more than any liberal such as myself would prefer?

President Obama, by all objective analysts, has held to a pragmatic political center, more like President William Jefferson Clinton than, let’s say, as some have claimed, Stalin or Hitler. Really?

Another digression: if President Obama is “extreme,” what must we call those who announce that they will do everything they can to “make him a one-term President”? Not legislate. Not compromise. Not even read history. Real history.

And what must we call a community of “opposition” that includes, not simply people who disagree in this pluralistic country with free speech and guns, but who are willing to talk openly about secession, about taking up arms against the United Nations forces who will no doubt storm our shores and seize our property to satisfy this “rage” in Our (yes) President. And what about the desperate tenor of the times, the regression to open racism—“lynching the chair,” or openly hanging the President in effigy, or advocating in the name of Christianity for the death penalty for rebellious children, or assassinating doctors who perform abortions, or shooting at Democratic headquarters in Colorado, or yelling “You lie!” during a State of the Union address, or any number of actions that threaten physical violence. What about that tone? That “America”?

I promised someone I love that I would go see D’Souza’s movie, as an entrée to talking about real details, real facts. So I went. Willingly paid money I wish I had not had to send to that cause. What I found was a model by which to teach students how not to “do scholarship.” And certainly not a model for “critical thinking.”

Hard-core ideology is always a set of blinders. Used honorably, it can help us to focus, gain depth, exclude irrelevancies. But it can also become an end in itself; then what suffers is accurate representation, dispassionate (NOT passionless) analysis, civility, and—for want of a better word—the truth. 

Oh, and America the Beautiful, the Truly Beautiful.