06/04/2012
The revelations of Obama’s teenage drug use in David Maraniss’s bio seem to have surprised everyone, proving once again that Steve Sailer is the almost only man in North America to have actually read Obama’s bestselling Dreams From My Father.
In 2008, in what can be called a near-vetting experience, The New York Times did read it — and told their readers Obama was lying, he didn’t really use that much drugs. See Remember When the NY Times Suggested Obama Exaggerated About His Drug Use? on Slate, where Jeremy Stahl says "It’s funny to think that this was one of the major stories vetting Obama’s drug use during the 2008 campaign, and it actually ended up underplaying the extent to which drugs were a part of his life in order to depict him as a fabulist."
However, the memoir is more important for what it says about Obama’s attitude than his actual drug use. He’s presumably given up illegal drugs, but his attitudes are still there.
Here’s future President Obama,meditating on drug use in Dreams From My Father:
"I poured myself a drink and let my eyes skip across the room: bowls of pretzel crumbs, overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles like a skyline against the wall. Great party. That’s what everybody had said: Count on Barry and Hasan to rock the house. Everybody except Regina. Regina hadn’t enjoyed herself. What was it that she’d said before she left? You always think it’s about you. And then that stuff about her grandmother. Like I was somehow responsible for the fate of the entire black race. As if it was me who had kept her grandma on her knees all her life. To hell with Regina. To hell with her high-horse, holier-than-thou, you-let-me-down look in her eyes. She didn’t know me. She didn’t understand where I was coming from.
I fell back on the couch and lit a cigarette, watching the match burn down until it tickled my fingertips, then feeling the prick on the skin as I pinched the flame dead. What’s the trick? the man asks. The trick is not caring that it hurts. I tried to remember where I’d heard the line, but it was lost to me now, like a forgotten face.[VDARE.com note: It’s in Lawrence of Arabia.] No matter. Billie knew the same trick; it was in that torn-up, trembling voice of hers. And I had learned it, too; that’s what my last two years in high school had been about, after Ray went off to junior college somewhere and I had set the books aside; after I had stopped writing to my father and he’d stopped writing back. I had grown tired of trying to untangle a mess that wasn’t of my making.
I had learned not to care.
I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though — Micky, my potential initiator, had been just a little too eager for me to go through with that. Said he could do it blindfolded, but he was shaking like a faulty engine when he said it. Maybe he was just cold; we were standing in a meat freezer in the back of the deli where he worked, and it couldn’t have been more than twenty degrees in there. But he didn’t look like he was shaking from the cold. Looked more like he was sweating, his face shiny and tight. He had pulled out the needle and the tubing, and I’d looked at him standing there, surrounded by big slabs of salami and roast beef, and right then an image popped into my head of an air bubble, shiny and round like a pearl, rolling quietly through a vein and stopping my heart….
Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn’t been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory. I had discovered that it didn’t make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. Nobody asked you whether your father was a fat-cat executive who cheated on his wife or some laid-off joe who slapped you around whenever he bothered to come home. You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.
That’s how it had seemed to me then, anyway. It had taken a couple of years before I saw how fates were beginning to play themselves out, the difference that color and money made after all, in who survived, how soft or hard the landing when you finally fell. Of course, either way, you needed some luck."
So here are the points:
If you still can’t stand to read Dreams From My Father, try reading America’s Half-Blood Prince, by Steve Sailer.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.