Month: May 2012

Did Obama Allow “Born in Kenya” Narrative? If So, Does It Bother You?

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments

You’ve heard that in 1991, literary agency Acton & Dystel typo’d the part of client Barack Obama’s bio that mentioned his place of birth.  (They said it was Kenya).

If a story from WND can be believed, successor firm Dystel & Gooderich kept the mistake in their client’s profile up through April 2007, when it was then corrected.

I don’t have any reason to doubt that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.  At some point or another, however, Barack Obama seems to have sanctioned the belief that he was born in Kenya, or allowed it to linger.  What started as a mistake at Acton & Dystel in 1991 was allowed to remain in the narrative until after Obama started running for president.

It’s hard to believe that a Obama was unaware of the error for 16 years.  For a young writer trying to sell a first book, “born in Kenya, successful in America,” was a much better hook than the truth.

Does it bother you that Obama seems to have let this error persist for so long?  Not “bother” in the sense that it has you questioning his eligibility, bother in the sense that it has you questioning his character?

Chuck Klosterman on Noel Gallagher; Me and “Be Here Now”

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment
Cover of "Be Here Now"
Brilliant.

I somehow missed this Klosterman/Gallagher Grantland interview from last fall but Noel’s in great form as usual.  Timely for our purposes in the context of my recent suggestion, prompted by a Klosterman quote, that Axl Rose and Noel Gallagher cut some tracks together. A.V. Club’s Steven Hyden explores the place of Be Here Now in the Gallagher cannon given Noel’s suggestion that we play his career in reverse for an alternate narrative of artistic expectation.

Hyden gets close to saying what I’ve been saying for a while:  Be Here Now is going to be one of those albums that people come back to and say, it’s not the first two Oasis albums, but it’s pretty great.  It’s who they were then, and it’s who we, the people who loved it, were, too.  Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory were almost perfect.  Be Here Now was a victory lap that may have misfired, but it was a hell of a lot of fun, and it made sense that the biggest band in the world (“the first post-grunge band to be massive in every way,” as Klosterman says) act the part.  And they did.  And that record got me through my senior year of high school.  I’ll always love it.

Related articles

The God of Senses

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Fight error with courage and kindness. Look around you and see the injustice that chains so many people. Take time for quiet prayer. Know your faith and let that knowledge burst into flame in your heart. (St. Anthony of Padua)

They say that knowledge born of experience is mechanical, but that knowledge born and consummated in the mind is scientific, while knowledge born of science and culminating in manual work is semi-mechanical. But to me it seems that all sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, and that are not tested by experience, that is to say, that do not at their origin, middle, or end pass through any of the five senses. . . .(Leonardo Da Vinci)

 

This scene from the 1995 movie starring Ben Kingsley as Moses.