gib·ber·ish (jbr-sh)
n.
1. Unintelligible or nonsensical talk or writing.
2.
a. Highly technical or esoteric language.
b. Unnecessarily pretentious or vague language.
I found the parts I read of Dreams of my Father (I didn’t finish it) to contain a lot of nonsense, very pretentious and rather vague (among other things). Hence the use of the word ‘gibberish’, it seems very apt and it is a direct commentary on the literary merit of the book.
Now, are you genuinely offended by the use of an adjective to describe a book or is this just a bunch of handwaving to divert the thread?
I found the parts I read of Dreams of my Father (I didn’t finish it) to contain a lot of nonsense, very pretentious and rather vague (among other things).’
& still no examples. No details. Just sweeping generalities.
I’ll be blunt. I don’t believe any of Dreams matches your description. That is because Dreams is a pure work of propaganda, as pure as any of the other three examples I cited.
There is a word for “gibberish” propaganda. That word is “failed”.
But Dreams did not fail. It succeeded spectacularly.
Here were Ayers’ tasks. He had to take an unaccomplished, self-absorbed, self-congratulatory (read: ‘obnoxious’), raised-by-white people political-nobody and make him first and foremost acceptable to the black Chicago constituency that would give Obama his first political win—if he was to have one—and in broader terms make this same narcissist appealing to a wider electorate, should Obama get that far.
It was a Herculean task. Considering what Ayers had to work with, it was a virtually impossible task. Had he at any time veered into “gibberish”, he would have failed.
But Ayers stayed on point. He presented Obama as well as anyone could, & this involved two things. First, lying like a rug 99 percent of the times (at least) that the book depicted Obama in a positive/appealing light. Second, Ayers had to cover Obama’s butt on the manifold issues with The Won’s personal attributes & unacceptable personal history. I.e.: in order for the propaganda to succeed, Ayers had to massage, & then present in the most sympathetic way possible, the WEIRDNESS of Obama’s sketchy, unacceptable history.
A general rule of thumb therefore applies in general to this type of propaganda and to Dreams in particular. Anything that makes Obama look good is almost certainly a lie. Anything that casts him in a negative light is ^certainly^ an effort to smooth over some unsavory or outright unacceptable aspect of Obama’s history/past.
Thus it is possible to say without reservation that the allusions to Stanley Ann’s “murky”, ‘not real’ wedding are true—at least as much of the truth as Ayers deemed it absolutely necessary to divulge.
& that is why it matters. Because both Ayers and Obama knew the truth, and knew it could hurt Obama in a devastating political way. So Ayers had to sympathetically tap dance around the truth, revealing just enough to cover Obama’s fanny in the event of future revelations.
From this is it becomes crystal clear that the ‘murky’ wedding was not ‘real’, and that Michelle absolutely told the truth when she said Stanley Ann was “very young and very single” when she had Obama.
Not that I imagine you followed one word of that, but nevertheless, there it is. I.e.: there is why your unfounded and absolutely false claim that Dreams is “gibberish” matters, and the unquestioned FACT of why Ayers deemed it necessary to include a passage that did not reflect well on Obama’s parents’ marital status.