Case closed: Obama not literate enough to write his books
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/06/29/cashill_ghostwrite/index.html?source=newsletter
June 29, 2009
Gabriel Winant
You've probably heard at some point about the fractious world of
literary criticism. Deep differences divide the various schools of
thought: Is the historical context of a work relevant, or should
scholars stick to the inherent features and form of the text? Is
there a political function intrinsic to literature? Did Barack Obama
actually write his first book, Dreams From My Father?
Yes, there's someone out there considering that last one. Jack
Cashill, a conservative journalist, has spent the last year or so
puzzling over texts and performing various analyses in an attempt to
prove that Bill Ayers is the real author of the president's
autobiography. On Sunday, he announced a "breakthrough." [see below]
Here's Cashill's proof: In his own book, Bill Ayers misspelled Frantz
Fanon's (quite unusually spelled) first name, using the more common
"Franz." Obama's book contains the same error. Ayers and Obama both
quote the opening lines of Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago" in the same
way, mistakenly turning the phrase "hog butcher for the world" into
"hog butcher to the world." Both books have characters named Malik,
Freddy, Tim, Coretta, Marcus and "the old man."
There are a few more points like this -- for example, Ayers
"fetishistically" refers to eyebrows six times, and Obama
"stunningly" tops that with seven, Cashill says. But the argument
seems to boil down to a lot of, "One book says this, and that sounds
just like what the other book says."
For example:
Both authors link Indonesia with Vietnam. In each case, clueless
officials -- plural -- with the "State Department" try to explain how
the march of communism through "Indochina" will specifically imperil
"Indonesia." The Ayers account, however, at least sounds vaguely
real. The Obama account sounds like an Ayers' memory imposed on
Obama's mother. She allegedly discussed these geo-political strategy
sessions in Indonesia with her pre-teen son.
Also, Obama and Ayers both seem to know the terms "baleful" and "bill
of particulars," both of which went over Cashill's head -- and in the
writer's mind, the use of a word he doesn't know is clear proof of shenanigans.
For a nice, clean, line-by-line shredding of Cashill, see here.
http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2009/06/polygraphlevel-scholarship-may-suffice-for-harmless-speculation-about-the-authorship-of-midsummers-n.html
Or here.
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/06/in-which-i-discover-bill-ayers-in-my-head.html
(One example -- by Cashill's standards, Dreams From My Father was
also ghost-written by Paul Krugman, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg and
the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological
Progress, among many others.)
Cashill found some support among mainstream conservatives last year,
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTlkMTdmNDRkMTM1ODZkNGNkZmRiNDFjMDE4YzRjMjg=
but they'll probably steer clear this time, and they'll be right to
do so. Still, it's the sort of crazy that tends to get purchase in
the fever swamps. So it's puzzling that Cashill would forgo his most
obvious piece of evidence against Obama: That botched "Chicago"
quotation -- that's from Carl Sandburg. A well-known socialist.
--------
Breakthrough on the Authorship of Obama's 'Dreams'
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/breakthrough_on_the_authorship_1.html
By Jack Cashill
June 28, 2009
Within days of my going public last September with the speculation
that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write his
acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, I learned that I was not
alone in that intuition.
Since then, I have received helpful contributions from serious people
in at least five countries and any number of states and have
integrated many of their observations into my ongoing narrative,
summarized here. If you are unfamiliar with this research, please
read this before going forward.
About a week ago, however, I heard from a new contributor. I will
refer to him as "Mr. West." Like most contributors, he prefers to
remain anonymous. The media punishment that Joe the Plumber received
has much to do with this nearly universal reticence.
A week before that, I heard from another excellent contributor, Mr.
Midwest. Their collective contribution should dispel the doubts of
all but the willfully blind that Ayers played a substantial role,
likely the primary role, in the writing of Dreams.
