I see the New York Times has put together this grandiose op-ed package:
We are shaped by the places we have lived. And Barack Obama has lived in a lot of different places. His memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” recounts formative years spent in Indonesia; Honolulu; Los Angeles; New York City; Cambridge, Mass.; and Chicago. How might these places have helped to mold the man who will be the next president of the United States? What might he have taken away from, say, Jakarta in 1967? Or Columbia University? Six writers who lived where Mr. Obama lived —when he lived there — reflect on those questions.
As a native of Oahu with a pretty good grasp of what the new president’s surroundings were like as a child, the sum total of my reflections on the utility of this excersise amount to this:
Is the Times so desperate to provide wall-to-wall Obama coverage and yet simultaneously committed to being so utterly toothless in their examination, that they are reduced to this? To the extent that this would have been useful, wasn’t the time for this well over a year ago when he first started running? And lastly, such a tendentious concept would only work with quality writers involved and, well, PHHHHFFFT. The Hawaii essay is particularly dreadful, with it’s telling reference to “land-owning whites” as a casual demographic descriptor in the first paragraph.
Ultimately, what I’d really like to know is what’s in the water at 620 Eighth Avenue that produces this nonsense on stilts.