Saturday, May 19, 2012

The Great Barry - Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby

From Mark Steyn at nationalreview.com

In a postmodern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake — an elite schooling — Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure — the impoverished roots — merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives — the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi — are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows. Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: Let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is in his way the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life.  But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”

1 comment:

  1. Great Article and an accurate comparison to Barry Soetoro. Just like in Chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby we find his real name [Jay Gatz] and his impoverished background. It has taken the US population 3 years to start looking at who the is real Barack Hussein Obama, and we still do not fully know who he is, where he came from and how he became a US president? Only his reversal was from Barry Soetoro to Barack Obama, thus changing his Americanized name to his African name in Kenya. He did this Christmas of 1980.
    Ashmita Saha gives a good analysis of Gatsby:

    -Gatsby is a compulsive liar. He lies about his back ground to everybody including his close friend Nick and his lady love Daisy till the very end. His most popular lie perhaps was that he had studied at Oxford because it was a family tradition [sic.Perhaps Obama studied Gatsby in school and figured he could pull off a great lie too?]
    Gatsby is a vulnerable character. Perhaps it is because of this that he constantly weaves a tapestry of lies around him as a protective shield. And it is due to this reason that he does not have any close friends.[sic or at least no one admits to ever knowing him]

    Comedian Steve Bridges who impersonated Obama and several other presidents came the closest to revealing Obama's thought process and his Compulsive lies. Obama did not care for Steve's act. Oddly enough Steve died in his home on March 6, 2012 at age 48. What happened to all his Obama research material ?

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