Apropos of yesterday’s discussion of the inimical effects of immigration, Dinesh D’Souza shows that Obama’s driving motivation is neither socialism nor traditional Democratic progressivism, but rather African anti-colonialism:
Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father’s influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His “granny” Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather’s other wives) told Newsweek, “I look at him and I see all the same things–he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son.”
In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir “the record of a personal, interior journey–a boy’s search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.” And again, “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.” Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, “My father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!”
The climax of Obama’s narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father’s grave. It is riveting: “When my tears were finally spent,” he writes, “I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America–the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago–all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that “I sat at my father’s grave and spoke to him through Africa’s red soil.” In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father’s spirit. Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.’s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.’s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son’s objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright….
Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.
The Obama presidency, too, is strongly indicative of where America stands in Glubb’s theory of imperial lifecycles. In much the same way that the later Roman emperors were not Romans in the sense that Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, Gaius Marius, or Gaius Octavius Thurinus were, Mr. Soetoro-Soebarkah is not an American in the same sense that past presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, and Bill Clinton were. None of Barack Hussein Obama’s predecessors identified with foreign cultures or ambitions, much less were motivated by them and none of them were steeped in expressly anti-American ideologies from their childhood.