BY PAULY FONGEMIE FOR CATHOLIC TRADITION Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance BARACK OBAMA Three Rivers Press, 1995 and 2004 [Updated Paperback] UPDATED APRIL 12, 2008 I had read Ann Coulter's column [Obama's Dimestore 'Mein Kampf'] in which Obama's work was cited from, Joseph Sobran's column in Catholic Family News regarding Obama, in which he concluded that the Senator was a fake, and Thomas Sowell's column [The Audacity of Obama-Wright Rhetoric]---Dr. Sowell writes for The Washington Times. I duly noted with approval that Mr. Sowell used the lowercase throughout when referring to a race [as Obama has done in this, his first book]. Uppercase, lowercase, it matters not, what is important is grammatical consistency when the term is not enclosed with quotation marks. I decided to purchase the updated paperback version and read it for myself. If the media has a vested interest in shielding their prized political project from in-depth scrutiny and the candidate seems unwilling to engage those media inclined to inquire, this member of the voting public who wants to hear things directly from the President-anointed, and not his handlers, knew this was one of those imperatives she could not dismiss. Barack Obama has no use for Miss Coulter---he took time in order to dismiss her. Why not just not bother to mention her at all, if that is the case? Is Ann Coulter onto something? For now I will set aside the aspects of racial screed and nascent "manifesto" that are evident therein. I was first struck by the beauty of the words themselves in brief snatches of this memoir, apart from any content, how they are arranged, pleasing the eye and the ear. Barack Obama can be as gifted a writer as he is a speaker. But most of the book is a polyglot of street jive, missing dates and jumbled events. But then, this is a memoir, not a traditional autobiography. I undertook the assignment I gave myself with some trepidation because I knew the press accounts of Obama's unfortunate habit of embellishing biographical facts, something he said he wanted to avoid; he realized the errors of his ways only when they were pointed out to him. I began the book asking what can I reasonably believe? And how will I know which fact is a fact and which is something else? He often alludes to the rewriting of events by others, a little hypocrisy gilding the spurts of self-consciousness?   The work begins as many do, with a quotation---Obama's is from the first book of Chronicles [1 Paralipomenon in the Douay-Rheims], chapter 29, verse 15: "And we are all sojourners before thee, and strangers, as were all our fathers." I do not know the intention of Barack Obama in using this passage from the Old Testament, and I read into its inclusion, neither malice nor misunderstanding, merely reverence for the word of God. It is a beautiful verse and more so when the passage [14] that comes just before is read: The setting is King David addressing his son Solomon before the assembly, on the house of God and what is owed to the praise and glory of God, the power of God over Heaven and earth. In the verse preceding the one cited, we hear exclaimed: "Who am I, and what is my people that we should be able to promise Thee all these things? all things are Thine: and we have given Thee what we received of Thy hand." An entire book of a lifetime could be written through contemplation of these two verses alone, for they are powerful and awesome to dwell on. Barack Obama has woven a richly textured tapestry of his account of coming to find his identity---meaning as a Black man, not a mixed race man, growing up in an America on the precipice of social change and the turmoil such a drama engenders, the child of a Caucasian mother [he describes her as White although she is part Cherokee], who traveled frequently and for long periods of time and an African father. He was named after his Kenyan father and called Barry as a kid. His middle name is that of his grandfather Hussein, a member of a large family of the Luo tribe. Obama's parents divorced when he was young, his father going back to Kenya where he would remarry, his mother, a teacher, to Indonesia where she would remarry also. Barack went with his mother. Some of the passages are sheer poetry, songs even, or dirges, which he "sings" for his parents, both of whom died far too young and under circumstances that are shattering to a child of any age. From time to time I employ in my essays the phrase, richly textured tapestry, and not for the lack of a better phrase, but because it seems so fitting. In Obama's case it is doubly so. Look below at the two swatches of fabric I scanned in, the one and same piece of cloth. On the left is the face or frontal view, the one that is designed for display; on the right is the obverse side. When the tapestry was woven the reverse side took on a different set of hues and texture, so that this side appears to come from a different cloth. Both swatches were taken from the same portion of fabric, using the same resolution, and measurements, and when reduced, sharpened at precisely the same setting. Yet what a contrast, two layers, one cloth. And contrast is the description for Dreams from My Father. The contrasts that concern us here are those that come from the confusion the reader is left to