Diatribune

If you're an ordinary writer like Margaret B. Jones or James Frey, writing a fake memoir can be a career-ending disaster. Publishers may insist on keeping your fiction off their non-fiction list. They may cancel your book tour. They may unpublish your book. Many bad things can befall you for lying in print, if you're an ordinary human being.

But if you're Barack Obama, and you write a fake memoir like Dreams From My Father, the New York Times will make all sorts of excuses for you that they would never make for an ordinary human being like James Frey or Margaret B. Jones, and all you have to do is bury a few disclaimers in a new introduction.

In the [new] introduction, Mr. Obama acknowledged his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue and events out of chronological order. He was writing at a time well before a recent series of publishing scandals involving fabrication in memoirs. “He was trying to be careful of people’s feelings,” said Deborah Baker, the editor on the first paperback edition of the book. “The fact is, it all had a sort of larger truth going on that you couldn’t make up."

Barack Obama is not a liar! He tells "a larger truth!" So what if he makes it up as he goes along? "Liar" is what you would call an ordinary human being like Margaret B. Jones or James Frey! Maybe they also thought they were telling the "larger truth," but their contracts got cancelled anyway. The New York Times has a different standard for Barack Obama.

So what if some of the people in Obama's "memoir" never existed? So what if nobody ever said what Barack Obama claims they said? So what if nothing ever happened when Barack Obama said it happened? It's just a few "composite characters!" It's just little "approximated dialogue!" It's just "events out of chronological order!" And best of all, Obama was writing "at a time well before a recent series of publishing scandals involving fabrication in memoirs!" Dinosaurs still roamed the earth. The truth didn't matter!

But outside the fabrications of Dreams From my Father, a little truth about Barack Obama still seeps into the New York Times' latest favorable review.

Barack Obama might never have written Dreams From My Father without the support and encouragement of his first literary agent, Jane Dystel, after she read a brief story about Obama's election as the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review.

The coverage prompted a call to him from Jane Dystel, a gravelly-voiced literary agent described by Peter Osnos, then the publisher of Times Books, as “a good journeyman with a hard edge.” The home page of her firm’s Web site currently features clients’ best sellers including “Lies at the Altar: The Truth About Great Marriages.” Ms. Dystel suggested Mr. Obama write a book proposal. Then she got him a contract with Poseidon Press, a now-defunct imprint of Simon & Schuster. When he missed his deadline, she got him another contract and a $40,000 advance from Times Books.

A $40,000 advance for an unknown kid in law school! If there's a literary agent out there who wants to do the same for me, I'll build her a shrine and cover it with rosebuds! But as soon as Jane Dystel became a little less useful, Obama threw her under the same bus that had already run over his grandmother, "the typical white person," and his pastor Jeremiah Wright, after Wright committed the "outrageous" crime of defending himself in the media.

Once Obama got elected to the Senate, he didn't really need the agent who got him his first deal, way back when he was just an unknown kid, and with multi-million-dollar offers raining down for The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama dumped Jane Dystel in favor a Washington insider, Robert Barnett. The current book review in the New York Times calls this manoeuvre “disloyal but not unusual.”

"Disloyal but not unusual"... for Barack Obama, and the bullshit in his "memoir" is also "not unusual for Barack Obama," and the adulation in the mainstream media for passing off fiction as fact is also "not unusual for Barack Obama," and the only thing that would be really "unusual for Barack Obama" would be holding him to the same standards that apply to ordinary people like you and me.

In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Obama said he would not be surprised if some people had gotten involved in his campaign “because they feel they know me through my books.”

And who is it exactly that Obama's supporters "feel they know" through his books? Is it the fictional hero who appears in Obama's fake memoir? Or is it the unscrupulous bullshit artist who will throw anybody under the bus for the sake of his own ambition?
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