The Book Review http://afripol.org/
In the age of Obama anything is possible even fictitious books on the president without basis are becoming New York best sellers and hot cakes. This is truly an asinine season, that’s why the garbage written by Dinesh D’Souza , "The roots of Obama’s rage" (Washington: Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2010) can be displayed in responsible bookstores and passed as an acceptable book on President Obama.
When Vice-president Joe Biden called the article version of the book a work of "science fiction" and "garbage" he was being conservative on his conclusion, the book is a sophomoric novel that lacks intellectual depth, a concoction without clarity.
D’Souza has been known for a while as an intelligent writer of conservative persuasion but when one takes a hard look on his writings, they primarily lack profound clarity except for their polemical qualities, and were irrelevant from scholastic and academic perspective. D’Souza thrives on controversies that do mask his poor writings and intellectual inept. His books without controversial issues will expose his low quality writings and his eagerness to be accepted as a functional writer.
This is not to say that he is not a clever marketer and self promoter. D’Souza is Lady Gaga with a pen except that Lady Gaga has talent and really enjoy entertaining people. This book that was titled "The roots of Obama’s rage" was misnamed because the book failed to deliver the angry and explosive Obama. The book should be correctly named "The Rage against President Obama" for it was about fabrications and heap of lies on President Obama delivered with anger, envy and jealousness and biting bitterness. It was more of cheap rudimentary analysis and pop psychology that was layered with tales than realities. In every inch of the book, the writer will throw in half-truth and next line with a conjured hypothesis; his illustration was so blurring that it became cumbersome to read.
The thesis of the book is that President Barack Obama imbibes his late father anti-colonial views and is applying it to his presidency especially in his policies. That is incredible; President Obama met his Kenyan father for first time when he was ten years and was raised by his Kansas mother and grandparents. Therefore Obama values were suppose to come from those immediate families he has been interacting with but the book insisted otherwise that Obama’s African grandmother was the middle person that transmitted to the son the desires of the father. That is bizarre that a woman that eked a living in an African village will lecture Obama the struggles, tribulations and intricacies of colonial era struggle for liberation and freedom.
The writer was beginning to look down on American readers and probably believes that in the era of Talk-radio jive talk and soap opera television that he can sucker us to buy his pop-psychology book. This time around he was wrong and the readers have rejected his fallacy that he packaged as a non-fiction.
The book has some major inconsistencies and errors. D’Souza continued to compare himself to Obama as people from third world. What a silly analogy and comparison. Obama is never from third world, he is an American of African descent while D’Souza is from India. D’Souza made us to understand in the book that just like President Obama that he also was educated in Ivy League school but he failed to tell us which school. He knew quite well that all Ivy Leagues are not created same.
Obama is a trained lawyer and D’Souza is a graduate of English language, unlike many Indians who study mostly medicine he chickened out and took the easy way out. The only thing he does have in common with the president which he rightly mentioned in the book is that anything is possible in America. America made it possible to have a Black president while it also made it possible to have a pseudo-intellectual and full time propagandist like D’Souza.
The author shows his lacking in the fundamentals of economics and capitalism for his arguments were devoid of economic understanding or bearings. Take for instance he failed to justify his Obama’s anti-colonial standing when he argued about global trade particularly on the issue of free trade and trade restrictions. He wrote that Obama was restricting free trade while the rest of other Presidents before him were for free trade. Let’s follow his line of thought for a minute. Why would a President who wishes to weaken America continues to restrict India and China from dumping cheap products in America, while simultaneously siphoning American jobs and lowering America’s standard of living with their relaxed environmental regulations, poor wages and abundant cheap labor?
Another thing he should understand is that is there is hardly any nation that wholly practice free trade completely. No economy would like to wholly expose its vulnerable industries to foreign competitors that will result to herculean loss of jobs and increase in unemployment. President Reagan knew this when he imposed quota on Japanese cars coming to America. That was a smart move because he wanted to safe American automobile industry from the then voracious Japanese automobile industry.
D’Souza was writing about something above his head, President Obama number one job is to protect American interest and so far he is up to the task. In D’Souza’s book the research was the weakest link, he claimed that the author of the famous Things fall Apart is from Ghana. Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian and his reference in the book within the context as an anti-colonialist is a false premise. Although Things fall apart might have derived its conception and motivations from the presence of the British colonials but it was not necessarily anti-colonial book from D’Souza perspective. Chinua’s Things fall apart is a descriptive novel based on the meeting and confrontations of cultures and its ramifications on both parties.
D’Souza is an intellectual imposter, academic hustler and cheap opportunist but this time around with his new project on President Obama he failed woefully on his back and became the joker of country. The book "The root of Obama’s rage" may be more about the author D’Souza than about the President Obama. Obviously, D’Souza admired the president and dreams about achieving such a mountainous accomplishment but his ego and political convictions could not allow him to be a fan of the president.
To justify his conservative credentials he willingly throws mud on Obama with a zeal and zest that becomes difficult to understand. Color of the skin is quite an issue with D’Souza, he made the comment that President Obama is lighter than him but he reminded us that he is not Black inspite of his darker complexion. But Economist magazine wrote, "The last name "D’Souza" is a common family name in West Africa, where it indicates that the family is descended from the slave-trading coastal mixed-race elite. In India, however, it indicates that the family likely belongs to the Roman Catholic Brahmins, Hindu Brahmins who were converted by missionaries beginning in the 17th century. Interestingly, the Christian community in Goa　retained a Hindu-style caste system, with Catholic Brahmins continuing to discriminate against Catholic dalit or "untouchables", whom they refer to as mahara or chamaar.
Elite Catholic Brahmin households in Goa sent their children to Jesuit schools (like the one Mr D’Souza attended) and often spoke Portuguese at home, referring to the main local native language, Konkani, as the lingua des criados　("language of servants")." (Economist, 2010) While ranting about Obama’s anti-colonial mindset, in one of the chapters in the book he wrote about the so-called divide between North and South hemispheres. Africans and Caribbean were classified as southern hemisphere by D’Souza while omitting India and southern Asia. If anybody has any rage that person is Dinesh D’Souza and the book he wrote about President Obama was actually about D’Souza. Only a simpleton can part away from logic without recognizing it.
Emeka Chiakwelu is the principal Policy Strategist at Afripol. Africa Political and Economic Strategic Center (Afripol) is foremost a public policy center whose fundamental objective is to broaden the parameters of public policy debates in Africa. To advocate, promote and encourage free enterprise, democracy, sustainable green environment, human rights, conflict resolutions, transparency and probity in Africa.
http://afripol.org/ strategist@afripol.org