Barack Obama

Zadie Smith: Life After

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British author Zadie Smith became an instant literary success upon the publication of her first book White Teeth in 2000.  The novel is a semi-autobiographical tale about living in London’s new multicultural landscape.  Many of her subsequent books including her latest work NW examine the intersection of race, class and identity.  In the 13 years since White Teeth’s publication, racial politics and the publishing world have evolved tremendously.  Recently, she came to Boston to discuss life in Obama’s America and why writing online is the new normal.

Smith has been a tenured creative writing professor at New York University for the last three years.  It was announced last year that her third book On Beauty will be adapted into a film and the BBC film adaptation of White Teeth has finally been put out on DVD and online streaming formats.  The Internet and media have made seismic shifts in the way the written word is shared with readers.

Like many of her contemporaries, Smith contemplates why she should continue to write in the digital age.  Writers not only have to contend with book reviewers at major newspapers and magazines, but also with social media critics, as well as have to fight copyright infringement to protect their work online.  She says today there is no difference between fake and real writers, as anyone now can be considered a published writer with the click of a mouse.

“Some might say it is harder to write now than it was years ago,” Smith said.  “How will writers be paid online? I have no idea.”

Maybe a culture tax she suggested.

However, she also says that the Web can be a great place for writers too.  She spends a lot of time reading blogs, and not just literary blogs, but a lot of the “trashy blogs” the rest of us read.  Writing online has also created a new intimacy with her readers that has helped inform her writing.  But she is still a fan of the printed, written word.  Smith says she owns over 10,000 books by authors ranging from Vladimir Nabokov to Zora Neale Hurston to Jean-Paul Sartre.  While many of the books are used as teaching aides, she also enjoys casual reading.

Smith never expected to become a writer, but has been an avid reader since she was a child.  She seriously considered becoming an actress at one point, but writing eventually became her true calling while attending Cambridge.  The only real writing training she had came from reading other books and having her work critiqued by her classmates.  Smith only wrote three and a half essays while in university, but those essays became the impetus for White Teeth.

While a great deal of that book came out of many hours of research at libraries, White Teeth is based on many aspects of her own life.  Born in North London to a black Jamaican mother and white British father, identity politics is part of her everyday life.

Smith said before a crowd Wednesday night at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts that she has many identities including being a liberal, feminist, black woman and British.

She also identifies with President Barack Obama’s multicultural background and his gift of mimicry.  Smith wrote this about Obama in 2008:

“Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank tellers, and even a British man called Mr. Wilkerson, who on a starry night on safari says credibly British things like: ‘I believe that’s the Milky Way.’ This new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them.”

Smith says that she didn’t watch Obama’s second inauguration, as she doesn’t own a television and she is not into the “pomp and circumstance” of such occasions.  But she was pleased Obama mentioned climate change in his inaugural speech, since she lives at the tip of Manhattan – ground zero for Hurricane Sandy.

As for her other identity as a writer, she will continue to do that, even as the Internet reinvents content distribution.

“Why I write? Because I am a writer,” she said.

Documenting Politics in Real Time

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President Obama will go down in history for many reasons.  He is not only the first African-American president, but he is also the first commander –in-chief to get into the Oval Office with the help of Internet campaigning.   New York filmmaker Arun Chaudhary got involved in the Obama for America campaign in early 2007 and instantly made a mark for himself by making ground-breaking videos for the campaign’s YouTube channel.  Following Obama’s 2008 victory, Chaudhary also went down in history as the first official White House videographer.

Chaudhary chronicles his many journeys on the campaign trail and in the Oval Office in his new book First Cameraman: Documenting the Obama Presidency in Real Time.  I receive many copies of books to review on a regular basis, especially Obama-related books in the last year.  I was convinced to read this book because of Chaudhary’s unique view into the making of this historic presidency through his camera lens.  He wasn’t just a fly on the wall; he was, as he said, “a gorilla in the corner.”

“Video is the most important barometer of truth we have in politics,” Chaudhary said in the book.

As a videographer myself, I am also interested in learning filmmaking tips from others.  I not only got some tips, but also got a crash course in presidential filmmaking history.  While the Obama campaign set the new standard for online videos and new media, visual communication has actually played a role in politics since the medium came to prominence during World War II.  Hollywood and Madison Avenue have usually worked hand-in-hand with politicians to create campaigns that reached the masses and influenced voters.

Chaudhary points to Primary, an influential documentary about the 1960 Wisconsin primary battle between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.  The film was a breakthrough for its use of mobile cameras and lighter sound equipment, which helped to created an intimacy with the candidates and their followers.

Primary was produced by Robert Drew, who also directed Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, which follows President Kennedy and Alabama Governor George Wallace as they navigated racial integration at the University of Alabama in 1963.  The film aired four months after the incident on ABC and received mixed reviews, due not only to the divisive racial issues brought up, but also many critics didn’t like that cameras were allowed into the White House.  Today the film is seen as a milestone in cinéma vérité.  When the film was entered into the National Film Registry last year for preservation, the Registry said that Crisis “has proven to be a uniquely revealing complement to written histories of the period, providing viewers the rare opportunity to witness historical events from an insider’s perspective.”

Crisis, Primary and other political films influenced Chaudhary’s work.  However, back in 2007 Obama’s campaign was still learning how to use the Internet to their advantage, with only Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run to use as a benchmark.  Chaudhary recalls using his many five and a half hour drives between Chicago and Des Moines to think about how to make better videos about Obama.  And he spent even more hours recording Obama greeting supporters on the road while eating many turkey sandwiches along the way.

“We knew we’d be generating a lot of content and that the most crucial task would be sorting and posting ,” said Obama advisor David Axelrod in the book.  “We thought that video could be the life of the campaign online, an authentic mirror of the whole campaign.”

