"Until reminded by Mona Charen, I had forgotten (or repressed the memory) that Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel Prize in 1992 for her fraudulent autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchu. As evidence of their privileging (don’t you hate it when people make verbs out of nouns?) 'hope' over 'change,' perhaps the Nobels awarded the prize to 'I, Barack' for much the same reason — to honor his promise more than his performance. Just as they honored the 'inner truth' of what she had written and said more than the external, literal, factual accuracy of her pronouncements.
"The similarities between these two icons of the multicultural left are enhanced, of course, by the recent revival, summarized ably here and here by Ron Radosh, of suggestions that Obama may not have been the actual, literal author of his own autobiography.
"For those of you who’ve forgotten (or are too young to remember), I, Rigoberta Menchu purported to be the autobiography of a poor Guatemalan who overcame extreme poverty (a younger brother starved to death, etc.) and violent oppression at the hands of Guatemala’s brutal right-wing oligarchs (who, she wrote, burned another brother to death before her very own young eyes). Her book, composed from tapes recorded by E. Burgos-Debray, an ethnologist and the wife of French Marxist theorist and revolutionary (he was in Bolivia with Che Guevara) Regis Debray, told its gripping story in moving and telling details and quickly elevated her to iconic status among European intellectuals and American academics.
"Alas, it was a good story, but only a story; many of the most dramatic details she recounted never actually happened."
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