Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Just Call Him Po-Mo 'Bama

VDH writes:
The chief tenet of postmodernism is that truth and facts are arbitrary constructs, set up by the privileged to manipulate others less fortunate. In the case of our first postmodernist president, Barack Obama, there cannot be facts, past or present, only a set of shifting assertions that gain credence to the degree that they prove transitorily useful for progressive causes. A sympathetic biographer, David Maraniss, noted that almost all the touchstone events in Barack Obama’s mythographic memoir were fabricated. Of course, Obama would object to such a value-laden term and instead call them composites, impressions stitched together and presented as truth to serve the higher moral narrative: a young biracial idealist searching for his identity in a mostly racist and oppressive America. To the degree that Dreams from My Father enhanced that narrative, then all of what was in it was “true” — even the literary agent’s bio attesting that the exotic author was born in faraway Kenya.
For the fabulist Obama, the past is a vague mess with shifting narratives that can serve noble contemporary causes...
Unlike the present, which is an all-too-real morass of mythographist Obama's making.

2 comments:

Al the Fish said...

Using the Obama "composite" methodology, I am a great pilot, who has travelled around the world. Translated back to reality as I threw paper planes around in school and huffed airplane glue.

scaramouche said...

And I am Marie of Roumania.