Posted on 02/03/2014 7:55:19 AM PST by Academiadotorg
A trio of academics at the Modern Language Associations (MLA) annual convention took obligatory swipes at conservative critics of the president in a panel on his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father. Oddly enough, though, they confirmed the essential facts behind much of the naysayers criticisms of that volume.
If you had googled Frank Marshall Davis ten years ago, you would have found next to nothing, John T. Lowney said of the presidents controversial mentor. If you Googled him now, you would find everything that is evil about Frank Marshall Davis.
Hes one of the few writers whos been recovered through his FBI files. Lowney teaches at St. Johns University.
Davis had a commitment to socialism, Lowney told the audience at the MLAs Chicago confab. He moved to Hawaii to escape the anti-communist harassment he was experiencing in Chicago, Lowney said, adding that he wrote for the Associated Negro Press and Chicago Defender and joined popular fronts [for the Communist Party] which aligned themselves with the Civil Rights movement.
Contra Barack Obamas depiction of the writer and poet as an octogenarian has-been, Davis was actually in his sixties when he met the future president and experiencing something of a career resurgence. In 1973, he gave a reading tour of his poetry, his first trip back to the Mainland since he arrived in Hawaii [shortly after World War II], Lowney claimed.
Davis certainly did reinvent himself in the Black Power movement of the 1960s, Lowney said.
Im not concerned with the factual accuracy of Obamas account, Stephanie Li of the University of Rochester said. He admits to creating composites.
Rather, she was struck by Obamas starkly dysfunctional family: A father known primarily through others, a mothers family known primarily for its rootlessness.
Moreover, she avers that the stories about the father stretch credibility, and notes Obamas own claimed preference for the imaginary over the real manifests itself in his account of his one meeting with his father. Obama preferred the myth over the man, the fiction over the truth.
I decided I liked his more distant image, an image I could alter on a whim, Obama himself wrote.
It is this part of Obamas autobiography that has fueled the right, David Borman, a graduate student at the University of Miami, said. The right-winger Borman specifically attacked was Dinesh DSouza, the noted author. DSouza claims that President Obama is motivated by anti-colonialism. Borman calls this anti-colonialism by osmosis.
In the actual text [of Dreams from My Father], the Kenya trip [which Obama took} shows none of this.
As it happens, this analysis is not that far removed from a reaction to the documentary that Accuracy in Medias Cliff Kincaid put forth in 2012, The new conservative film, Obamas America: 2016, offers a lot of good information but muddies the waters as Americans, during this critical election year, look outside the major media for information about their President.
Instead of educating people about the communist influence over Barack Obama, an unprecedented and shocking development for an American president, filmmaker Dinesh DSouza claims that anti-colonialism, a philosophy exploited by communists, is behind his beliefs and policies.
When STEM folks want to have a good time looking down upon what has to be the least academically qualified group of idiots in the multiverse, they pick the MLA.
There’s a fine example out there...which I’ll leave for those interested to find. It was perped by a physicist who decided to write a bunch of liberal-stupid awfulness for their publication. The awfulness was accepted (of course) to the great entertainment of the science community. QED - the MLA folks are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Heck, they aren’t even knives.
“...
Moreover, she avers that the stories about the father stretch credibility,
and notes Obamas own claimed preference for the imaginary over the real
manifests itself in his account of his one meeting with his father.
Obama preferred the myth over the man, the fiction over the truth.
I decided I liked his more distant image, an image I could alter on a whim,
Obama himself wrote.
...”
-
This reveals a lot about his personality and unwillingness/inability
to deal with reality and to make excuses for things.
Exactly, which is why I was surprised that someone at the MLA would highlight it.
Not the sharpest spoons in the drawer?
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