Summer re-reading

I like it when a person feels so strongly that he has insight into someone or something that he has the discipline and courage to put his words down on paper. Two people who did that in the last decade were Jonah Goldberg and Shelby Steele. You know Goldberg from National Review, and Steele from the Hoover Institute at Stanford.

Goldberg became fed up with liberals attacking conservatives as "fascists," and wrote Liberal Fascism to set the historical record straight, tying today's liberals to the historical fascistic traditions of Mussolini, Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, F.D.R., and Hillary Clinton, among other leftists who gained positions of power. Power, after all, is what the left craves more than anything.

Steele's book A Bound Man is about Barack Obama. Steele, the son of a black man and a white woman, thinks he understands Barack Obama. He points out that blacks have always had to wear a mask when functioning as a black in a white society. But, no one ever achieves their human potential wearing a mask. At some point in one's life, every human must make it clear who he/she is, or, as Martin Luther King would put it, show the content of their character.

Steele asks, "What gave Barack Obama the idea that he could plausibly run for the presidency of the United States? Was it that he had evolved a compelling vision for the nation grounded in deeply held personal convictions? Or was it simply that he had become aware of his ability to enthral white America? If the mask is history's price of admission for blacks, then the pressure is to make inauthenticity a talent. Our masking, once so essential to our survival, has caused us to overvalue the manipulation of whites and to undervalue the evolution of our individual selves."

Those quotes above from Steele are from different parts of his book.