RANT: The Obama Platform

We live in the age of the 'hook.' That is, if you are trying to get a book published. Book publishers have always wanted to make a buck, so they have always opted to publish books that could make them money. This is obvious. But there was also a time when, alongside all the pulp fiction and schlock, there was room for books well written and for just pure writing talent.

That is no longer the case in this era of infinitesimal attention spans and shrinking readerships, not to mention corporatist profit uber alles in the publishing world. Of course there are still well-written books being published, and some of them even do well, but they had better have a hook or that other publishing favourite, the 'platform.'

I happened to be watching morning news here on a South African television station the other day, and along came an authoress with a big, fat hook or platform or coattail to ride along, or call it what you will: she happens to be the half-sister of the world's most powerful man. No, not Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, but his lapdog, Barack Obama.

Auma Obama, who has written the book, "And Then Life Happens," was born and raised in Kenya and spent her formative years in Germany.

She spent much time in the interview saying how being a 'person of colour in a new country as multi-cultural as Germany with so many different cultures was a challenge for her," as well as the challenges of being a mother and running an NGO in here native country. It was so ho hum. It seemed a life replete with mundane issues, none of which suggested a particularly brilliant or unique life; certainly not a life worth writing about. But she is the half-sister of Barack Obama.

She never lived with the man, has only met with him a few times over the years and now they stay in touch by phone. She did phone to congratulate him on the night he won the election. And this deserves a book deal? 

But she has that all-important hook, that imperative platform which book publishers and all media mavens seem to adore. She is connected to someone well known, therefore she is a somebody. In this age of celebrity, celebrity is everything, even if by association or degrees of separation.

Jeez, I wish I had that type of platform or super duper hook. I only grew up a white Italian- Portuguese boy in apartheid South Africa raised by a single mother whilst my father sat in jail for being an extreme right wing terrorist.

Nothing to write about there, naturally.

I did have the audacity to write about my youth, which I thought was a story worth telling. Stupid, arrogant me. Rejected to the hilt, because the story was not "compelling enough" or because I'm a talentless hack, of course. At least a few publishers made it known that I didn't have that all-important hook or platform, even if not in so many words.

Bitter? Hmmmm. I'm thinking more along the lines of vinegar.

So Miss Obama-Half-Sister gets to the sashay around the world being interviewed because she happened to have the same father as the latest American warmonger. She may not be an outright celebrity, but by God she has the (half) correct genes.

Makes perfect sense. After all, when it comes to telling a story, who the hell am I, right?

Do you get my point?