As a reminder, there is no reliable computer science for determining
authorship. In assessing the value of the existing science, think
polygraph, not DNA. Polygraph-level scholarship may suffice for
harmless speculation about the authorship of Midsummer's Night Dream,
but not for Dreams From My Father. Too much is at stake for the latter.
The experts in the field have told me to stick with old-fashioned
literary detective work, and I have done just that. Mr, Midwest has
helped. His most recent contribution is a good example of keen-eyed
detection.
Going forward, I will be referring to five books. These include
Ayers' 1993 To Teach, his 1997 A Kind and Just Parent (shorthand:
Parent), his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days, and Obama's 1995 Dreams From
My Father (Dreams). Casual critics of this research have repeated the
canard that I attributed both Obama books, Dreams and the 2006
Audacity of Hope (Audacity), to Ayers. I never have. From the
beginning, I have asserted that the two books appear to have two
different authors, and so I will leave Audacity out of the equation
until the end.
What Mr. Midwest noticed recently is that both Ayers in Parent and
Obama in Dreams make reference to the poet Carl Sandburg. In itself,
this is not a grand revelation. Let us call it a C-level match.
Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library in any
case. Both talk of reading the books of Malcolm X, James Baldwin,
Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois and Frantz Fanon among others. In
fact, each misspells "Frantz" as "Franz."
Ayers and Obama, however, go beyond citing Sandburg. Each quotes the
opening line of his poem "Chicago." From Dreams:
He poured himself more hot water. "What do you know about Chicago anyway?"
I thought a moment. "Hog butcher to the world," I said finally.
From Parent:
"At the turn of the century, Chicago had a population of a million
people and was a young and muscular city - hub of commerce and
industry, the first skyscraper city, home of the famous world
exposition, "hog butcher to the world" - bursting with energy."
This I would call a B-level match. What raises it up a notch to an
A-level match is the fact that both misquote "Chicago," and they do
so in exactly the same way. The poem actually opens, "Hog butcher
for the world."
Last week, the first email I received from Mr. West had in the
message box "759 striking similarities between Dreams and Ayers'
works." This claim seemed so outsized I did not take it
seriously. When I was unable to open the documents, I emailed Mr.
West back, asked him to reformat, and then forgot about the
email. He resent his documents a few days later.
This time I was able to open them and was promptly blown away. Mr.
West's analysis was systematic, comprehensive, and utterly, totally,
damning. Of the 759 matches, none were frivolous. All were C-level
or above, and I had no doubt of their authenticity. I had been
gathering many of them in my own reserve waiting for a book-length
opportunity to make my case. Mr. West had done the heavy
lifting. He even indexed his matches. This represented months of
works. As I learned, he had been patiently gathering material since
November when he first began building on my own research.
I read through all 759 matches and culled out those that I would
consider B-Level or above. There were 180 of these. As a control, I
tested them against my own 2006 book Sucker Punch, like Dreams and
Fugitive Days a memoir that deals extensively with race. In that I
am closer to Ayers in age, race, education, family and cultural
background than Obama is, our styles should have had more chance of
matching. They don't. Of the 180 examples, I matched, strictly
speaking, on six. Even by the most generous standard, we matched on
only sixteen.
Let me just cite a few matches between Ayers' work and Dreams that I
found intriguing. Rather astonishingly, as Mr. West points out, at
least six of the characters in Dreams have the same names as
characters in Ayers' books: Malik, Freddy, Tim, Coretta, Marcus, and
"the old man." Many of the stories involving these characters in
Dreams seem as contrived as their names.
In one instance, Obama reflects on his own first days as a ten
year-old at his Hawaiian prep school, a transition complicated by the
presence of "Coretta," the only other black student in the class.
When the other students accuse Obama of having a girlfriend, Obama
shoves Coretta and insists that she leave him alone. Although "his
act of betrayal" buys him a reprieve from the other students, Obama
understands that he "had been tested and found wanting."
