“Because the book teaches me things…”

Sorry for no Sunday post. We spent the weekend near Bristol, visiting a friend. Recently divorced, she’s re-full of all the joys of new challenges, moving on, and (dare it be said) “change”, etc.

Well, we’ll see how long that lasts.  Definitely she is pleased to be rid of her estranged husband.  He was not a friend of mine, nor was my wife close to him; as the divorce has demonstrated, he was mostly an acquaintance due to the wives’ friendship, which began when they had worked together.  So while she as his ex must still see him on occasion, we expect to see no more of him — especially because, his ex also told us, he has become involved with a 40-something Ukrainian woman (no, not that one), and is flying back and forth to Odessa with a degree of regularity.

Yes, seriously.  In any event, realizing none of us had seen it, we decided to catch “Quantum of Solace” Saturday evening.  As a “movie review” aside, this blog has to say that while it was entertaining, between the parade of explosions, knifings, shootings, oil poisonings, and all the various other means of human dispatch, not only was it seemingly anti-just about everything (not just anti-American, which yours truly has seen laid at its feet), but for all the hype over who they were to be, the “Bond girls” actually got very little screen time.  Even the two Bond girls in yours truly’s company concurred: they thought it the least “Bond babe” Bond they had ever seen.

Just prior to that cinematic experience, while wandering around downtown, we had ducked into Borders for a couple of books the friend wanted, and to grab some coffees.  Nothing dramatic.  However, once inside, your blogger noticed that in happy celebration of the coming inaugural festivities on Tuesday, the store has erected several displays of choice works (most leaning, as this writer recalls, rather leftwards) under banners noting, “Once upon a time in America, a man named Barack was made president . . .”

Huh, and we all thought he had won an election, not been elevated by the Politburo to lead the Revolution?  Anyhow, the Wife and her friend did their choosings well away from that which the likes of yours truly would buy; but one of the Wife’s happened to be 2/3rds short of a “3 for the price of 2.”  She suggested perhaps my trying to fill in the remaining.

Yours truly promptly found one that suited, but couldn’t find another.  Mulling the top sellers, reminded what Tuesday is, long already sensing what we are told is the overall global mood (the Che Guevara collection didn’t make the “Once upon a time” list probably only because Ernesto wasn’t a “United Statesian“) and not wanting to be left behind, for the 3rd this blogger impulsively decided to buy — yes, again, seriously — “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” penned by our incoming president.

The Wife thought yours truly must be coming down with something, but no, yours truly assured her that wasn’t so.  Neither was it a case of buying it in order simply to want to place under an arm casually, cover exposed, while strolling up Queen’s Road, subliminally messaging passersby, ‘Excuse me, “new American” in your presence.  Surely you like us now?  See.  See.  You see what I’m reading?’  For it went into a (presumably recycleable) plastic bag.

Yours truly is willing candidly to admit that, having gotten through somewhat more than 100 pages thus far (owing to having decided momentarily to put aside Andrew Roberts’ weighty white guys tome), it is worthwhile reading and believes those less than enamored of the soon to be president really should forget preconceptions and take the time to read it.  True, like any autobiography, there is vanity jumping out at you from every page: we are supposed to care about the wide-ranging cast from Mom to Ray and Lolo?  But he writes disarmingly, using a chatty style nearly anyone might try to about family and the confusions inherent in so much of growing up and, above all, of the seemingly innate desire to “fit in.”

But it is much more, and not just merely because it appears to be the first pre-presidential memoir in which we are treated to how a then future president recalls thinking, as a child, of some careerists he encountered at a U.S. embassy being “caricatures of the ugly American,” as well as serving in all likelihood as the first to employ “authentic” even if not precisely wholly uplifting expressions such as “bad-assed,” “sh-t” and “motherf-cker” quite so freely.  Depending on your racio-culturally imposed interpretations of such, mind you.  Remember, we must “free” our minds, too.

If for no other reason, it is worth taking in just to try to better appreciate what our incoming president publicly has been willing to share with us — long before knowing he would become president — about what he thinks about himself and the wider world, and what he thought and thinks and, it has to be said, imagines, that world thought of him.  Case in point: on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” on page 108 he writes of thoughts he had early in his university career:

“…because the book teaches me things . . . About white people, I mean.  See, the book’s not really about Africa.  Or black people.  It’s about the man who wrote it.  The European.  The American.  A particular way of looking at the world.  If you can keep your distance, it’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid…”

Indeed, and never was a description more inadvertently apt, and applicable, also, to himself.  His rhetorical devices of conveniently placing the harshest critiques into the mouths of others (while then usually putting the more “conciliatory” response into his own voice), and sharing long verbatim quotations from what were even then decades-old casual conversations (to say they are often “reconstructed” but maintain the gist, as he admits, doesn’t excuse the excessiveness: to write in that style borders on docu-drama), are a bit too much.  And, yes, his approaching his own life as essentially a post-colonial anti-essentialist project is often wearying.

Still, if you can keep your distance, one cannot help but suspect that whatever later gloss he tries to throw over his own upbringing, through what he included and what he chose not to, there is no escaping he was an exceedingly confused young man.  (Aided in such by it seems his often “lack of upbringing,” given that, for instance, his mother needed to do field graduate research in Indonesia.)  Such may make moving literature, and might have perhaps also marked him out as a possible professor of African diaspora and cultural studies, or even an Independent columnist.  However, as you, the reader — likely yet another non-introspective, dull-witted product of (white) “consumer culture” — turn each riveting page, you can’t help but ask is it the raw material that will produce a great, or even a decent, U.S. president?

While undoubtedly the presidential monument is already in the pre-development stage, of course we don’t know yet, which, in itself, is more than worth the price of admission.  Starting on Tuesday, we will begin to discover the only “truth” about him that matters to most of us: Barack Obama as the presidential officeholder.  Whatever one thinks of him, for years to come it seems we are certain to be living more history than usual.