July 6th 2009
Whoa! Investigative Media Check Out Obama’s College Years!
Stop the presses! Barack Obama went to college! He joined groups! He wrote stuff! He attended meetings! The mainly marginalized media, content that their candidate is solidly ensconsed in office, has finally decided to write the stories they should have written last summer and fall.
Here’s the Obama-crazed NY Times, letting its readers know “Obama’s Youth Shaped His Nuclear-Free Vision.” Imagine that. Obama had a youth. It shaped him. Gosh, maybe it should have been reported. Writing at The Corner, Andy McCarthy puts it in perspective, writing, “the mainstream media has finally done a bit of the candidate background reporting it declined to do during the campaign — other than in Wasilla.”
The NYT is based on an article the future president wrote for The Sundial, a college newspaper, in which he railed against war and industrialism – in this case, being “sensitive” about “the latest mortality statistics from Guatemala.” Guatemala?! He calls national policies “distorted” and says the country is “on a dead-end track.” The article goes on and on, like an Obama answer at a press conference, until all but the most love-struck or policy wonkish will sign out by the second of its three paragraphs. Fortunately, McCarthy plowed through it all and dug up some gems:
Generally, the narrow focus of the [Nuclear] Freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities, suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets. When Peter Tosh sings that “everybody’s asking for peace, but nobody’s asking for justice,” one is forced to wonder whether disarmament or arms control issues, severed from economic and political issues, might be another instance of focusing on the symptoms of a problem instead of the disease itself.
And this the big, emotional (unintelligble) wind-up:
Indeed, the most pervasive malady of the collegiate system specifically, and the American experience generally, is that elaborate patterns of knowledge and theory have been disembodied from individual choices and government policy. What the members of ARA and SAM try to do is infuse what they have learned about the current situation, bring the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, names like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part. By adding their energy and effort in order to enhance the possibility of a decent world, they may help deprive us of a spectacular experience — that of war. But then, there are some things we shouldn’t have to live through in order to want to avoid the experience.
So now, way too belatedly, the NYT has found one measly article and written a story about it. Obama was in college for eight long years and left many, many more footprints than this one article. The marginalized media can never overcome the black mark [can I say "black mark?"] earned from its lack of negative coverage during the campaign – but that shouldn’t stop it from finally covering the story now.
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