flounder in; sometimes the disorder is contained in the small and subtle, other times unmistakable displays of contempt. For instance, although the love he bore for his mother is undeniable, he finds himself feeling embarrassed for her when he has a different response to a movie than she did; by the time they went to the film together, on old one she had seen years before, Barack had already been damaged by hate rhetoric on the part of those he interacted and went to school with and worked with. The kind that is at the very least disdainful of Caucasians in general. He was judging his mother's reaction through his political lens. I was embarrassed he would mention such a thing. What he gives with an easy, eloquent command of the language, he just as easily takes back by killing with what seems to be a backhanded kindness. Just as the fabric below has two patterns or faces, so has Barack Obama. Obama's tale is a complex, intricate composition, with layer upon layer. One had to read and reread again and sometimes entire sections a third time. He dashed between episodes and back again, like he was trying to go through it in his mind but his thoughts raced away from him. My purpose is to try to understand what it is that Barack Obama thinks as a man who is seeking to become the US President, not evaluate his writing skill. Having said this, one still has to read the prose to parse the man with the pen. How someone comes to think a thing or a set of ideas and to hold it as a conviction strong enough to act on, even impose it on others, is influenced by his early experiences. So it is necessary to see the man as he sees himself, an axiom of life, and to understand what it is that he loves and holds dear. We either see the man himself or the immature boy in the body of a man. That being stipulated, it is also a part of human nature and our God-given moral freedom by which to choose the good in order to be the best of men, that how we see ourselves or self-identify as the phrase goes, is also largely dependent on the overtures we make in response to the seemingly unimportant events and the milestones in our lives and the people they concern: how we acknowledge boundaries. A man has an intellect and a heart and soul, he is not a purely instinctual being like the lower creatures, although the experts like to say it is mostly in our genes. [They have a supposed gene for almost everything today.] We are not responsible for our birth and the social milieu we did not shape, but we are responsible for what we do about the challenges that God has ordained for us or permitted to be. The redeeming crucible of the cross or the anticross of the world, a crucible without hope. This ought to be axiomatic, too, but Americans are given to dwell on rights and less on responsibilities in the 21st century. It is part of the indoctrinary spirit of all things PC. The left is about grievances, redefined "rights" and demands of government paid for by our neighbor beyond that which is often morally permissible given the parameters of human nature and the natural law; the right is about the proximate relation of rights, right reason and law, with a strong emphasis on personal responsibility; a slight oversimplification, but I think a good capsulation nevertheless. In other words, the left, to which Obama belongs, believes in the common evil, and they are champions to overcome it with other people's money while crushing their God-given freedoms; the right recognizes the principle of the common good and is reluctant to wield the heavy hand of power to effect it because they know from experience that the government that governs least governs best. Bureaucracy and its stagnant arbitrary, cruel contrariness and burdensome largess are symptoms of the ill-effects of the left's dominance in the switching points of power, unaccountable and insulated from the exposure of their machinations on behalf of petty "elites". If I may, a prosaic example of the difference between the viewpoints: It is June, a perfect day for swimming and it begins to rain, the clouds are overflowing buckets; the schoolboy on vacation sees the rain and is dejected because he cannot go to the beach; in addition his next door neighbor has asked his mother permission to have him do some work for him in his basement since her son won't be going to the seashore. The lad begins to resent the neighbor and feels he has gotten a "raw deal". His friends come over and join in the peccant chorus, goading him to express the injustice of it all. The farmer down the road looking out upon the rain is glad, for his crops are thirsty, almost withered. The rain is a blessing, a kindness from God to man because water is essential for life and the farmer's hard-won yield. The rain is not that of a violent storm, just a steady downpour to revive nature. The kind of rain one can dance under, too. The farmer gives thanks to God and sets off for the barn to do other chores. He would very much have liked the company of that boy, for he is a widower with no grandchildren of his own. It is all a matter where our heart lies, ourselves or our Creator and our neighbor, is it not? And our maturity and temperament or predisposition by which we judge circumstances. The boy has yet to know manhood while the man still remembers the child