Barack Obama

Dreams From My Father By Barack Obama

After reading "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" (see my previous book review) I was interested in seeing what Obama had to say about all that the author of the previous book had mentioned, particularly that author's claim that the USA conspires to keep poor countries poor and ruins natural resources for their own purposes.

Indeed, Obama talks about the great poverty in Indonesia, where as a child he lived for a few years. They were not wealthy, and he lived immersed in that environment. He also saw the poverty in Kenya, where his father was from and the family left behind was not well to do. He noted the wide gap between rich and poor there, too.

This gap, he says, exists whether you live in a third world country, or in the backstreets of Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer. Unlike the author of "Hit Man", Obama doesn’t talk about any great conspiracy to keep poor countries poor. But he does talk a lot about the similarity of poverty wherever you may find it in the world.

We do not question his statements, but do note that the United States has a good, strong middle class that bridges this gap, as do many other countries like New Zealand and other first world countries. That's why they are called first world. This is what is lacking in the third world.

At any rate, Obama speaks about poverty in general, but his approach to dealing with it is in finding out ways to resolve it rather than looking for someone to blame for it. Indeed, unless righteous anger is brought to the level of learning and working, it remains useless.

OBAMA'S FATHER

One of the most wonderful lessons Obama imparts is how he faces his personal life, the fact that he never really knew his father. Growing up Barack Obama, it would be easy to be bitter. His father left him while he was a child, and when he was older, his mother left him with his grandparents, (he made the choice), because she decided to go back to Indonesia with his half sister.

His grandparents were white, and he went to a white school where he was one of only 3 black students. There was discrimination, but even that young, he was interested in finding his identity as a black American.

It was perhaps the only way that he could hope to know why his father left him. He considered the intense racism at his parents' time, and tried to imagine how different life must have been in Kenya, which would explain why his mother had not followed him there. He did not blame either of them in his book, though as a child, you wonder if there was anger in his heart.

GRANDPARENTS

He had a more stable family life with his grandparents. They were far from ideal, but provided the one constant in his life, and when he ran for president, he stopped his campaign temporarily to attend his grandmother's future.

Obama's grandfather never did well in his career and the grandparents had moved from state to state, until they settled in Hawaii and grandma Toots took charge, got a steady job, did well, and paid the bills.

OBAMA'S FATHER

Obama’s father lived for his ideals, his mother often told him. In Kenya, he was a very great and idealistic man. He held an important government job, but one day, simply for being too outspoken, he was let go and blacklisted. In such a totaliarian goverment, Obama's father could not even be hired as a street sweeper. People were terrified of defying the presidency. And so he lived in disquiet, poverty and shame, which lasted for the entire length of the presidency of the man who had blacklisted him. And after that, he was in power again.

NO BLAME

Of late I heard that Obama's half brother will speak of his father's darker side. In this way, the President may finally learn what, all his childhood, he had missed. And yet one admires how he doesn't like to blame so much as try to understand; and how he desires to give others the benefit of the doubt. He was empowered to do that by listening to people's stories far enough so that he can unravel answers to painful truths, and find his epiphany. If for this alone, this book is a good read for anyone who experiences alienation and family separation in one’s life.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZER

Obama has learned what it can be like to deal with communities that feel entitled, rather than grateful, because they are poor. It was not a romantic journey, dealing with people who had lost their sense of hope and feeling of empowerment. People with ingrained attitudes of dependency. People who had the mindset that if someone gave them something it was a right, not a privilege, because the giver had more.

WET EARS

If you read only this book, you will really say Obama lacks experience to be president, because it only ends with his work as a community organizer and his trip to Africa. , and does not yet touch on his studies in Harvard and his role in the senate. But the book had different intentions.

WHAT I LEARNED

For me, I realized how hard it must be to be a second class citizen in your own country. No wonder so many blacks had to look to Africa to find their ancestry. No wonder black churches have an energy unique only to them. They are naturally ebullient but the church is also a place where they could deal with discrimination and at the same time understand their experience in terms of the word of God. No wonder Jeremiah Wright would be Obama's pastor of choice for so many years. He could do all of the above better than many others.

Long ago I read a book by Jacobo Timmerman, a newsman who was imprisoned and tortured. He said the one thing most commonly brought up in his tortures was the fact that he was a Jew. As if being Jewish , being himself, being born, was the most wrong thing about him. This was the commonality he experienced as he was being tortured, and he spent a lot of time writing a bout that.

Having a homeland, I now know, can be a very nice thing. And feeling at home in one's homeland is even better--is how it should be.

This is a very good book if only because it clearly and very fully explains how racism has evolved and become more complex through the years. I grew up in the States as a child and although Asian,experienced my share of discrimination. The blacks had it much worse. They could not even cross the street to ring the bell of a house of a white man at that time.

Since then, there are more complexities involved in racism, disagreements among mixed blacks and pure blacks, with lighter blacks considered prettier and who seem to have it easier. And yet I remember in my time if you were white, but even had 1% black in you--even if it didn't show--you were black.

Obama writes about these things too, and asserts himself for who he is--a part black, part white man who lived partly in Indonesia, and 100% American. Many mixed races will benefit because he insisted on making this assertion.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
By John Perkins

The communists and terrorists and new agers would have loved this book. It explains how large businesses, the American government, the World Bank et al collaborate to keep smaller countries poor and in debt by taking on loans they could not possibly expect to repay maybe 30 years down the line.

In the case of the writer, electricity. He would make proposals to government leaders with inflated expectations down the line of growth and profitability. The catch – they would build it and costs would be paid by bank loans from the World Bank and so when the leader takes it on the electricity also only caters to rich people, making the poor even more poor and then there’s this debt to pay that keeps them from using the money to build programs for the poor and so in essence America owns them and the global empire is expanded and the company that builds the electric plant makes a lot of money to boot.

