The Filtnib’s Progress

One day left, and we’re on the cusp of great change. Fingers crossed. A while back I read ‘Dreams from My Father‘, the memoir published 13 years ago, when Barack Obama was just 33; post his social justice work, post-Harvard; the book he wrote while working as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago.

As such, it’s an incredible historical document. What’s really fascinating is the window it gives into Obama’s motivations, offering anyone who can afford the price of a paperback the chance to see beyond the weighty rhetoric of his speeches; to get into his head.

Of course if we’re talking about historical documents, this one is hardly an objective source, and the cynics would say, why trust it? Couldn’t he just be telling us what we want to hear? Isn’t an autobiographical memoir the perfect way to reconstruct oneself and manipulate your readers’ reactions?

Language is surely powerful. But the cliche is correct: actions speak louder than words, and Obama’s actions are on his side. Indeed, one of the strongest endorsements of Obama’s integrity has to be the actual timeline of his life thus far. Not to mention that the man would have had to be ridiculously machiavellian to have thought of writing a manipulative memoir over a decade before he even ran for Senate.

Dreams from my Father, above all else, witnesses to something truly inspiring in a politician: someone who isn’t interested in power for its own sake. Near the end of the book, having worked in the deprived Chicago housing projects of Roseland and Altgeld, Obama describes his decision to study at Harvard:

I had things to learn in law school, things that would help me bring about real change… I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire.”

Leave aside the lyricism of these sentences, their measured cadences; it is the actions that follow that best bespeak his integrity. Returning to Chicago, Obama worked as a lawyer and civil activist for a further three years before deciding to run for Senate. He revered the law but also recognized it’s limitations.

How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me – for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed.”

I love the barefaced idealism of these words. When Obama’s half-sister Auma visits him for the first time in Chicago, she asks him why he’s chosen a low-paid, undervalued job as an “organizer” (an American word for community advocate – a bit like a youth worker, except that it’s for all ages).

Are you doing this for them, Barack?” she asked, turning back to me. “This organizing business, I mean?”

I shrugged. “For them. For me.”

That same expression of puzzlement, and fear, returned to Auma’s face. “I don’t like politics much,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. People always end up disappointed.”

That Obama includes this line in the book tells us something: he’s faced cynicism and doubt for a long time, even in the people closest to him. He understands why good people hardly ever bother to go into politics anymore, which makes his own career choice all the more admirable.

On top of all this, the writing is crafted, elegant and often witty. A great writer has to have imagination; the compassionate vision to relate to anyone and everyone, to “climb into [their] skin and walk around in it“. It’s a quality that we should desire in our politicians, and yet it’s all too rare. In the course of telling his story, Obama demonstrates it constantly. Like when he describes trying to reason with four teenage boys who’ve pulled up in a car outside his flat:

One of them could be me. Standing there, I try to remember the days when I would have been sitting in a car like that, full of inarticulate resentments and desperate to prove my place in the world. The feelings of righteous anger as I shout at Gramps…

The blood rush of a high school brawl. The swagger that carries me into a classroom drunk or high, knowing that my teachers will smell beer or reefer on my breath…

That knotted, howling assertion of self… while these boys may be weaker or stronger than I was at their age, the only difference that matters is this:

The world in which I spent those difficult times was far more forgiving. These boys have no margin for error; if they carry guns, those guns will offer them no protection from that truth.”

Can you imagine a man with this level of compassion and intelligence, such understanding of human weakness and woe, in the White House? And did you get that bit, where he describes being “drunk or high” in class? The book isn’t a carefully censored, clean and tidy version of a life. It’s honest to the point where you know the writer didn’t intend to run for president when he wrote it – he just wanted to tell a truth.

Obama also talks about race with astonishing candour. It’s all very well to admire his Perfect Union speech (see below), but it’s almost more illuminating to read about the first time he visited Kenya:

“You could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway. You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate. Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal.”

I’m still not certain what the title “Dreams from my Father” means, even after having read the book. It’s not ‘Dreams of my Father’ though it easily could have been, since the narrative is haunted by the absence of Obama’s dad, who left his wife and two-year-old son and returned only once.

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned… The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image”

So is it that Obama’s dreams were inherited from his father? Or are they the dreams his father would have wanted him to have? At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter: what counts is the nature of the dream. Here’s an excerpt from his speech, A More Perfect Union:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand — that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.”

Of course we can’t predict how well Obama will actually perform in office, if he does win tomorrow. In today’s Financial Times, Clive Crook argues: “The plain fact is, Mr Obama cannot deliver what he has promised. The problems he will confront are too difficult.” He’s right, in that to idolize anyone, to put unconditional faith in any human being given power, would be absurd. But I would argue that if Obama brings to office even just a little of what this book promises, we have good reason to be hopeful.

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A few other key excerpts from A More Perfect Union:

23.23: “…to wish away the resentments of white americans, to label them as misguided… this too, widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding. This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy — particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.”

26.11: “The profound mistake of Rev. Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

“But what we know — what we have seen — is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope — the audacity to hope — for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”