he was. Now let us begin: I was immediately struck by the title, Dreams from My Father. It is clear that Barack Obama knew his mother and grandmother better than he did his father, and that they strove to see that he became a man of learning and accomplishment, sometimes against his own predilections. Yet the book's title is for his father. Now Sen. Obama lost both his parents when they had much of their life ahead of them, and it can easily be understood why a boy would long for his father who had been so absent and look to his spirit. This is supremely laudable. It is that his dreams are from his father, who happens to be of African [Black] descent. Since he continually identifies with his "blackness" I begin to wonder about the title. It occurs to me that there is a possibility [in the context of the rest of the book] that because his father is not "white" as we decide such things, that his decision to have the title center on his father and not his self-sacrificing grandmother or mother, who gave him dreams, too, is as much a political declaration as it is a testimony of love. Perhaps he does not know himself. He tells us in the preface that he had "little time for reflection for the next ten years", so he really might not know at all. Yet, he admits in the same preface that when he reread his work "he winced" on more than one occasion. I think we all do that. He says forthrightly "And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives ..." He further explains that his mother's untimely death---and he loved his mother intensely---caught him in a sense unawares, although he knew she was dying of cancer, and that if he had had time to reconsider he would not have focused so much on his father and more on her. He pays tribute to her, "I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her." Thus I could reasonably conclude, having the context, that the title is identity politics, with the African aspect taking center stage deliberately. I could also reasonably decide that it is simple longing for his father; very understandable, too. As I indicated, his life is a complexity of dreams and myth, pathos and joy.  However, it is curious coming from a man who claims in the media that he is not about race and that he is not running as a "black man". If both his parents had been Black, it would be different. It is as if his gratitude for his other heritage is overpowered by his need to be Black, exclusively, not naturally what he is, part Caucasian [what he calls WASPS], part Cherokee Indian, part African. There is anger, some of it just, some fabricated by political opportunists who influenced him, and there is audacity, and arrogance. You catch a glimpse of the man who was photographed not saluting the flag. He was reading the book, Heart of Darkness, and one of his friends asked him why he was reading it. He answered, " ... 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.  ... so I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted." Not some Whites or Europeans or Americans. All. Their ideas are twisted, they have the demons. The implication is that America for Barack Obama is not Black as is Africa. But I get ahead of the narrative. He writes of his White heritage, and the love he was given in that quarter, yet when he is elected president of the Harvard Law Review, he cites his accomplishment as a Black man, not a bi-racial man if he had to bring race into it. The stress is on his "blackness". And this is in the beginning, in the introduction, the first paragraph even. He opened by admitting that he had originally intended to write a "very different book." Among the ideas he sorted through for clarity and meaning were the "limits of civil rights litigation" among others; yet in the same sentence he again comes back to his Black identity, what he calls Afrocentrism---not Americancentrism. The very first page of his brief introduction. On the next page he pours out his heart and soul: "When I actually sat down and began to write, though, I found my mind pulled toward rockier shores." He tells the reader, too, "What has changed, of course, dramatically, decisively, is the context in which the book might now be read." He could have no way of knowing when he wrote this line that the Rev. Wright jeremiad would be erupting and that the context he acknowledges may have changed, had really changed in unexpected ways. But then, when he announced his candidacy he asked the preacher to not be in attendance by media accounts. Mixed signals and contradictions---the warp of the book---when contrasted with his public facade. Of course the change for context was that which he placed within the orbit of political gains as the left values and works for them, not one of cult of personality itself. Ironically the Rev. Wright and he are the benefactors of the phenomenon. He had a quotation from Faulkner about the past never being dead ... The last twenty years spent in that church of racial cant can no longer be buried and laid to rest now, surely. If we have any sympathy for Barack Obama it is derived from the egregious attack and slander hurled at him by another preacher who called his mother a name I won't say here. One can disagree with a man's politics without casting aspersions on his mother. That preacher is more than fiery, he