Ayers relates a parallel story in Parent. He tells of a useful
reading assignment from the 1992 book, The Kind of Light That Shines
on Texas, by black author Reginald McKnight. The passage in question
deals with the travails of Clint, the first black student in a newly
integrated school, who repudiates Marvin, the only other black boy in
the school. Upon reflection, Clint thinks, "I was ashamed. Ashamed
for not defending Marvin and ashamed that Marvin even existed."
As Mr. Midwest pointed out in a recent missive, Ayers' interest in
education bleeds into Dreams. The tip-off once again is the
contrived name, in this case "Asante Moran," likely an homage to the
Afro-centric educator, Molefi Kete Asante. Moran lectures Obama and
his pal "Johnny" on the nature of public education.
"The first thing you have to realize," he said, looking at Johnnie
and me in turn, "is that the public school system is not about
educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are
about social control. Period."
"Social control" is an Ayers' bugaboo. "The message to Black people
was that at any moment and for any reason whatsoever your life or the
lives of your loved ones could be randomly snuffed out," he writes in
Fugitive Days. "The intention was social control through random
intimidation and unpredictable violence."
In Dreams, "Moran" elaborates on the fate of the black
student, "From day one, what's he learning about? Someone else's
history. Someone else's culture. Not only that, this culture he's
supposed to learn is the same culture that's systematically rejected
him, denied his humanity."
If this character were real, and Obama had actually met him, there
would be no reason to phony up his name. In fact, however, Moran is
spouting exactly the same educational philosophy that Ayers does in To Teach.
"Underneath it all," Ayers says of standard school textbooks, "the
social studies and literature texts reflected and promoted white
supremacy. There were no pictures or photographs of African
Americans . . . there was throughout an assumed superiority and smug
celebration of the status quo."
Both authors, by the way, use the phrase "beneath the surface"
repeatedly. And what they find beneath the surface, of course, is
the disturbing truth about power disparities in the real America,
which each refers to as an "imperial culture." Speaking of which,
both insist that "knowledge" is "power" and seem consumed by the uses
or misuses of power. Ayers, in fact, evokes the word "power" and its
derivatives 75 times in Fugitive Days, Obama 83 times in Dreams.
More exotically, both authors evoke images of a "boy" riding on the
backs of a "water buffalo" and prodding the beast not just with
sticks, but with "bamboo sticks." Ayers places his boy in
Vietnam. Obama puts his in Indonesia.
Both authors link Indonesia with Vietnam. In each case, clueless
officials - plural -- with the "State Department" try to explain how
the march of communism through "Indochina" will specifically imperil
"Indonesia." The Ayers account, however, at least sounds vaguely
real. The Obama account sounds like an Ayers' memory imposed on
Obama's mother. She allegedly discussed these geo-political strategy
sessions in Indonesia with her pre-teen son.
Ayers and his radical friends were obsessed with Vietnam. It defined
them and still does. To reflect their superior insight into that
country, they have shown a tendency to use "Mekong Delta" as
synecdoche, the part that indicates the whole.
In Fugitive Days, for instance, Ayers envisions "a patrol in the
Mekong Delta" when he conjures up an image of Vietnam. Ayers' wife,
Bernadine Dohrn, pontificated about "a hamlet called My Lai" in a
1998 interview, but to flash her radical chops, she located it "in
the middle of the Mekong Delta," which is in reality several hundred
miles from My Lai.
Given Obama's age, "Mekong Delta" was not likely a part of his
vocabulary, but that does not stop him from writing about "the angry
young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta." Ayers, of
course, would also have had a much deeper connection than Obama to
"Detroit," whose historic riot took place shortly before Obama's
sixth birthday. Ayers worked in Detroit the year after those same riots.
Returning to the exotic, in his Indonesian backyard Obama discovered
two "birds of paradise" running wild as well as chickens, ducks, and
a "yellow dog with a baleful howl."
