Miranda Devine assesses the legacy of Barack Obama as seen in The Obama Presidential Center. Her current New York Post column provdes an on-the-scene report from “the Obamination”:
[T]he library-that-is-not-a-library is a monument to the self-regarding former president.
Obama is the central focus of the entire museum, with enormous portraits and photographs of Barack and Michelle as imperial rulers, and dozens of installations, interactive exhibits and videos depicting his inspirational life story as the first black president.
His blackness is depicted as the essence of his presidency, although technically, he only half qualifies. The parts of the museum that aren’t devoted to him are shrines to black people, artists, storytellers, activists, community organizers and regular black people from Chicago’s South Side, which the Hawaii-born Obama has appropriated for his origin story. Just as his presidency was never all-inclusive, so, too, does his center seek to divide and conquer.
Obama’s dulcet tones echo through every room like the disembodied voices in “1984” or “Brave New World” that tell citizens what to think, who to hate, what to believe and how to behave:
“I’m asking you to believe, not in my ability to bring about change but in yours,” he intones.
That doesn’t sound too different from the hypnopaedic slogans in “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley’s sci-fi classic: “Everyone belongs to everyone else;” “I’m glad I’m not an Epsilon;” “Progress is lovely.”
Even lefty New York Magazine was appalled by the narcissism, describing the Obama center as “a dimly lit multistory shrine to the president as prophet [with] messages of humility [blazing] from every wall and screen.”
The biggest gaslight of all is seen in the 4-foot-high, monumental concrete letters engraved atop the building in which Obama humbly quotes himself: “The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ”
“We” doesn’t mean what we think it means. It means racial division, Obama style, which was the single legacy of his presidency, paving the way for Trump’s ascension and laying the ground for the Democrats’ current civil war. One day, somebody should take a chisel to those concrete letters and replace “We” with “Me.” At least that would be historically accurate.
Whole thing here.
