Projection

I have received an e-mail from Townhall.com offering me, with purchase of a subscription to Townhall Magazine, a free copy of the new Dinesh D'Souza book The Roots of Obama's Rage.  The e-mail tells us, "In this mind-blowing book D'Souza explains why Obama's economic policies are designed to intentionally make America poorer, why he welcomes a nuclear Iran, why he sees the United States as a rogue nation, and much more."  The e-mail features a blurb describing the book as "profound" from the morally decayed Newt Gingrich, whose personality appears to have been completely taken over by his Mr. Hyde side.

In short, the usual right-wing crackpot stuff. But what is most striking about this book is its title. Rage? True, it's an obvious ripoff from an article by Bernard Lewis in The Atlantic some years ago entitled "The Roots of Muslim Rage." But one can see angry Muslims on TV on a regular basis. Has anyone ever seen a really angry Obama? No-drama Obama? Can you imagine him burning a flag? Or throwing rocks? No, too weird.

So why rage? Here's a quotation from Wikipedia:

In Freudian psychology, Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where a person unconsciously denies their own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, such as to the weather, or to other people. Thus, it involves imagining or projecting that others have those feelings.^[1]
 
Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them.

It's not Obama's rage against America that needs explaining; it's the right's rage against Obama. I don't know what the roots of right-wing rage are. But there's no doubt that it's there, and has been since before Inauguration Day. It's not anger, it's apoplectic rage, and it predates anything Obama did in office.

Perhaps D'Souza should have actually read Lewis's article, instead of name-dropping it, for it is relevant not to Obama's fictional rage against America but to the right's real rage against Obama. In Lewis's view, Islamic rage against America has less to do with America's actions than with America as the symbolic leader of a way of life that threatens to change everything, i.e.,  modernity. Just so, the rage against Obama probably has less to do with his actions than with Obama as symbol of a (relative) loss of power by groups that had gotten used to being in power.

Obama's Cairo speech: The missing page

Sheet of paper found on the floor of the auditorium at Cairo University:

"We hear a great deal these days, from those who want to justify terror, about a 'war against Islam,' supposedly led by the United States. I find this puzzling. When the Muslims of Bosnia were under attack from Christians, who saved them? It was not, certainly, the jihad crowd, who may have had a good time killing people but had no discernible effect on the outcome. The war was stopped, and with it the killing of Bosnian Muslims, by the intervention, including military, of the United States. And a few years later, when NATO went to war for the first and only time in its history, it was against a Christian country, to stop them attacking Muslims.

"Why did we do this ? Because we like Muslims more than Christians? No. We did it because we believe that human rights apply to everyone, no matter what their religion is.

"So let us dismiss the notion that there is a war against Islam. But while there is no war against Islam, in many places Muslims are under attack. In Iraq, for example, tens of thousands of noncombatants have been killed. But by whom? Not by Americans-- by Iraqis! Tens of thousands of Muslims have been killed by Muslims. Indeed, the allegedly anti-Muslim invasion of Iraq was aimed at overthrowing the man responsible for the deaths of more Muslims than anyone in history.

"Or consider another conflict, one that has been going on for over a decade. This conflict has resulted in over a million Muslims being displaced, hundreds of thousands being killed, and hundreds of thousands of Muslim women being raped. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim women being raped! Yet in the Muslim world apparently no one cares. Americans care, Europeans care, but the Muslim world has been silent, if not worse. Apparently the attitude in the Muslim world is, 'Displacing, killing, raping Muslims is perfectly fine, as long as we do it.' This attitude is very difficult for Americans to understand."