In Fugitive Days, there is even more "howling" than there is in
Dreams. Ayers places his "birds of paradise" in Guatemala. He
places his ducks and dogs together in a Vietnamese village being
swept by merciless Americans. In Parent, he talks specifically about
a "yellow dog." And he uses the word "baleful" to describe an "eye"
in Fugitive Days. For the record, "baleful" means "threatening
harm." I had to look it up.
Ayers is fixated with faces, especially eyes. He writes of
"sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes,
eyes "like ice," and people who are "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed."
As it happens, Obama is also fixated with faces, especially eyes. He
also writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes,
"twinkling" eyes, and uses the phrases "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed."
Obama adds "smoldering eyes," "smoldering" being a word that he and
Ayers inject repeatedly. Obama also uses the highly distinctive
phrase "like ice," in his case to describe the glinting of the stars.
If Ayers is fixated on eyes, about eyebrows he is positively
fetishistic. There are six references to "eyebrows" in Fugitive Days
-- bushy ones, flaring ones, arched ones, black ones and, stunningly,
seven references in Dreams -- heavy ones, bushy ones, wispy ones. It
is the rare memoirist who talks about eyebrows at all.
On three occasions in Dreams, Obama speaks of people with "round"
faces. On four occasions in Fugitive Days, Ayers does the
same. Both speak of "grim-faced" people, people with "soft" faces,
and, most unusually, people with "tight" faces.
Both Ayers and Obama describe acquaintances who smile like a
"Cheshire cat." Some of their characters have a countenance -- grin,
squint, or scowl -- that is "perpetual." Others are "suppressing"
their smiles or their grins.
To this point, I have just skimmed the 759 items in the bill of
particulars in my case against Obama's literary genius. Not
familiar with the term "bill of particulars?" Uncertain myself, I
looked that one up too. It means a list of written statements made
by a party to a court proceeding. Ayers and Obama each refer
knowingly to a "bill of particulars." Doesn't everyone?
The answer, of course, is no. In Audacity of Hope, Obama does not
use this phrase or most of the distinctive words or combinations of
words in Dreams. In Audacity, for instance, there are virtually no
descriptions of faces or eyes, and the few that the author does use
are flat and clichéd -- like "brave face" or "sharp-eyed." In Dreams,
seven different people "frown," twelve "grin," and six "squint." In
Audacity, no more than one person makes any of these gestures.
Mr. West independently came to the same conclusion that I did, namely
that Ayers was not meaningfully involved in Audacity. These two
Obama books almost assuredly had different primary authors. What
should be transparent to any literary critic is that the author of
Audacity lacked the style and skill of the author of Dreams. There
are a few pockets in Audacity that evoke the spirit of Dreams but
without the same grace.
A likely suspect for these imitative passages, perhaps the whole of
Audacity, is Obama's young speechwriter, Jon Favreau. Favreau joined
the Obama team in 2005, time enough to play that role. The London
Guardian reports that Favreau carries Dreams wherever he goes and can
"conjure up his master's voice as if an accomplished
impersonator." If so, in Audacity he played the classic role of the
ghostwriter -- one who absorbs his client's thoughts and relates them
in a refined version of his client's voice.
Bill Ayers was no one's ghostwriter. The now overwhelming evidence
strongly suggests that he used the frame of Obama's life and finished
it off with his own ideas, his own biases, his own experiences, his
own passions, his own friends, even his own romances, all of this
toned down just enough to keep Obama viable as a potential candidate.
I would argue that Ayers played Cyrano to Obama's Christian. His
personal history was too ugly for him to woo Roxane/America
himself. But Obama -- "articulate and bright and clean and a
nice-looking guy," as Joe Biden reminded us -- could and did make
America's heart melt.
--
See also:
Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/who_wrote_dreams_from_my_fathe_1.html
Evidence Mounts: Ayers Co-Wrote Obama's Dreams
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/evidence_mounts_ayers_cowrote.html
The Odd Story of Romance in Dreams from my Father
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/the_odd_story_of_romance_in_dr.html
Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/who_wrote_dreams_and_why_it_ma_1.html
.
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