Dreams From My Father, Revisited

A few random comments on different subjects tonight.

A  group called FAIR had a great idea, which I saw quoted by Riley Waggaman over at Wonkette, and I’m now giving to you 3rd hand, about how the Occupy Wall St. protesters could get a bit

One of these is the personification of ultimate evil. The other is Lord Voldemort

more media attention.  They should just rename themselves “The Tea Party” and CNN would have a news van down there lickety split.  After all, they are protesting Wall St. corruption, so there really is no conflict.

While speaking to the recent conservative conference in his state, Florida Governor Rick Scott (who really does bear an unfortunate, but perhaps not coincidental) resemblance to Lord Voldemort, made a joke about Obama reading from a teleprompter.  Of course, he read the joke from a teleprompter.

Here’s my paranoid conspiracy theory of the day, which doesn’t really involve a conspiracy at all, but it seems that the term “conspiracy theory” is applied lately to any hypothesis  (how is Bigfoot a conspiracy?), so here it is: when I read Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” back in 2008, one line stuck in my head.  It was while he was living in Indonesia and his stepfather, Lolo Soetero, had just got out of prison, where it’s entirely probable that he was tortured, and Obama wrote about how quiet and subdued he seemed.  Then he (Soetero) offered the future president a bit of life advice.  “It’s always better to be strong than weak.”  That line has been tumbling around the largely empty spaces inside my brain ever since and I just recently realized why it bothered me.

If I were writing my autobiography, I would likely change a few words here and there, especially with close family members.  It’s not lying, it’s just trying to present things in a good light.  Admirable stuff, in a way.  And “it’s better to be strong than weak” doesn’t sound exactly like something someone would say if they’d been in prison and horribly tortured, because being strong in those circumstances doesn’t  do you a damned bit of good.  It just means you get tortured longer.

So, I suspect that maybe he said something like “it’s better to be on the strong side than the weak side” or, even worse, “it’s better to be with the winners than the losers.”

I could be totally full of shit with this, I’m basing it on nothing more than “that’s what I would have said,” but it bears thinking about.  Even though Barry has been acting a bit more like a fighter in the last couple of weeks, there are still plenty of indications that he’s taking the side of Wall St. and the megarich against the American people.  He proposed a great jobs program, but proposals don’t cost anything.  Bradley Manning is still in jail.  Marijuana is still illegal.  Guantanamo still exists.  Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and George Bush have not been tried with war crimes.

I hope I’m wrong.  I like Obama.  Nonetheless, it’s stuck in my mind.