is into total racial politics. Obama is not "black" enough for him, not a "genuine" Black. Thus his apparent animus. Sometimes I got the idea that Barack did not consider himself sufficiently "black". The empathy does not long endure when the reader finds so many acts of verbal condensation directed at those who are not of Black lineage. I soon realized just why it was he could sit in that Baptist church for two decades and not be perturbed or get up and leave, for he himself had said and thought a number of like-minded bigotries. Interwoven throughout his book are references to Louis Farrakhan and similar rabble rousers, calmly, matter-of-factly, as if they were perfectly normal. Of Malcolm X he writes glowing words about the Black Separatist [which he fails to mention]: "His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me ...". There were the mandatory lauds for Communist sympathizers and his distaste for those who were anti-Communist only to hurl contempt and derision at President Reagan: "Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change." Sound familiar?---he said this as a community organizer in Chicago in 1983, one of the few dates provided. He went on: "Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. ..." I may not be the biggest fan of the late President, as he did not do much to reduce the nanny state, for instance, but "dirty deeds"? Reagan was at least an honorable man.  Before the first chapter I had already begun to grasp the shape of shadow as much as light, for Barack Obama seems fractured, if not tormented; the prism is a myriad of thoughts and feelings, turning the reader this way and that. Just when you think you begin to see the man in his full dimension, the light flickers, then fails and there is but a faint outline, as if he has drawn the curtain to veil the light. Then just as suddenly the window is thrown wide open. It is disconcerting, if also intriguing. "That was the world in which my grandparents had been raised, the dab-smack, land-locked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty." There are lots of phrases to match this one. Is there such a thing as "blinking" cruelty? How is conformity itself necessarily bad? Suspicion regarding what? A healthy dose of suspicion can sometimes save one's life. He never explains really, just characterizes---he owes so very much to his grandmother but she has a potential for cruelty, by implication. With one sweeping phrase he has self-righteoulsy condemned an entire sub-culture. I see how easy it was for him to throw her to the wolves by calling her a "typical white person" when the going got a bit tough in the media. Apparently he saved his loyalty for his heritage back in Kenya. After all, is not this conformity he condemns just a part of that which is not "black" for him? How so? you ask. When speaking of Black racist leaders he approves of their non-conformity. "Self-creation" is about revolution. He also had the irksome knack of referring to his grandmother by her nickname, "Toot". I don't know about you, but I always refer to my beloved grandmother as my grandmother or Meme [an affectionate French term for grandmother], not some pet name for her that adults had. I had a sense of over familiarity imposed for the reader to embrace, despite one's best instincts and decorum. Perhaps she wanted this nickname. But he gives too many details that do not engage the reader. His grandfather he calls Gramps. Writing in one passage of them both he says after informing us that they were "freethinkers"---"All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology, in this, too, they were American." Well, if they were freethinkers, how could they be suspicious and conforming? I mean, which is it? The reader is constantly having to choose between contradictions. "I would not have known at the time, for I was too young to realize that I was supposed to have a live-in father, just as I was too young to know that I needed a race." A race. Not needed to be who he is, the confluence of races or ethnicity. Barack the consummate politician had already been born, all that awaited was baptism by the exploitation of racial politics. In contrast to his need to be "black", period, he writes of his friend Joyce who is telling him [italics Obama's]: " 'I'm not black, ... I'm multiracial.' Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. 'Why should I have to choose between them?' she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry. 'It's not white people who are making me choose ... no, it's black people who always have to make everything racial. They're the ones making me choose. They're the ones who are telling me that I can't be who I am ...' "They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce ..." Barack Obama places the blame for her torment on Joyce and not where it really belongs. The mark of a fervid liberal. In that one sentence in response to Joyce we see the framework for Obama's racial manifesto still being formed within his heart. No wonder the myth makers and adulators and liars of the media do not want him approached too closely. We see more fleeting flashes of honesty such as: "Gramps had a number of black male friends ... and before I got old enough not to care about hurting his feelings ...". He loved his grandfather