It is usually a joyful occasion to find a missing link and it should have been a doubly joyful occasion to find two missing links at the same time but such was not the case on this occasion. What happened this time was not that two early primate fossils were found but that they found each other and fell into the embrace of one another. These were not the remains of real monkeys, in which case they would have been valuable, but were the fossilized ideologies of a writer and an editor-in-chief who found each other and discovered a most eloquent method by which to give credence to the old saying: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Here is the story. On September 9, 2010 Forbes Magazine printed an article written by Dinesh D'Souza under the title: “How Obama Thinks” and the subtitle: “The President isn't exactly a socialist. So what's driving his hostility to private enterprise? Look to his roots.“ This tells you right away that both D'Souza and Forbes adhere to the notion that socialism is inherently hostile to business, an idea not worth the poop of a monkey – fossilized or not. Yet, building on this, the author sets out to show that President Obama is worse for America than a socialist president would have been, and you deduce that the publisher of the magazine embraces the theory because it aligns itself with what the magazine has become, a rag you avoid stepping on.
The writer begins the article this way: “Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president ... big government is back. Obama ... has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy.” As a reader you expect to see the author expand on these ideas because you expect him to show respect for your intelligence. But no, this is not what he does until he reaches the end of the article where he returns to those same ideas but barely touches on them. What he does in the meantime is tell you this: “The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.” That is, he tells you to go read enough issues of the Standard to get a feel of what that publication stands for at the end of which you will understand what it has summarized. And this prompts you to ask yourself if D'Souza means to disrespect your intelligence or is it that he does not know what he is talking about, and he hopes that someone else will do a better job making the point for him?
He then continues in that same vein as he seeks to acquire energy both from Obama's critics and his supporters. To this end, he reaches out to the Wall Street Journal from where he tries to absorb one big gulp of energy. Without discussing in detail any of the points he makes, he hopes to expand on his theory that Obama is a bad President by simply saying this: “The President's actions are so bizarre that he mystifies his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from … the Wall Street Journal...” Well, I'll get to that headline in a moment but first let me tell you something important. I am a retired teacher and I used to run my own school. I started it because I realized there were kids in this world who had a tough life and needed a special attention which I knew I could provide. But I made it clear to the parents of each kid that I had my limits; if their kid pushed past that limit or proved to be hopeless, I shall call them and tell them to take their kid out of my school. And I tell you now, my friend, I would have called the parents of Dinesh D'Souza. This kid is a hopeless case.
Now to the Wall Street Journal headline that mystified him. This is the one: “Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling.” The story is that an American bank specializing in bankrolling imports and exports offered to loan money to the Brazilian oil company Petrobas which is drilling off the Brazilian coast among the many other places where the company operates. The bank is a huge American bank and the loan is but a drop in the basket of its operations. Also, the Brazilian company is a huge oil company that operates everywhere on the globe, and the discovery off the Brazilian coast, although promising, is so far but a drop in the operations of Petrobas. And what these two companies did is exactly the sort of business that good, wholesome capitalists do all the time. But what they did is also the sort of business that increasingly mystifies the sham advocates of distorted capitalism such as Forbes Magazine and sometimes the Wall Street Journal whose preoccupation is increasingly becoming less about how to create wealth and more about how to accumulate the wealth that someone else creates. This is their problem not Obama's.
Past that, the author lists what he calls oddities about President Obama. They are positions taken by the Administration which are economic in nature, and so you would think that the writer will attempt to demonstrate how this can be worse for America than socialism. You expect to read economic criticism of the President's position but no, you find nothing of the sort. Instead, the author goes into foreign policy which gives you hope that maybe there is something here that ties with America's economy but you are disappointed again because this is not what you find here either. In fact, you find nothing that has anything to do with economics and worse, you find the blatant misrepresentation of positions taken by the President on the other issues.
With all this embarrassment under his belt but believing that he has the tiger by the tail, he gets into the business of explaining the President's behavior. Without saying that he, Dinesh D'Souza, did not come to America from India until he was 17 years of age, he slams President Obama because: “Here is a man who spent his formative years -- the first 17 years of his life -- off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.” The author then asks what may be Obama's dream. And he right away asserts that it is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. And he does this in a tone that leaves you with the impression that he, Dinesh D'Souza, is an All American, blue-blooded, several generation WASP – maybe a WASP with a funny name but a WASP nevertheless.
Now that he has conferred on himself the right to speak with authority about the dream of the founding fathers of America, he examines the dream of Barack Obama only to discover that it is the dream of his father, the dream of Obama Sr., a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He says that Barack had his father as inspirational hero because the old man represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anti-colonialism. Only now does Dinesh tell us that he was born in Mumbai, India and not the United States. And he admits to this only because he wants to show that he has the credentials to speak about anti-colonialism which he says was the rallying cry of Third World politics.
The writer explains what anti-colonialism is; he argues that Barack Obama inherited the philosophy from his father and he sets out to show how the President uses that philosophy to govern America thus fulfill his own dream which happens to be that of his father as well. Here is one example the author gives that relates to Obama's style of governance: “Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more.”
