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"The art with which 'Dreams From My Father' is constructed to serve his deepest personal needs shows how ludicrous is the charge of Rush Limbaugh and others that he did not write it."

That laughably incomprehensible sentence is written by Garry Wills in his NYT book review of David Remnick's new book about Barack Obama (inanely titled "The Bridge").

I mean, really,the book serves Obama's interests ? excuse me: deepest personal needs ? so therefore he must have written it himself. Absurd!

Remnick rightly sees that memoir as a bildungsroman in the specifically black form of a ?slave narrative,? a story of the rise from dependency to mature self-possession. 

Oh, for the love of God. How does a privileged modern American get to style himself as a slave?

In order to place himself in that tradition, Obama darkens the early part of the story and lightens the concluding sections. He trims the facts to fit the genre, just as he trimmed the events in his Selma speech to fit the black sermon format. 

Trims the facts, eh? Some would call that lying. Or just bullshit.

Obama was not literally a slave in his youth...

Now there's a concession!

... but he was in thrall to false images of his father, fostered by his mother?s protective loyalty to her husband. 

You see the similarity? He was "in thrall" ? etymologically, enslaved ? to... to what? To nothing. That sentence just says that Obama's mother presented him with a positive image of his absent father. That's nothing like slavery. It's insensitive to slaves to make that analogy. Hell, it's insensitive to common sense!

Since Obama comes to a later recognition of his father?s flaws, the story is crafted to show him shedding false idealism to become a pragmatic realist. 

Which has nothing to do with slave narratives.

The narrative protects him from claims that he is an ideologue or peddler of false hopes.

Yeah? How?

Full post as published by Althouse on April 10, 2010 (boomark / email).