66 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography“Reading Hillary Clinton’s Hidden Thesis,” MSNBC, May. 9, 2007) Alinsky offered Hillary a job
as a community organizer, which she had the good sense to refuse. Obama later accepted just such a
job from the Gamaliel Foundation after Alinsky’s death.^15
OBAMA’S ROOTS TRIP TO KENYA
After quitting his job as a community organizer, Obama decided to make his obligatory
pilgrimage to Kenya, where he had never been. By this time his father was deceased. He traveled by
way of London. A conversation about political and economic conditions in Africa with a young
Englishman in the airplane gives Obama another chance to reflect on his favorite obsession, race.
Here he found yet another opportunity to reflect on his “own uneasy status: a Westerner not entirely
at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers.” (Dreams 310) He has an
opportunity to travel around Europe for three weeks in a grand tour that most American middle
class families of whatever race were already unable to provide for their children, or for themselves
in retirement. Obama tells us that he visited London, Paris, Madrid, and Rome, and then concluded
that it was all a terrible mistake:
...by the end of the first week I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t
beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out
someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites
I saw like a hard pane of glass. I began to suspect that my European stop was just one more
means of delay, one more attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Old Man. Stripped of
language, stripped of work and routine – stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I’d
become accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation – I had
been forced to look inside myself and had found only a great emptiness there. (Dreams 301-
302)
Obama, we see, was a convinced existentialist.OBAMA AND THE DECLINE OF THE WEST
Here Obama’s racist psychopathology is displayed in the sharpest relief. Had he already been
imbibing Wright’s hate-mongering theories about the Italian garlic noses and the inferiority of the
Irish? Europe represents a huge chunk of the historical experience of humanity as a whole, but
Obama’s racist obsession leads him to conclude that it does not belong to him – despite the obvious
facts that the language, institutions, science, technology, and all the related components of his life
derive from European models. Obama rejects what he sees, and clings to the empty abstraction of
Afrocentrism, albeit tinged with a heavy dose of existentialism. If he had gone to China, Obama
would not have pondered that the majority of the man-days lived by humanity have probably been
Chinese; he would have rejected China too, on the same explicitly racist grounds. Obama explicitly
rejects the unity and wholeness of human history. He imagines that history is made up of a series of
self-contained and hermetically sealed races, and that no race exercises any influence over the
internal life of another race. With this, historical reality goes out the window, and is sure to be
replaced by racist myths.
Obama turns out to be close to the pre-fascist pessimist Oswald Spengler, the 1920s theoretician
of the Decline of the West, who also thought of each Kultur as being axiomatically independent of
and untouched by all the others, with each one living out its own appointed life span. Obama’s
contemptuous dismissal of Europe obliges us to label him as a fanatic and an incurable racist.