UPDATE: ‘Dreams from My Father’: TV Facts, Fantasy and Falsehoods

Barry Soetero, center at classmate's birthday party in Jakarta, Indonesia, 1971

UPDATE May 19, 2011: Thanks to Janny Scott’s new book about Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro, A Singular Woman, we have confirmation for my June 2010 article, which follows.

. Scott writes (page 117) that Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro taught classes in the late afternoon and evenings. Why? “Because there was just one miserable state television channel at that time. .. there was little else to do at that hour.”

. . . .

Once again, I ask you to come along with me as I dissect a duo of Obama TV Land tales.

Let’s say right up front, when someone writes his or her autobiography it’s understood that, especially when drawing on childhood memories, not every detail is expected to be exactly correct.

However, when the historical circumstances of certain memories can easily be verified in the Age of Google and Lexis-Nexis — by both the author and the reader — there is little excuse for not setting dates and events into their proper context. In fact, it’s inexcusable when those dates and events are incorporated into the narrative of one’s life in such a way as to provide background for important, sometimes life-changing events.

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation writes: “Some of our memories are true, some are a mixture of fact and fantasy, and some are false — whether those memories seem to be continuous or seem to be recalled after a time of being forgotten or not thought about.”

In Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father it seems we have at least two examples of liberal co-mingling of fact, fantasy and falsehoods regarding Obama’s memory of tv history.

First, in April 2010, Jack Cashill wrote at American Thinker about the seemingly missing girlfriends in Obama’s life:

“[Obama] recalls his early days in Indonesia, when he began to notice “that Cosby never got the girl on I Spy.” Curiously, in his own book, he does not do much better.”

When I read this little alarm bells began to go off.

I thumbed my copy of Dreams, Barack Obama’s pre-emptive 1995 autobiography, where he writes the following on page 52. Emphasis added.

… The initial flush of anxiety would pass, and I would spend my remaining year in Indonesia much as I had before. I retained a confidence that was not always justified and an irrepressible talent for mischief. But my vision had been permanently altered. On the imported television shows that had started running in the evenings, I began to notice that Cosby never got the girl on I Spy, that the black man on Mission Impossible spent all his time underground. I noticed that there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog that Toot and Gramps sent us, and that Santa was a white man.

Next, I quickly checked that mostly reliable online authority, the Wikipedia. Obama went with his mother to Indonesia in 1967, where he lived from ages 6 to 10.

Turning to movie and tv authority, IMDb, I find the show I Spy with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby ran on NBC from 1965 to 1968. It did not start reruns until 2002. Selected episodes were released in the 1990s on VHS in the US. The program did not enter syndication until 2008.

Obama could not have watched the program when he returned to Hawaii in 1971, at age 10, since the program was off the air by then.

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