[3 articles]
Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/who_wrote_dreams_and_why_it_ma_1.html
By Jack Cashill
May 24, 2009
While waiting for America's publishers to find their nerve, I had put
my research into the authorship of Barack Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams
From My Father on the back shelf. But then I heard Chris Matthews.
The Hardball host was weighing in on the subject of Sarah Palin's new
book deal. "Sarah Palin - now don't laugh - is writing a book,"
sneered Matthews. "Not just reading a book, writing a book."
"Actually in the word of the publisher she's "collaborating" on a
book," Matthews continued. "What an embarrassment! It's one of these
'I told you,' books that jocks do. You know she's already declared, I
mean, why they do it like this? 'She can't write, we got a
collaborator for her.'"
I dedicate what follows to Matthews and those willfully blind souls
like him. It is a work in progress, a collective one at that, aided
and abetted by nearly a score of volunteer co-conspirators from
Hawaii to Ohio to Israel to Australia. The thesis is simple enough:
Barack Obama needed substantial help to write his 1995 memoir, Dreams
From My Father. Moreover, unlike Sarah Palin, Obama chose to
conceal the identity of his collaborator and not without good reason.
To admit that he needed a collaborator would have undercut his
campaign for president and to reveal the name of that collaborator
would have ended it.
My involvement in this occasionally harrowing literary adventure
began in July 2008, entirely innocently. A friend sent me some short
excerpts from Dreams and asked if they were as radical as they
sounded. I bought the book, located the excerpts, and reported back
that, in context, the excerpts were not particularly troubling.
But I did notice something else. The book was much too well written.
I had seen enough of Obama's interviews to know that he did not speak
with anywhere near the verbal sophistication on display in Dreams.
About six weeks later, for entirely unrelated reasons, I picked up a
copy of Bill Ayers 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days. Ayers, I discovered,
writes very well and very much like "Obama."
In mid-September, after considerable digging, I wrote a few
speculative articles for American Thinker and other online journals
and discovered that I was not alone in my suspicions.
Looking for some scientific verification, I consulted Patrick Juola
of Duquesne, a leading authority in the field of literary
forensics. Juola, however, advised me against relying on computer
analysis on a subject this sensitive. "The accuracy just isn't
there," he told me. He encouraged me instead "to do what you're
already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work." I
took his advice.
The first question I had to resolve was whether the 33 year-old
Barack Obama was capable of writing what Time Magazine has called
"the best-written memoir ever produced by an American
politician." The answer is almost assuredly "no."
In his bestselling study of success, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
painstakingly lays out what he calls the "ten-thousand-hour
rule." Gladwell quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin to the effect that
"ten thousand hours of practice [in any subject] is required to
achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class
expert" and cites example after example to make his case.
Obama appears to have lopped about 9900 hours off that standard. In
Dreams, he speaks of writing only the occasional journal entry and
some "very bad poetry." He does not sell himself short on the
poetry. From his undergraduate poem, "Underground":
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .
If possible, Obama's early prose showed less promise than his
poetry. Although the Obama camp has been notoriously shy about
releasing proof of Obama's assumed genius-SAT scores, LSAT scores,
transcripts, theses-I was able to unearth three essays in print that
predate Dreams.
In March 1983, Obama wrote an 1800-word article, "Breaking the War
Mentality," for Columbia University's weekly news magazine,
Sundial. Five years later, he wrote an essay titled "Why Organize,"
which was reprinted in a 1990 book called After Alinsky: Community
Organizing in Illinois.
In the Sundial article there are an appalling five sentences in which
the subject noun does not agree with the verb. In some sentences,
like the following, the punctuation and word selection are as random
as the grammar: "The belief that moribund institutions, rather than
individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM's energies alive."
Although "Why Organize" seems to be better edited, in neither of
these two clunky essays does Obama turn a single phrase that is
clever, concise, or even vaguely memorable. In 1990, he wrote an
unsigned student case comment for the Harvard Law Review. The prose
here, although reasonably well edited, is even more dull and leaden.
It was not Obama's style but his election as the first black
president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990-more of a popularity than
a literary contest-that netted him a roughly $125,000 advance for a
proposed book. According to a 2006 article by liberal publisher
Peter Osnos, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract when Obama could
not deliver, despite a sojourn to Bali to help him write.
It was about this time that Bill Ayers entered the picture. "I met
[Obama] sometime in the mid-1990s." he would later tell Salon. "And
everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For
the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants
to be mayor of Chicago."
