https://x.com/BarackObama/status/1870153606822797692
I always look forward to sharing my annual list of favorite books, movies, and music. Today I’ll start by sharing some of the books that have stuck with me long after I finished reading them.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 20, 2024
Check them out this holiday season, preferably at an independent bookstore or library! pic.twitter.com/NNcAnaFzdU
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This is a more complicated question than you would first think. If you're curious about Obama then you know the truth is Obama is secretly a pretentious nerd pretending to be a cool guy.
Here is a letter he wrote to his girlfriend in college:
I haven't read 'The Waste Land' for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this.
Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he's less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there's a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it's due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot's irreconcilable ambivalence; don't you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
But wait, oops. Obama actually didn't really write that letter and Maraniss essentially laundered these heavily editorialized fabrications for the Obama campaign so people would think:
"The Obama campaign has been lying to me. The real Obama is a pretentious nerd."
No. The real Obama was screaming at his 2008 campaign staff "not on my court" whenever they wouldn't let him win at Basketball. (Cousin worked on his campaign)
Why did they feel they had to go so hard fabricating this Obam-nerd psyslop everywhere in 2012? I genuinely don't know. Maybe they thought the Ayers association would be used as an attack during his re-election campaign and wanted people to have already "filled-in-the-blank" for that period of his life.
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no way
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What? Maraniss claims he got to read the official archive of Obama's letters for his 2012 book, and then Emory University admits that there never was an archive because they received the originals directly from his girlfriend Alex McNear in 2014, and then McNear admits that actually the "originals" she let Maraniss read were not the originals. She rewrote the real letters and redacted statements like 'I make love to men daily, but in the imagination' from them and let Maraniss read those, and also that was the official archive Maraniss consulted for his book. By the way, nobody is allowed to see or photograph the originals from Emory's archive. Historians are publishing the 'I make love to men daily' line based on post-cards of what other people claim they read about in the original. You can take out photocopies of the "originals" from Emory's library but the photocopies don't have those redacted paragraphs, even though Emory's Rose Manuscript Archives don't contest David Garrow's account of the 1982 letters at all. If you're an official manuscript archive and someone is lying about you archiving forged manuscripts, you will challenge that because it's a deathblow to your credibility and persistence as an organization.
Anyway none of it really matters because Obama is pretty open about having made up the entire period of his life when he was a community organizer. When he was promoting this biography he told Maraniss "yeah I made up the girlfriends in my last biography, but in this biography I'm revealing the truth about my shadowgirlfriend Alex McNear even if I have to retroactively say I lied about everything else to make that fit" https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/05/obama-new-york-girlfriend-was-composite-122272
Look, those letters and that book are designed to cover precisely the period of time he was supposed to have met Bill Ayers and started studying community organizing with him, before he went to Columbia. The Obama campaign has always been supremely insecure about this period of his life and they keep getting caught in these weird lies by introducing more "proof' that it doesn't feel like they need to make.
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