Puncturing the bubble

By the way, Steve Sailer’s book on Obama, which can be downloaded free or read online in Adobe format, has this wickedly clever dedication:

To my father and mother, who, together, gave me more than just dreams.

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In his forward to the book, Peter Brimelow writes:

And the truth is that Steve, in himself, is genuinely a moderate and temperate personality. [LA comments: Except, unfortunately, when he’s talking about Israel and those who support its existence.] He has that selfabsorption not uncommon among introverted bookish intellectuals, which can be irritating, but otherwise he views his fellow man with amiable affability and, generally speaking, benevolence. [See previous.]

James S. writes:

Does the fact that Sailer was adopted make his dedication better or worse?

LA replies:

Doesn’t affect it. Sailer is saying his parents gave him good values, and from that position he is cleverly putting down the way Obama (this is sad, but true, and important for us to understand) made his worthless, messed-up, absent father a lode star of his life, as well as his deeply eccentric though I’m sure nice and appealing mother. The point is, the man had a truly strange upbringing, and, through no fault of his own, is radically lacking certain things a person needs. Instead of dealing with that, and making his own life ok (which, on a personal level, apparently he has done), he has created an identity constructed of dreams, and now he wants to impose those dreams and that identity on the whole world as president of the United States, using the presidency of the United States to work out his own identity issues. This is mad. It spells ruin on a catastrophic scale. Why can’t he just leave us alone?

November 3

Bruce B. writes:

You wrote: “Sailer is saying his parents gave him good values…”
Upon first glance, I took the dedication, “To my father and mother, who, together, gave me more than just dreams,” to mean they gave him good genes. Isn’t that what most of Sailer’s writing is about?

LA replies:

Interesting. I thought he meant that his parents gave him good parenting, equipping him for life, for dealing with reality. Such parenting would be the opposite of Obama’s getting “dreams” from his absent father. Sailer’s good genes would not be the opposite of Obama’s bad dreams. Also, Sailer doesn’t say that Obama doesn’t have good genetic inheritance. He has made a point of saying that Obama’s maternal grandmother had high IQ ancestors. Your interpretation would turn the dedication into a mean-spirited put-down of Obama because he’s half-black: “I dedicate this book to my parents, who, unlike Obama’s parents, were both white, and therefore I’m superior to Obama.” Though Sailer is, as you point out, focused on genetics (I would say that at times he is excessively and reductively focused on it), such a crude comparison obviously can’t be what he intended.

Bruce replies:

You’re right I think. That was just my knee-jerk reaction.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 02, 2008 10:19 PM | Send