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Mark Steyn: Eternally shifting sands of Obama's biography
Published: May 18, 2012
By MARK STEYN
It used to be a lot simpler. As E.C. Bentley deftly summarized it in
1905:
"Geography is about maps. But Biography is about chaps."
But that was then, and now Biography is also about maps. For example, have
you ever thought it would be way cooler to have been born in colonial Kenya?
Whoa, that sounds like crazy Birther talk; don't go there! But Breitbart News
did, and it turns out that the earliest recorded example of Birtherism is from
the president's own literary agent, way back in 1991, in the official bio of her
exciting new author:
"Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law
Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."
So the lunatic theory that Barack Obama doesn't meet the minimum eligibility
requirements to be president of the United States was first advanced by Barack
Obama's official representative. Where did she get that wacky idea from? "This
was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me," says Obama's literary agent,
Miriam Goderich, a "fact" that went so un-"checked" that it stayed up on her
agency's website in the official biography of her by-then-famous client up until
2007:
"He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance
minister."
And then in April 2007, someone belatedly decided to "check" the 16-year-old
"fact" and revised the biography, a few weeks into the now non-Kenyan's campaign
for the presidency. Fancy that!
When it comes to conspiracies, I'm an Occam's Razor man. The more obvious
explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of
Obama's biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii,
he's spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya.
After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has
the working title "Journeys In Black And White," being born in Hawaii doesn't
really help. It's entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black
grievance – American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of
people, Hawaii is a luxury vacation destination and nothing else.
Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly
decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against
the white man's rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary
agents.
And where's the harm in it? Everybody does it – at least in the circles in
which Obama hangs. At Harvard Law School, where young Barack was "the first
African-American president of The Harvard Law Review," there's no end of famous
firsts: As The Fordham Law Review reported, "Harvard Law School hired its first
woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995." There is no evidence that Mrs.
Warren, now the Democrats' Senate candidate, is anything other than 100 percent
white. She walks like a white, quacks like a white, looks whiter than white.
She's the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out. But
she "self-identified" as Cherokee, so that makes her a "woman of color." Why,
back in 1984 she submitted some of her favorite dishes to the "Pow Wow Chow"
cookbook, a "compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes
families."
The recipes from "Elizabeth Warren – Cherokee" include a crab dish with
tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren's fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were
renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It's in the
state song: "Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin' down the plain." But
then the white man came, and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the
Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren's traditional Five
Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.
A delegation of college students visited the White House last week, and Vice
President Biden told them: "You're an incredible generation. And that's not
hyperbole, either. Your generation and the 9/11 generation before you are the
most incredible group of Americans we have ever, ever, ever produced."
Ever ever ever ever! Even in a world where everyone's incredible, some things
ought to be truly incredible. Yet Harvard Law School touted Elizabeth "Dances
with Crabs" Warren as their "first woman of color" – and nobody laughed.
Because, if you laugh, chances are you'll be tied up in sensitivity-training
hell for the next six weeks. Because in an ever-more incredible America being an
all-white "woman of color" is entirely credible.
Entering these murky waters, swimming through it like a crab in Mrs. Warren's
tomato mayo, Barack Obama refined his own identity with a finesse that Harvard
Law's first cigar-store Indian lacked. In 1984, when "Elizabeth Warren –
Cherokee" was cooking up a storm, the young Obama was still trying to figure out
his name: He'd been "Barry" up till then. According to his recently discovered
New York girlfriend, back when she dated him he was "BAR-ack," emphasis on the
first syllable, as in barracks, which is how his dad was known back in Kenya.
Later in the Eighties, he decided "BAR-ack" was too British, and modified it to
"Ba-RACK". Some years ago, on Fox News, Bob Beckel criticized me for
mispronouncing Barack Obama's name. My mistake.
All I did was say it the way they've always said it back in Kenya. But Obama
himself didn't finally decide what his name was or how to say it until he was
pushing 30. In the shifting sands of identity, he picked his crabs
carefully.
"I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then," says Nick
Carraway in "The Great Gatsby." "His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful
farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at
all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his
Platonic conception of himself... . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby
that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception
he was faithful to the end."
In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake – an elite
schooling – Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure –
the impoverished roots – merely add to Obama's luster. Gatsby claimed to have
gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a
million bucks' worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law,
and still nobody knew him ("Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and
found no one who remembered him"). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His
"shiftless and unsuccessful" relatives – the deportation-dodging aunt on public
housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in
Nairobi – are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the
central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don't seem to know him
either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows.
Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and
remote: let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is, in his
way, the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who
you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on
biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a
thing or two about "the unreality of reality."
©MARK STEYN
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