but did not care eventually about hurting his feelings. What manner of man, if he believes this and acts this way, would display his bad manners before the world? A few pages later he is honest when he admits that some Black people are cruel, too. News flash, Mr. Obama, cruelty lies within the soul of individuals not nameless masses of people whatever they might look like. The italics in the next quote were added by me. "Later when I was alone, I would try to untangle these difficult thoughts. It was obvious that certain whites could be exempted from the general category of our distrust ..." He added that the term, whites, was another word for bigot. He was wary of falling into thinking sloppily along those lines, for which he deserves credit, although there is so much sense of distrust in him in other passages that this is one of these incidences that convinces me I am not sure what to believe about what he believes. He and his friend Ray decided never to use the word "whites" in front of whites. Then he publishes this book which thousands and thousands of "whites", meaning bigots, except for the exceptions of course, have read. Light and shadow ... Who is Barack Obama?  I recognize that Barack and others like him of his generation came of age not only when they were most vulnerable, as we all do, but when the Black power movement [the hate Whitey aspect, not civil rights and justice] was feeling its own pressures; the push was from above and below at one and the same time. Those who were doing the pushing were able to take advantage of the Baracks they knew; Judy, mentioned above, is perhaps one of the most stunning examples of this. Barack did not resist like Judy did, in rejecting a part of herself. He seems to have consciously done so, after a number of inner struggles of years. I know it was a struggle for him, he did not even have to say it point blank. He had a passage, too long to cite in a book review, where he discusses his affectation of the adolescent Black male swagger, a stereotype to him. He knew it was exactly what it was. Similar aspects he said would make his wife Michelle cringe. I presume his adoption of what we used to call jive talk, words without proper last syllables, and "Yo" and that sort of thing, with profanity thrown in, the kind I can't and would never publish here, was part of that identity phase. It is hard to imagine this suave, almost elegant man who delivers such stirring speeches with flawless diction talking in this manner, but he did. Unless, of course, this is one of those memories of youth that are not accurate like his father's ties to John Kennedy, et al. Many passages of his memoir are difficult to follow because he includes so many details in which to get lost, in a thicket of deeply personal accounts and a maze of conflicting emotions, so that one labors to distill the meaning, for him and for what he intended to convey. One is never certain if they are one and the same. The curtain veil and open window, mystique and or misspeak? Perhaps he simply does not know himself and is trying to be honest. Whatever it may be, non-Black folks can only cut him slack so long and so much. Countless of Black men or multi-racial men have experienced what Barack did, and from more desperate origins and they did not grow up with an adolescent chip on their shoulder, like our rained out boy in the analogy above, no, they made something of their lives for themselves, not to prove anything or to show "Whitey" or to damn him either. Sometimes the boy-man [a Barack phrase] never grows up, he is in a permanent swagger despite appearances to the contrary. All I know for certain is that Obama has internalized many, if not all, of the poisonous ideas from the older Black leaders he admired. Rev. Wright? He is just one after so many demagogues. I don't care about the unity rhetoric he affects on the stump, he is a bold and committed partisan of the left as those who served with him in the Illinois state house acknowledge and the kind of left that is as prejudiced as those it claims others are. He has become the very thing he hates. Too many passages of his book scream, better Black than White. That is divisive rhetoric, not unifying speech. I believe it might be the secret speech in his heart. He even explained that he purposefully fought with a White woman he loved and dated; they had always gotten along, but he would not marry her because she was White. She loved him and he treated her like a coward so as to have an excuse to stop seeing her, rather than tell her honestly. He pushed her away he said, on purpose. Because she was White, not because he was too young to marry and or some other reasonable motive. This is as bad as dating someone of a different skin color because they are. Does this mean he married Michelle not only because he loved her, I know he does, but because she has "black" skin? My skin was beginning to crawl by this time although I had already read some truly poignant passages, such as this one: "I looked down now at the abandoned New York street. Did Marcus know where he belonged? Did any of us? Where were the fathers, the uncles and grandfathers, who could help explain this gash in our hearts? Where were the healers who might help us rescue meaning from defeat? They were gone, vanished, swallowed