Authenticity is a running theme in the book.  Chaudhary says that while the Internet did play a big role in Obama’s victory, just like John F. Kennedy, Obama won the American people over on his charisma and authenticity.

“Senator Obama did not become President Obama because of some mysterious dark Internet powers that only his youthful supporters understood how to tap into,” Chaudhary said.  “He won because he was the right candidate with the right message at the right time.  The boundless, open-all-night Internet simply gave his team the space and freedom to present him and his message to as many people as possible, in more ways than usual.”

After the election, Chaudhary was in charge of shooting, editing and posting the Weekly Address on video, and later on started up the web series West Wing Week, which shows highlights from the president’s work that week. Again this wasn’t an easy job, as his job never existed before.  Prior to Obama’s election, White House videography was usually handled by the military.  A lot of people within the administration didn’t really understand what Chaudhary’s job was either.  However, over the course of two years his work became a valuable documentation of this administration, as seen by example in the video below.

One of the complaints of Obama during both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns was his many “unpresidential” appearances on shows like The View and The Daily Show.  Chaudhary reiterated that like the Internet, “a campaign’s target audience  should be people who didn’t follow politics closely but might have a particular vested interest in a specific issue, whether it be the cost of Medicare prescriptions or the legality of carrying a concealed weapon into Wal-Mart.  Those were the people we needed to engage.”

After logging in many long hours following the president around the world, Chaudhary gave up his position last year to do nonprofit video advocacy and spend more time with his family.  He reflects on his job and legacy he left behind.

“I wanted to show a side of Barack Obama that the American people might not otherwise see; to use the power of video and the freedom of my access to capture more of the American presidency than had ever yet been recorded, which was a state policy goal of this administration, and one that I could actually help with.”

“I also like to think that the Office of the President has grown a little with me, that I’ve helped to equip it with the infrastructure necessary to keep up with the clamor of the day while at the same time preserving history right as it’s happening.  No less important, I’ve been able to advocate for the rules of traditional filmmaking in one of the epicenters of the ‘new ways’ of doing things.”

The Notion of Anti-Colonialism

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I had a chance to see the controversial new film 2016:Obama’s America.  I hadn’t paid much attention to it until it became the highest grossing conservative documentary of all time.   After seeing the film, I felt quite bemused by the story line.  The film is based on conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza’s 2010 book titled The Roots of Obama’s Rage.  The book and film claim that the basis for Obama’s political ideology comes from the radical “Founding Fathers” in his life, such as Palestinian scholar Edward Said, Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers, liberation theologian Jeremiah Wright and communist writer Franklin Marshall Davis.  However, Obama was apparently mostly influenced by his biological father Barack Obama Sr. – a man he had only met once as a child.  The elder Obama was a staunch anti-colonial socialist who played a role in Kenya’s independence.

And from this D’Souza theorizes that President Obama has a yearning to carry out his late father’s radical beliefs, as if he were a modern day Robin Hood stealing from the West to give back what was “stolen” from the developing world.

“He is trying to reduce America’s footprint in the world by stepping on America,” said D’Souza before a recent gathering hosted by Americans for Prosperity.

But what is so wrong with anti-colonialism, or the notion of anti-colonialism?

Last time I checked, the United States was a country built upon the ideals of anti-colonialism.  D’Souza must have forgotten about the original “tea party” that fought against British tax policies by throwing tea into the Boston Harbor.  D’Souza was born in India, a country that has its own colonial legacy with Britain.  He also says that he came to the United States to pursue the great “American Dream” by attending Dartmouth College and becoming an advisor for the Reagan administration – a dream he claims he would not have been able to pursue in India.

D’Souza contends that Obama is an  American (that’s right; D’Souza is not a birther) who also had the same opportunity for that American dream, but has instead used his opportunity by manipulating people using his biracial heritage and dynamic speaking ability from college to the White House, all while secretly harboring his Marxist ideas of bringing down the country.

In the movie, D’Souza cites a number of examples of Obama degrading America, such as cutting back financial and military support to Israel, siding with Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands and allegedly backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  D’Souza went as far as getting the president’s half brother George Obama to admit that Kenya was better off under British colonial rule.

Coincidentally, this movie’s release came around the same time as the Non Alignment Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran.  NAM was set up in 1961 to create a buffer zone for newly independent countries that wanted to find their own identity instead of siding with the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

However, in recent years it has been criticized for not being relevant.  But given that 120 countries are represented at the summit and host country Iran has become the center of the world’s attention with its nuclear testing and its growing tension with Israel, NAM is possibly more relevant now than ever.  Iran is taking over as NAM’s chair through 2015, and this could make some big political waves in the near future.  Furthermore, many of the issues that were the foundation of NAM’s birth 50 years ago still exist in the formerly colonized world, such as racism, foreign aggression, hegemony and neo-colonialism.

Considering that D’Souza comes from one of the founding countries of NAM, it comes as a bit of a surprise that he would hold the views that being anti-colonial is being anti-American or even anti-freedom.  Doesn’t the world need less racism, foreign aggression, hegemony and neo-colonialism? If Obama wants to make the world a fairer place or be Robin Hood, is that really a bad thing? Isn’t this part of the American dream too?  It is outrageous to say otherwise.

Mass Decision 2010: President Obama Rallies Massachusetts Voters

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By Talia Whyte

Nearly 15,000 strong gathered early in front of the Hynes Convention Center Oct. 16 just to get a glimpse of President Barack Obama, who was in town in support of Gov. Deval Patrick’s re-election bid and other Massachusetts Democratic candidates running for office. As expected, all the people I spoke to enthusiastically supported Obama’s job performance, stating mainly that they believe he is still “cleaning up the mistakes” of the Bush administration.

View the video here

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