To respond to this, we must be reminded, first of all, that in the decade of the Nineteen Sixties, when Dinesh was still a toddler living in India with his grandfather, we were told in our schools and our universities here in North American that we only represented 2% of the population of the Earth yet consumed more than 20% of its resources; exactly what Obama is saying now. But we were told more than that. We were told this is why we were swamped by garbage and were bathing in acid rain. We were told by our WASP teachers, professors and politicians that the solution to our problems was to consume less and conserve more. Well, we have solved the problems of garbage and of acid rain without cutting down on consumption, and it remains to be seen if we can do so again. But to go from here and say that Obama is anti-colonialist is to imagine things that have more to do with D'Souza's grandfather than with Obama's father. As for the Brazilian oil, Dinesh must know that unlike natural gas which is still a regional form of energy but is getting less so with the proliferation of pipelines and of liquification plants, oil is international and has been since the beginning. Consequently, it does not matter from where oil is extracted, if you have the money you get the oil, any amount of it from wherever it is extracted – off the Brazilian coast or off the Louisiana coast.
He then says that the refusal to accept the bailout paybacks offered by some banks is proof that Obama wants to “decolinize” these institutions. What he is talking about are the banks whose CEOs wanted to return the bailout money so as to give themselves the same size bonuses that nearly collapsed the financial system. No, said the Obama Administration, we will neither nationalize you -- which would be the socialist thing to do -- nor let you run roughshod over the public this soon after it bailed you out. Of course, Dinesh is entitled to continue believing this decision was worse than socialism but we are also entitled to laugh at him. As for his remarks about health insurance, this guy should know that the entire Western industrialized world, made of the former colonial powers and a few others, is using one form or another of the single payer system. The exception is the United States of America which will at least now leave the league of the Third World colonies, thanks to Barack Obama, and join the advanced nations having given itself a more civilized system at long last.
Whatever Obama the father says in his book, the President of the United States never suggested the levying of a tax at the 100% rate on the rich like the article insinuates. But if the President wants to allow a “temporary” tax cut to lapse, and if the author of the article says this is proof that the President wants to decolonize the American government, then what D'Souza is saying is that America was a colony during all the years that the tax cut was not in place. How do you talk to a guy like this? As for his remarks about the New York mosque and the Lockerbie affair, this is the ravings of a mad man and they may have a place in a publication as disgraceful as Forbes Magazine but they do not deserve a comment on this website.
Now a word about NASA. Let me tell you something I never tire talking about. Space was my first and my last frontier as I was growing up, and so it was with many kids my age the world over in the late Nineteen Fifties and early Sixties. The Soviets knew that and the Americans knew that. These two nations were fighting a fierce propaganda battle in the non-aligned countries which comprised among others, Egypt, India and Ghana. Yes, the two superpowers did some politicking to speak to the older folks but what I remember most were the glossy magazines that the two powers put out and we, the kids, picked up for free on the stands. These were basically science magazines extolling the accomplishments of their respective countries and we absorbed the ideas like ice cream on a hot day. And guess what I learned one day, I learned that the first Mercury capsule to carry a man into space and return him safely to Earth was coming to Cairo to be displayed at Tahrir Square in a huge tent so that the people can go and see America's accomplishment. And guess what, I did something I never did before or since; I spent the night near that tent to make sure I was going to see the capsule in the morning, and I did get to see it.
Decades later I was the owner of a private school and teaching a class where, one day, I and the students knew that something important was going to happen soon. We waited anxiously, barely ably to do some learning until it finally happened. We heard the sound of a plane fly low over our heads at which point I dismissed the class and we all went outside to watch a Boeing carry the space shuttle on its back. It went several times around Montreal to give everyone the chance to see the magnificent sight. And this is the kind of goodwill gesture that superpowers do to have the world share in their accomplishments, share the joy and celebrate the oneness of humanity. For someone like Dinesh to try and cloak an effort like the Obama Administration is conducting to use the science of space exploration to capture the imagination of young people in the Arab and Muslim Worlds says that he missed out on something in his youth. Neil Armstrong was right; landing on the moon was a giant leap for mankind, and no little ciphers like Dinesh or Forbes are going to second guess him this many decades later and get away with it.
The author of the infamous article then goes into a psychoanalytical rant to explain what he believes motivates Barack Obama. I shall let others respond to that but offer my own psychoanalysis of Dinesh D'Souza. This guy is of the same age as Obama; they were born the same year only a few weeks apart. They came to settle on the mainland of the American Continent at about the same time. Dinesh feels he is as qualified as Barack to be the leader of the free world and commander in chief of the most powerful army ever to exist. There is one problem though, he was not born in America which is a constitutional requirement, and Barack was. This is why he is not President of the United States and Barack is. He is jealous and he hates him.
One more thing. Unlike the people of the Middle East who feel comfortable in their brown skin, some people of Southeast Asian descent experience an identity crisis when they find themselves surrounded by Whites. They hate to be thought of as brown or worse as black because they are not classified as Negroid. In fact, they are not even classified as Mongoloid but are classified as Caucasian even though some of them can be as black as Africans. I saw individuals draw laughter from the crowd at a reception when they described themselves as a white man who happens to have a black skin. All indications are that Dinesh D'Souza is one of these individuals. In this sense, he regards himself as superior to Barack Obama who is only half White. And realizing that he will not be governing America by the power of his pen, he chose to play the role of a White Knight wearing the armor of Don Quixote who is out to rescue America from a man whose stated mission is to pepper the landscape with windmills. Some people call this borderline insanity.
Dinesh D'Souza has overplayed his hand already; it is time for him to write his memoirs and tell us what happened to him during the 17 years that he lived in India with his grandfather which he said -- while discussing Obama -- that they were formative years. There may be a clue in there as to why he wants to start an argument with Neil Armstrong. I am interested because I have not lost that spark yet and space is still my first and last frontier.