Obama needed help, and Ayers had the means, the motive, and the
ability to provide it. Unlike Obama, he has a well-established paper
trail. He co-authored the 1974 tract, "Prairie Fire: The Politics
of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, in which book, by the way, he
misspells Frantz Fanon's first name as "Franz" just as Obama does in
Dreams, and nearly twenty books thereafter as writer and editor.
Ayers, we know, provided an informal editing service for like-minded
friends in the neighborhood. Aspiring radical Rashid Khalidi attests
to this in the acknowledgements in his 2004 book, Resurrecting
Empire. "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his
family's dining room table to do some writing for the project."
Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed
the help. Having no political ambitions, Khalidi was willing to
acknowledge it.
Dreams was published in June 1995. That same year, Ayers was busy
fueling the ambitions of his young protégé, first with an appointment
to the chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant and later with
a fundraiser in his Chicago home. Ayers admits that his "imagination
ran out of steam." He thought he was launching a mayor that he could
exploit, even control, not a president, who would move quickly beyond
his grasp.
After Dreams was published in 1995, Obama's typewriter fell silent
once again. He contributed not one signed word to any law journal or
other publication of note until his unexceptional and conspicuously
ghosted 2006 book, Audacity of Hope. Obama was not a writer. As his
lame inaugural address proved, he still isn't.
It is possible that Obama actually met Ayers in New York in the early
1980s. In his brief New York sojourn, he often seems to be
channeling the thoughts and experiences of the world weary Ayers who
lived in New York the same years as Obama. "Like a tourist, I watched
the range of human possibility on display," writes Obama in Dreams,
"trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw,
looking for some opening through which I could re-enter."
Re-enter? This seems more the reflection of a soon to be ex-fugitive
than that of a Columbia undergrad. It is in New York too that Obama
feels himself living "behind enemy lines," the exact phrase that
Ayers uses to describe his life in the underground.
The opening scene of Dreams takes place in the early 1980s in and
around Obama's New York City apartment with its "slanting"
floors. As the scene unfolds, Obama is making breakfast "with coffee
on the stove and two eggs in the skillet." In Fugitive Days, Ayers
inhabits an apartment with "sloping floors." He too cooks a lot --
his books are rich with often sensual food imagery -- and uses a
"skillet," a southern regionalism.
Obama tells the reader that the buzzer downstairs did not work and
that visitors had to call from a pay phone at the corner gas
station. There, "A black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through
the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle."
Fugitive Days opens at a pay phone. (Unless specified otherwise, all
Ayers' references will be to Fugitive Days and Obama's to Dreams).
Ayers spent much of his underground years waiting at pay phones. He
writes about pay phones with the loving detail art critics reserve
for Picassos. The vivid image of the Doberman almost assuredly comes
from his experience. Obama had no reason to use that pay phone, if
it even existed.
Obama shared his apartment with a roommate, who would scream "with
impressive rage" at "white people" whose dogs pooped on their
sidewalks. Adds Obama, ""We'd laugh at the faces of both master and
beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed."
Both Ayers and Obama speak of "rage" the way that Eskimos do of snow
-- in so many varieties, so often, that they feel the need to qualify
it, here as "impressive rage," elsewhere in Dreams as "suppressed
rage" or "coil of rage," and in Fugitive Days as "justifiable rage,"
"uncontrollable rage," "blind rage," "and, of course, "Days of Rage."
Another note of interest is that all of the distinctive words in the
sentence above -- "master," "beast," "grim," "unapologetic," and
"deed," as well as the phrase "hunkered down" -- appear in Fugitive Days.
In the opening pages, Obama makes an exception to his unlikely New
York "solitude" for an elderly neighbor, a "stooped" gentleman who
wore a "fedora." In Fugitive Days, it was Ayers' grandfather who is
"stooped" and a helpful stranger who wears a "fedora."
One day, Obama's roommate finds his neighbor dead, "crumpled up on
the third-floor landing, his eyes wide open, his limbs stiff and
curled up like a baby's." Ayers tells of watching his mother die,
"eyes half open, curled up and panting." In both cases, the eyes are
"open" and the body is "curled up."
On the neighbor's mantelpiece, Obama reports seeing "the faded
portrait of a woman with heavy eyebrows and a gentle smile." There
are seven references to "eyebrows" in Dreams -- heavy ones, bushy
ones, wispy ones, and six in Fugitive Days -- bushy ones, flaring
ones, arched ones, black ones.
