Obama abuses power and gives hint of end of civilisation

I like Barack Obama. I like the idea of a writer being President of America. It’s a welcome change from having a President of that media-soaked country as an ex-alcoholic semi-literate fratboy. Most books written by heads-of-state are memoirs with selective memories (Bertie Ahern wrote a self-serving account of his years in office and ignored the part about the country being hollowed out by his buddies) so it’s a relief to see someone at the helm of a country who is articulate.

Articulateness is a sure sign of intelligence. Lincoln and Jefferson were great writers and great presidents. Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Collected Works of Gandhi is over 50,000 pages long (he also worked as a newspaper editor). Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X wrote prolifically. Trotsky was in his study where he spent thousands of hours writing when he was stabbed through the head with an ice axe. Literature is essentially an honest venture. Literature and words used to have power. Nowadays I don’t think that’s true. An honest politician is, like a good summer in Ireland, a thing of nostalgia.

Barack Obama reads books. Can you imagine? Books. Ones without pictures. Or graphs. He reads literature. He reads modern literature. What’s more, he seems to enjoy it. He doesn’t publish obviously made-up booklists as a PR ‘I’m not a fucking idiot’ stunt like in this Karl ‘Bullshit’ Rove op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal. He reads because he has the love of reading that strikes with rare but severe resonance. We don’t have this luxury in our politicians. I bet Brian Cowen thinks John Banville is a cartoon character.

According to the newspapers Obama went into a bookshop while on holidays (in Martha’s Vineyard) and bought a bunch of books for himself and his daughters. Jonathan Franzen, who for some unknown reason was on the cover of TIME magazine last week with the words ‘Great American Novelist’, has a new book coming out. Americans are wet for it. It’s his fourth novel, his first in the nine years since people decided he was any good. Apparently it’s more of the same, a Midwest family surviving the modern culture-vacuum that is America. So Obama walks into the bookshop, buys the book a WEEK before its release date. Bastard. How dare he? How dishonest. How impatient. Who does he think he is? When I went down to my local bookshop and they just kept repeating ‘It’s not out yet’ to my incessant questions. So the next time the lunatic fringe on the right in America accuse Obama of not acting democratically, they can point to this action as proof he has abused his position to his own advantage. I hope the book is shit.

On another note. Obama bought a copy of The Hunger Games for his kids. Children’s literature is encouraged to give kids a moral compass, an idea of how lucky their middle-class arses are and how shit it was to be around in the imagination of Charles Dickens. According to Wikipedia The Hunger Games introduces sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic world where a powerful government called the Capitol has risen up after several devastating disasters. In the book, the Hunger Games are an annual televised event where the Capitol chooses one boy and one girl from each district to a fight. The purpose of the Hunger Games is to show how no one, including children, is above the Capitol’s power. The last person standing wins the game. The book is set in Panem, the nation that “rose out of the ashes” of what was previously North America. Panem consists of a wealthy Capitol and twelve poorer districts.

Maybe Obama thinks Sarah Palin will win the next Presidential election and is preparing his kids for the inevitable collapse of society thereafter.  Maybe that’s why he was so rushed to read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Maybe there’s not much time left.