up by time. Only their cloudy images remained, and their once-a-year letters full of dime store advice...." There was, perhaps is, a deep gash in the heart of Barack Obama who did not have much time to know his father. I know that would leave a whole in my heart. It is on the pages like this that one wants to like Barack Obama. God commands us to love one another, not like each other. He even tells us that there is more virtue in loving those we dislike than in those we already like. And I believe in this and try to practice this commandment. But the purely human part of me, the people-person in me, wants to like him, too, regardless of his politics which I loathe. I cried when I read this small melancholia---the absence of so many close male relatives, until I remembered that it was his mother who divorced his father and his mother's father did his best to help raise him, but Barack had spent too much time musing on his hayseed [my term, for lack of one some people use] characteristics that embarrassed him, rather than emulating him. [In one sentence he said he purposefully could not emulate him.] You know, he might have been a bit rough around the edges as my father would have said, but Barack's grandfather remained married to his wife and faithful to her and his children and grandchildren. He struggled to earn a living. In my book that counts for an awful lot, an awful lot. It always has and always will. My grandfather worked in the woods and the lumber mills of Maine. He, too was a bit rough around the edges. He never raised his voice, he accepted everyone as his friend, he never complained of hardship. His silence was joyous gold. I thought he was one of the most exquisite, the most eloquent of men. I will now present a few more passages, with commentary only on some of them, before I conclude this review. The words mostly speak for themselves ... Barack's mother: "Then Barack's father---your grandfather Hussein---wrote Gramps this long nasty letter saying that he didn't approve of the marriage. He didn't want Obama blood sullied by a white woman he said." Barack Obama: "In Indonesia I had spent two years in a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies. ... In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and thirty brown children muttering words." I think I prefer the mackerel-snapper jokes, don't you? Barack speaking of his friend Rafiq and citing him, too: "Over time I arrived at a grudging admiration for his tenacity and bravado, and, within his own terms, a certain sincerity ... he had found religion he said, under the stewardship of a local Muslim leader unaffiliated with ... the Nation of Islam. ...'growing up in Altgeld, I'd soaked up all the poison the white man feeds us. ... The Irish---they took over city hall ... The Jews, the same thing ... you telling me they care more about some black kid ... than they do 'bout they relatives in Israel? [Expletive] It's about blood, Barack, looking after your own. Period. Black people the only ones stupid enough to worry about their enemies.' " Again to his credit, Obama recognizes that this blanket distrust and hatred is wrong, although he admits he understands the power and unifying appeal of the message, and that much of the success of the Nation of Islam was due to this. Then the light dims once more, as it always seems to do, and he also says the message appeals to him, a lawyer with continuing doubts. On some level it still does, ergo twenty years with Rev. Wright and his hate-mongering. And to expose his own daughters to it. "In a sense, then Rafiq was right when he insisted that all blacks were nationalists. The anger was there, bottled up and often turned inward. ... Desperate times called for desperate measures ... If nationalism could create a strong ... insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence." He went on to write that the ineffectiveness of black nationalism gave him more pause than its sentiments. Ergo Jeremiah Wright. I was still waiting for Christ and His teachings, how Obama came to Christ. It would come. Meanwhile we find revealing passages like this one because he considered it significant enough to include: Barack writing of a play he took his friend Ruby to: "They danced until they all seemed one spirit. At the end of the play, that spirit began to sing a single, simple verse: I found god in myself and I loved her/I loved her fiercely He was touched by this verse. He did not want to break the silence as if it were almost sacred. In reference to Rev. Wright and others: "And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance ... having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won." About his grandparents, perhaps the most poignant of all the passages: "I didn't understand that they were talking about the vertical dimension! About their relationship to God! I didn't understand that they were thanking Him in advance for all that they dared to hope for in me! Oh I thank you, Jesus, for not letting go of me when I let go of you! Oh, yes, Jesus, I thank you ..." From the section titled Kenya, while stopping in Europe before boarding for Africa to visit his half sister: "And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I'd made a mistake. It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I'd imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else's romance ... stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I'd become so accustomed and which I taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation ... Would this trip to Kenya finally fill that emptiness?" In Kenya: "What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct ... or ... store of shared memories ... I'd never arrived at a definite answer ... here in Africa the same maddening patterns still held sway; that no one here could tell me what my blood ties demanded ..." While on safari: "Mauro spoke, staring into the fire. 