Paul Street's succinct summary of Barack Obama — delivered in his well-grounded review of David Garrow's biography of the former president

© 2017 Peter Free

 

12 October 2017

 

 

The value of reading biography book reviews — occasionally concise insights

 

Biographies tend to be long and filled with non-essential trivialities. Reviews of them, on the other hand, often come to a take-away point of memorable value.

 

 

Here is one such from Paul Street

 

Regarding David J. Garrow's (1472 page) Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017) — Paul Street inserted his own (more widely based) summation of the former president:

 

 

[Martin Luther] King in his final years inveighed eloquently against what he called “the triple evils that are interrelated,” essentially capitalism, racism, and militarism-imperialism.

 

King came to the end of his martyred life with the belief that the real faults in American life lay not so much in “men” as in the oppressive institutions and social structures that reigned over them.

 

He wrote that “the radical reconstruction of society itself” was “the real issue to be faced” . . . .

 

Obama took a very different path, one that enlisted him in service both to narcissistic self and to each of the very triple evils . . . that King dedicated his life to resisting.

 

The Obama-King contrast continues into Obama’s post-presidential years.

 

Dr. King sternly refused to cash in on his fame.  Now that he out of the White House, Obama, by contrast, is cashing in. He’s raking in millions from the publishing industry and Wall Street and he’s back to his old “hobnobbing” ways with the rich and famous.

 

© 2017 Paul Street, Obama: a Hollow Man Filled With Ruling Class Ideas, CounterPunch (02 June 2017) (excerpts)

 

 

The moral? — That's all that we really need to know about President Obama

 

Whose lacking soul demonstrated its non-existence throughout his presidency, just like most of his predecessors.

 

The American "system" is (arguably) continually led by the lowest common denominator of unspirited repulsiveness.

 

Ain't "equality" grand?