......Or, I like to think that my book reading actually does make my brain more bigger sometimes.
I haven't watched Dinesh D'Souza's '2016: Obama's America' and have no intention of doing so. My own bias does lead me to assume that it probably sucks, true that. Yet it is also true that I have never paid cash money to watch any political documentary friend or foe. I am a somewhat strongly political person and have voted in every election large or small since I turned eighteen. Still I think there's something to be said for leaving to Caesar what is Caesar's and leaving to Friday night what is Friday night's. Some think differently. D'souza's '2016' is right now the second highest-grossing political documentary of all time. To judge by poll numbers its popularity is, as with every political documentary, near entirely a matter of preaching to the choir. I'm sure the man worked hard and I won't begrudge his money.
D'Souza is famous for arguing that President Obama is consciously trying to destroy True American Values out of an anti-colonial malice inherited from his father. His film, as far as I am able to tell from summaries, seems to be his latest extension of that argument. Many critics have read the "anti-colonial" charge to mean "anti-White". An interpretation which strikes me as not just correct but pretty damned obvious. At any rate it does raise the obvious question of why being anti-colonial should be considered bad in the United States of Fuck The King. Or why the brown-skinned son of a colonial assault victim would consider being wither anti-colonial or anti-White as anything less than something to be.
In this matter it may help to know something about D'Souza's particular heritage. Wikipedia lists the man's ethnicity as 'Indian'. But of course India is a near parallel to Europe in terms of overall population and ethnic variety. It just happens to be under a single flag at the moment is all. The specific ancestry of Dinesh D'Souza is Goan Catholic, a subset of the Konkani people who were converted by the Portuguese in or around in the sixteenth century. I personally learned about this folk from reading Tony d'souza's novel 'The Konkans'; told through the eyes of the older son of a White Yankee mother and Konkan father who immerses himself fully into the striving and prejudice of 1970's America; constantly pressured by a family history of privilege to do even better. It's one of the better newish books I've read lately and chock full of Chicago porn for those of us who love that town. It has my highest recommendation.
In real life, Catholic Konkans are one group of Brown people who have genuinely benefited from White colonialism. The people who are sometimes described as 'the Jews of India' enjoyed a tremendous boost in social status under European sovereignty. Going from suspect minority to go-to enforcers, administrators, essential economic middlemen. If I were to hazard to guess the soul of a stranger I would say that this is where Dinesh D'Souza is coming from. A culture where White hegemony is firmly entrenched is one where his own historically elevated status is also firmly entrenched.
In saying this I certainly do not mean to argue from the left that ancestry is destiny. Rather I find the heritage of D'Souza and the Konkans to be similar in many ways to my own. I am what would have been called a 'White Ethnic' fifty years ago; Catholic, (at least by ancestry) and East European. Off-White but not quite. Today we have achieved the hollowed status of simply being White, culturally and genetically blended into the old WASP mainstream over time. Today our collective self-esteem is almost wholly based upon the prestige of being American, and unfortunately the fear of seeing this prestige diluted among strangers has led some of us, (some of my own closest blood relations in fact) to become as racist as those treasonous waterheads in the KKK; betraying our ancestors with every epithet thrown against those who walk their path.
I personally believe very strongly in a moral imperative to accept every new group of compatriots into our family without reservation, if you'll allow me to gush. Still it is true that every acceptance of someone new into the American family must invariably come at the cost of someone else's sense of specialness. There is a strong desire among those of us in normalized classes to believe that the eternal glory of the polio vaccine Constitution and the moon landing belongs to ourselves and ourselves alone. It is a despicable desire to be sure; but one based on basic human needs, however twisted; one that has to be dealt with with something that at least looks like empathy in order to be changed.
Which isn't to say that Dinesh D'Souza, entitled to human regard as he certainly is, shouldn't be regarded as a full-of-shit hack, because this is is basic honesty. He has written that "Being a conservative in America means conserving the principles of the American Revolution. " which brings us back to the old point that the American Revolution was; pretty damned anti-colonial, among other things. More to the point his rhetorical cash cow of Pres. Obama being distinctly unAmerican and "anti-colonial" is such obvious nonsense as to force me to question D'Souzas conscious honesty. Everything about the manner and bearing of Barrack Obama the man is the virtual screaming prototype of upper-class Yankee Protestant; with all the vestigial Anglo flavoring that comes with that. Save for the Black he is precisely the same sort of man, mind, and culture that has always populated our ruling class and I don't think it's too far to say that this is rightfully obvious to anyone not blinded by the Black.
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