In The Roots of Obama’s Rage (Washington: Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2010), Dinesh D’Souza takes seriously Obama’s autobiography (significantly titled Dreams from My Father), seeking to understand him as both a man and a president in accord with it. Though politically conservative D’Souza (born and reared in India) rather rejoiced in seeing an African American elected president and never joined “the conservative chorus bashing” him (p. 4). In time, however, he became alarmed at the policies Obama both espoused and implemented, fearing that: “If Obama serves two terms, he will likely leave America a very different country than it is now. This is certainly his objective; he has set himself the task, as he put it in his inauguration address, of ‘remaking America’” (p. 18). Amazingly enough, D’Souza has concluded that: “We are today living out the script for America and the world that was dreamt up not by Obama but by Obama’s father. How do I know this? Because Obama says so himself. Reflect for a moment on the title of his book: it’s not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. In other words, Obama is not writing a book about his father’s dreams; he is writing a book about the dreams that he got from his father” (p. 198).When I first read Obama’s autobiography two years ago, I took it to be an inner journey of self-understanding, largely defined by his utterly absent but desperately desired father, Barack Obama, Sr., and his determination to self-identify as African-American. Thus, as Obama, Jr. acknowledged, there is a dreamlike, fictional dimension to the book—individuals’ names are changed and at times seem to be a composite of several persons. He devotes one-third of the book to his “origins,” one third to his community organizing efforts in Chicago, and one third to a trip to Kenya that is (I’ve learned from other sources) actually a fusion of two trips. He tells the story of his birth in Honolulu to an American woman and Kenyan man who met at the University of Hawaii. Given the opportunity to pursue a graduate degree in economics at Harvard University, his father soon abandoned his wife and son and moved to Boston. Then his mother married an Indonesian who’d come to the University of Hawaii, and they moved to Jakarta, where Obama attended both Catholic and Muslim elementary schools. That marriage also floundered, and Barack, his mother and half-sister, returned to Honolulu, where she resumed her studies in anthropology. When she finished her studies, she determined to continue her anthropological work by returning to Indonesia, but she wanted her son to get his education in Honolulu. He then spent his adolescence living with her parents, who were in many ways the only stable parents he’d ever know. His generally unemployed grandfather, who seemed to have failed at most everything he attempted while moving about the country, offered a rather constant criticism of the “system” that...