The author does this stuff in Indeonesia, Ecuador, Panorama, etc. sometimes he gets a shot of conscience and tries to do stuff a bit tweaked like with Torrijos in panama, where the electricity actually was designed to benefit the poor. Sometimes he tweaks stuff to meet different situations like in Saudi when they had all this money generated by raising the price of oil many times over. The whole point was making money and getting the country to the point where it is owned. Saudi was owned because according to the author, the deal was that America would build all the infrastructure it needs, but the money would be placed in the American banks and both countries had to decide what projects the money would be spent on.

Well, from the beginning of time there have been owners and properties. Or kings and people. Or bosses and workers. So if not America, then who? In an idealistically equal world where each country could find its true destiny, one or maybe 5 would try to own the rest anyway. That’s my quirky zen.

I enjoyed this book though cause the information is truly compelling and written well, and it explains a lot of global events that we had been seeing in the past from a more in-depth and more informed view. I also loved learning about countries in South America, about rain forests, about indigenous cultures in these countries. I was truly intrigued about what happened in Saudi in the House of Saud and how America made much out of a less than perfect situation. And the story of Iraq and Saddam, let me not even begin.

This is a good read. Whether you like the writer or not, perhaps the fact that there is feeling on the part of the reader, showed the author wrote it well. He becomes a new ager in the end, which one other blogger ruminated, now he has a new group to exploit. The future is best anticipated by being informed about current history. So much to know, so many viewpoints to consider.

Anyone who is interested in entering the world of diplomacy should read this. It would be very helpful…..Also anyone interested in history or who would like to find reasons to grind one’s incisors against America or, or, …….

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaardner

It is a good idea to read "Sophie's World" by Jostein Gaarder after one had just finished Pope Joan. This is because it gives a wider picture of the transition to Christianity under the time of Constantine. In between those who prayed to gods like Thor and Odin and all the others, there were philosophers, from Socrates to Aristotle to Kierkegaard to Marx to Darwin, et. all of whom questioned what is real, what is life, it's purpose, etc. And so the European world did not just transition from one set of spiritual beliefs to another, but in between and amongst them were intellectuals, ie philosophers who tried to find answers outside of the arena of faith to explain mysteries that were then incomprehensibles.

I do recall in college wanting to major in philosophy, believing so much in one's ability to think one's way through anything. People often told me it was a useless course, that the only thing you could do with it is teach. And while I loved using my brain to try to bring together the enigmas of the world, I wasn't sure if the life of the Academician would suit me in the long term.

Besides, getting into the initial courses of these people, one simply studied what each of them believed. That was it. The advantage of Sophie's World is that it brings together the connections and the role that Philosophy played in an age where books were not plentiful and mass media not available. Entertainment and the search for answers were found in cafe conversations and that is how people learned, because in the earlier times, there were not even schools.

Philosophy was prominent then, forming new connections of knowledge through the years even as new scientific discoveries were made. Discerning superstition from fact, dissecting a thought to tiny parts to sometimes the point of exasperation (on the part of this reader) in search for that kernal of knowledge that may form a component in the building up of a complete picture not dissimilar to putting together the myriad tiny parts that compose a child's robot or dynosaur.

Warning; You must be sincerely interested in this stuff to enjoy the book. Because it will cover the whole story of philiosopy from its beginnings to the present time, and not in a necessarily entertaining way so much as in a way that may replicate what such a conversation was like in an old cafe in Greece hundreds of years back when people were not bombarded with choices from book stores, the net, print media, television, gimiks, and the like. Just sheer conversation.

There are the rewards. One will be amazed at the accuracies of philosophers musings, not yet backed by science, biology, astronomy, research, etc. how they were very much on track using what today would resemble a "caveman's intellectual tools" referring not here to intellectual brilliance but an absence of sufficient scientific and technological discoveries at that time to back up their musings.

In the end the book attempts to pull a little surprise, if you will, a virtual adventure to the things philosophers often pondered on, where you find yourself being the voyager, the topic of dissertation, someone apart from and alienated, and in your own way being the mystery and posing the mysteries to the philosophrs themselves.

Pope Joan

Was there ever a woman pope?

A question related to that is, could a woman successfully disguise herself and live as a man and get away with it?

If you read this book by Donna Woolfolk Cross, you will see how it can be possible. But then a part of you wonders, can one really get away with it? It is, after all, fiction.

And yet the issue of a woman pope has certain pieces of evidence stated at the end of this compellingly written book that indicate that yes, there may have been a woman pope.

I tried googling “women who disguised themselves as men” and found that it has actually not been an uncommon thing historically. During the American civil war many women disguised themselves as men so they could fight. Conversely, there are stories of men who disguised themselves as women so they wouldn’t have to go to war!

Through the years there are documents of women who disguised themselves as sailors, or taking on other male identities, usually to get some freedom, to escape the restrictions that were placed on women. Sometimes, to go to war alongside the man they loved. Sometimes, in the quest for love. Sometimes for economic reasons, because they would not be able to find employment otherwise.

So yes, women have many times in history disguised themselves as men and for good reason, and gotten away with it. And yes, there may have been a Pope Joan who did so in her quest for learning, another gift forbidden to women at that time.

More compelling than the question itself is the history the book covers, the transition from paganism to Christianity under Constantine, how people had to secretly play to Thor and other gods while pretending to be Christian.

And the extensive writings about herbal medicine and the role it played in healing, and how it could lend stature to someone such as Joan to the point of eventually elevating her to become Pope.

These things interested me most – the extensive portions on alternative medicine, the history, the transition to Catholicism, the life in a monastery, the outer trimmings of ceremony and dress as compared to the secret goings on in mind and secret acts behind the pulpit.