Who writes about eyebrows? In the lengthy excerpts that I have
gathered from a half dozen other contemporary political memoirs --
150,000 words in all -- there is no mention of "eyebrows" at
all. Nor is there anyone or anything "stooped," "curled,"
"crumpled," "hunkered down," or wearing a "fedora."
At the climax of the opening sequence, Obama receives a phone
call. It comes from an African aunt. "Listen, Barry, your father is
dead," she tells him. Obama has a hard time understanding. "Can you
hear me?" she repeats. "I say, your father is dead." The line is cut,
and the conversation ends abruptly.
The opening sequence of Fugitive Days climaxes in nearly identical
fashion. This phone call comes from Ayers' future wife, Bernardine
Dohrn. "Diana is dead," says Dohrn of Ayers' lover Diana Oughton,
killed in a bomb blast. Ayers has a hard time understanding. "Diana
is dead," she "repeats slowly." Ayers drops the line, and the
conversation ends abruptly.
At the conclusion of Dreams' opening scene, a stunned Obama "sat down
on the couch, smelling eggs burn in the kitchen, staring at cracks in
the plaster, trying to measure my loss." This passage features
Obama's signature rhetorical flourish, the triple parallel without a
joining conjunction. There are scores of such examples throughout
Dreams, perhaps hundreds:
"...the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the
tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds."
"Her face powdered, her hips girdled, her thinning hair bolstered,
she would board the six-thirty bus to arrive at her downtown office
before anyone else."
"...his eyes were closed, his head leaning against the back of his
chair, his big wrinkled face like a carving stone."
As it happens, Ayers' signature rhetorical flourish, likely cribbed
from Joseph Conrad, is the triple parallel without a joining
conjunction. There are scores of such examples throughout Fugitive
Days, perhaps hundreds:
"He inhabited an anarchic solitude-disconnected, smart,obsessive."
"We swarmed over and around that car, smashing windows, slashing
tires, trashing lights and fenders-it seemed the only conceivable thing to do."
"...trees are shattered, doors ripped from their hinges, shorelines
rearranged."
More intriguing still, Obama seems to borrow the one girlfriend in
the oddly sexless Dreams from Ayers' experience. "There was a woman
in New York that I loved," he tells his half-sister years after the
fact. "She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes."
The woman of Obama's memory evokes images of Diana Oughton. As her
FBI files attest, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes. The two
women shared similar family backgrounds as well. In fact, they
seemed to have grown up on the very same estate.
"The house was very old, her grandfather's house," Obama writes of
his girlfriend's country home. "He had inherited it from his
grandfather." According to a Time Magazine article written soon after
her death, Oughton "brought Bill Ayers and other radicals" to the
family homestead in Dwight, Illinois. The main house on the Oughton
estate, a 20-room Victorian mansion, was built by Oughton's father's
grandfather.
The carriage house, in which Oughton lived as a child, now serves as
a public library. It may have already seemed like one when Ayers
visited, an impression that finds its way into Obama's memory of a
library "filled with old books and pictures of the famous people [the
grandfather] had known-presidents, diplomats, industrialists."
"It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us," Obama writes of
his visit to his girlfriend's country home, "and we paddled a canoe
across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected
along the shore." As can be seen from aerial photos even today, the
Oughton estate also has a small lake and is surrounded by woods.
Curiously, Obama tells the story of this past love while cutting "two
green peppers." In his 1997 book, A Kind And Just Parent, Ayers
specifically links "green peppers" with "saltpeter" and other
substances that scare young men with the threat of impotence. Go figure.
Ayers lived a considerably more adventurous life than Obama,
beginning with his youthful days as a merchant seaman in the North
Atlantic. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular
experience," Ayers writes. Yet much of the nautical language that
flows through Fugitive Days flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.
Although there are only the briefest of literal sea experiences in
Dreams, the following words appear in both Dreams and in Ayers' work:
fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first
mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, anchors, barges, horizons,
ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling,
fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky.
My own memoir on race, Sucker Punch, offers a useful control. It
makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to any of the
above words save "current" and "tides." Yet I have spent a good chunk
of every summer of my life at the ocean and many a day on a boat.
Ayers equates the flow of water with that of language. "The debates
swam above and around and through us," he writes. "The confrontation
in the [Student Union] flowed like a swollen river in to the
teach-in, carrying me along the cascading waters from room to room,
hall to hall, bouncing off boulders."
In Dreams, Obama makes the very same equation. "I heard all our
voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling
over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream," he
writes, "my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in
memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to
that single course, a single story."
