Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Newswire

Washington (UNS) -- A popular conservative website today released what it claims are passages edited out of the first draft submission of Barack Obama's best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father. Outraged Obama supporters contend the story is a fraud seeking to arouse racist sentiment.
"These are forgeries in the mold of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and they're blatantly racist, perpetuating sexual stereotypes about black men in an attempt to stoke racial anxieties toward a man who could become the nation's first black president." Senior advisor David Pouffe said today.

Among the material posted on the Dredge Report this morning was an explicit account of a sexual encounter between a young Obama and a fellow student at Columbia University:

As our heaving forms labored to produce the kinetic energy of two opposites interacting, two counterpoints alternately coming together and apart as if unsure of their relation to one another, simultaneously at war and in congress, the tempo increasing and our sexual pleasure quickening, she suddenly called out:
"Yes! Faster! Harder! More! More!"
It was then that it struck me. It would always be thus; this expectation of more, this taking for granted of subservience, arising in habit ingrained by generations of the casual indulgence of privileged status. I would forever be driven forward, compelled on, faster, harder... More, black man. More.

I looked at Demarcus, across the pale expanse of privileged skin separating us. Our eyes met in silent, weary understanding. Now it was as if the gentle rocking of our heads was no longer merely the result of our exertions, but mutual nodding in grim assent to the harrowing recognition of a reality too evident, too total, too painful and humiliating to speak aloud, in the silent communication of a profound pain that began in the holds of the slave ships. No matter how hard we worked to "fit in", no matter what we did or how well we did it, we would never find respite. Even here with two of us in harness, it simply would not do. For some the bar would always be set a little higher; from some a little more would be demanded. This compulsion would always be there, driving us on in the silent company of the many enslaved and oppressed to come before, this expectation that we were to spend ourselves in subjugation and service.

In my mind's eye I saw them, legions of nameless black men, bending over their work in the field, being driven beneath the lash. Here I was now bent over this work, driven, still, beneath this lash. Only now the actual whip was no longer required, the promise of violence so long established that it needed no overt threat. So deeply instilled was the system of privilege that it determined every interaction between the races. Now the whiplash came in the insensitive, blithely ignorant comment, in the nervous look, in the discretely tightened grip on the purse, in the drawing of the child closer, in the taxi cab speeding past and in the callous enthusiasm demanding more. Faster. Harder. More.

I would always be expected to "satisfy", to perform a task on someone else's behalf, to be an object of amusement, even here a mere sexual beast of burden...

Citing an "anonymous source still working for the book's publisher", the website alleges the passage from which the above excerpt was taken was cut before going to press due not to its subject matter but a need to trim the first-time author's manuscript by an additional ten thousand words. Senator Obama's campaign was unavailable for comment.

7 comments:

Steve Sailer said...

Bravo.

A couple of suggestions: Make the sentences even longer and more convoluted. The meaning is a little too clear.

And change Harvard to Columbia -- the book ends before Harvard.

Dennis Dale said...

Thank you. Done. As for dialing in the prose style, give me time, I only just cracked open "Dreams" last night.

Steve Sailer said...

Here's a sample from pp. 123-124, where as a young man in NYC, his mother comes to visit and asks to attend a revival screening of the 1950s Brazilian art film "Black Orphesus."

"The story line was simple: the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice set in the favelas of Rio during Carnival. In Technicolor splendor, set against scenic green hills, the black and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in colorful plumage. About halfway through the movie, I'd decided that I'd seen enough, and turned to my mother to see if she might be ready to go. But her face, lit by the blue golow of the screen, was set in a wistful gaze. At that moment, I felt as I were being given a window inter heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad's dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white, middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.

I turned away; embarrassed for her, irritated with the people around me. ... The emotions between the races could never by pure, even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvations, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart. ...

My mother laughed once more, and once more I saw her as the child she had been. Except this time I saw something else: In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up -- their parents' lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misundertandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances.

etcetera etcetera

ziel said...

I was watching Annie Hall this morning and while this thought isn't original I was really keyed in on how much the movie was a commentary of the Jew as outsider in a sea of hung-up, dysfunctional, essentially aimless Christians. For all his inadequacies, he (the homely Jew) is the one who must make sense of their lives, give meaning to their otherwise robotic existence.

Of course Woody frames it as comedy, and we find it hilarious. Does Barack see any humor in his white netherworld?

Dennis Dale said...

I had a similar thought about "Curb Your Enthusiasm", which is essentially about Larry David trying to negotiate the various protocols between him and the slightly foreign people he lives amongst (of course part of the joke is that David has difficulty seeing eye-to-eye with anyone). They should call that show "Larry Among the Goyim."

Dennis Dale said...

Also, Ziel, the thing that strikes me most about Obama from reading his memoir, is the profound lack of humor and any real insight. Check out the quote Steve provided above. Recognizing his mother's rapture is a fairly keen observation on his part. What does he do with it? Right down the bleak-hole with it. The guy is kind of a drip. The dysfunction is ours however, that we see this as insight, "transcendance", ad nauseum.
When in fact what the man represents is not a moving beyond race, but an attempt to anchor it in an early-seventies, Norman Lear vision of perpetual white collective guilt/black collective nobility and suffering.

Anonymous said...

Very funny. This really is your forte.

Obamas remarks on the Jena 6 incident are interesting. He calls the assault on Justin Barker a "fight".

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