'Me, I leave the Church. Too many rules. Don't you think Francis, that sometimes Christianity not so good? For Africa, the missionary changes everything, yes? He brings ... how do you say?' 'Colonialism,' I offered." Light and shadow. By way of context, Francis did not agree with the tone and direction of the conversation. He said that things were not the failure of God but men's faults. Still in Kenya, mourning for his dead father: "Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion ... a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn't new, that wasn't black or white or Christian or Muslim, but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village ... a faith in other people.  ... I realized who I was, what I cared about ... all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father's pain." I close with two special excerpts that show him at his best: Six years later, back in Chicago, regarding the nature of the law, its disappointments and narrow rules, one of his most powerful pieces of prose showing keen insight, the light returning full power: "But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience. ... that despite everything that's happened, those words put to paper over two hundred years ago must mean something after all. Black and white, they make their claim on this community we call America. They choose our better history." On the occasion of his marriage to Michelle, with his friend Roy, now called Abongo, we discover joy: "We dribbled our drinks onto the checkered tile floor. And for that moment, at least, I felt like the luckiest man alive." I want to think, that as liberal as he is, that these last glimpses of the man Barack Obama are the authentic ones. But I really do not know who or what to believe. I am almost certain he is a political fake, but I so want to think and hope that he is not a fake otherwise. This doesn't take audacity, just a simple heart and soul utterly dependent on the grace of Almighty God. All men are equal before the law, no race or ethnic group superior; in fact, we are all one race through Adam and Eve. It is my dream, a dream I inherited from both my father and mother, that one day all men will believe it, too. Of all the Christian virtues, the one most accorded praise and time for meditation upon is that of humility. St. John Eudes writes: "Let us consider that we are nothing in body or in soul, since both have been created out of nothingness. Worldly men may glory in the status of their ancestors. Let us Christians remember that we are descended from nothing from which God draws us forth. What should humble us still more is that we do not deserve that He should draw us from it anymore than an infinite number of other creatures who will remain in nothingness forever. God in His pure goodness withdrew us from the void. "Another truth which should confound our pride is that if God did not preserve us every moment, if He were to leave us to ourselves, we would fall back into the nothingness whence we came, so true is it that of ourselves and by ourselves we are nothing. By counting every moment that has elapsed since you came into the world, you may know how many times you would have been annihilated if God had not performed as great a miracle to preserve you, as He did to create you ..." [Eudes, St. John, Meditations on Various Subjects, 1947, p. 104.] Let us ask the Blessed Virgin Mary for the grace of holy humility; let us consider ourselves in all our frailty and pray for Barack Obama and his family, that they are given the true gift of faith, the Catholic faith. April 8, my Mother's birthday, in the Year of Our Lord, 2008 UPDATE The news last evening was abuzz about Obama's contempt, his bigotry concerning small town folks, such as their clinging to religion and their being against immigration and those who are different from them. Does this mean that the senator does not hold his religion dear enough to "cling" to it? Since all kinds of people share small towns, what could he possibly mean by those who are unlike them? As for immigration, he failed to distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants---a world of meaning, polars apart. Actually none of these insults ought to surprise us. After all, he says much the same in his memoir written over ten years ago in so many tiresome ways. I said above that I was almost certain he was a political fake, but that I hoped he was not a fake otherwise. I was wrong and right. He is a fake in every matter save one, in which he is the real thing: he is an absolute, genuine bigot, a committed one! The more things change the more they stay the same ... E-MAIL www.catholictradition.org/reviews.htm