For the one and only time in his career, Obama writes in the language
of postmodernism, a language the academic Ayers has mastered. Ayers
describes Fugitive Days as "a memory book," one that deliberately
blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. In
Dreams, Obama admits, some characters are composites. Some appear out
of precise chronology. Names have been changed.
Ayers seems consumed with lies, lying and what he calls "our
constructed reality." The Obama of Dreams says much the same and in
much the same language. "But another part of me knew that what I was
telling them was a lie," he writes, "something I'd constructed from
the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."
That they both speak of "narratives," "traps," "contradictions,"
"intimacies," and "journeys" is not exceptional. That is standard
postmodern patois. What is exceptional is their shared use of
advanced postmodern slang -- the "fictions" into which they and
others force their lives, the "grooves" into which they have fallen,
the "poses" they assume, and even the "stitched together" nature of
the lives they or their relatives lead.
More convincing still are those complex tropes in Dreams that appear,
only slightly altered, in Ayers' books. In his 1993 book, To Teach,
Ayers writes, "Education is for self-activating explorers of life,
for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for
citizens." "Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal
subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for
obedient soldiers."
In Dreams, these thoughts find colloquial expression in the person of
"Frank," the real life poet, pornographer and Stalinist, Frank
Marshall Davis. "Understand something, boy," Frank tells the
college-bound Obama. "You're not going to college to get educated.
You're going there to get trained." Both authors make the point that
"training" strips the individual of his racial identity.
In To Teach, Ayers recounts the story of an ambitious teacher who
takes her students out to the streets of New York to learn about its
culture and history. These students ask to see the nearby Hudson
River. When they get to the river's edge, one student says, " Look,
the river is flowing up." A second student says, "No, it has to flow
south-down." Upon further research, the teacher discovers "that the
Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south,
and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."
In Dreams, written two years later, Obama takes an unlikely detour to
the exact spot on the parallel East River where the north-flowing
tide meets the south-flowing river. There, improbably, a young black
boy approaches this strange man and asks, "You know why sometimes the
river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?" Obama
tells the boy it "had to do with the tides."
For the literary left, the fact that Ayers helped Obama would be a
less troubling revelation than that Obama needed help at all. They
have built a foundational myth around his genius, a genius that can
be located only in Dreams. The dark side of the Democrat genius
mythology, of course, is the Republican dunce mythology of which
Sarah Palin and George Bush are the most recent victims.
There is thus a logic to the left's willful blindness. Why the
literary right has accepted this charade continues to baffle me.
--
Video: The Washington Times asks Ayers about his "collaboration" with
Obama on "Dreams From My Father."
http://www.thefoxnation.com/politics/2009/05/19/bill-ayers-back-and-hurls-insult-reporter
--
Jack Cashill has written six books this decade, one of which,
"Hoodwinked," dealt with literary fraud. Cashill has also served as
"literary doctor" on several other books, two of which were best
sellers by household names. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from
Purdue University.
--------
The Washington Times Asks Bill Ayers if He Wrote Obama's First Book
http://washingtonindependent.com/43733/washington-times-asks-bill-ayers-if-he-wrote-obamas-first-book
By David Weigel
5/20/09
Kerry Picket of The Washington Times trekked to Baltimore to hear
former Weatherman Bill Ayers speak yesterday and sparked an exchange
that the paper is teasing on its op-ed page with a lot of huffing
about Ayers's terrorist past ("His radicalism and chosen profession
bring to mind Oscar Wilde's quip that, 'Everybody who is incapable of
learning has taken to teaching.'"). Curiously, the paper doesn't
mention what Picket actually asked Ayers about the conspiracy
theory that he ghost-wrote President Obama's first book, "Dreams From
My Father."
From the video, after Picket asks Ayers a few times about what the
president thinks of his new book:
WASHINGTON TIMES: I'm just curious whether or not your publisher has
sent a copy to President Obama.
AYERS: Have you gotten any feedback on your writings from the
president? (Laughter)
WASHINGTON TIMES: Considering you may have had a collaboration with
"Dreams of (sic) My Father."
AYERS: I never had a collaboration. No.
WASHINGTON TIMES: No?
AYERS: That's a myth.
The idea that Ayers wrote Obama's first memoir was popularized by
conservative author Jack Cashill on the conspiracy site
WorldNetDaily, one of the hubs of the discredited theory that Obama
was not born in Hawaii. Cashill's investigation is a funny read, full
of "proof" like Obama's use of a nautical metaphor and asides such
"in Obama, alas, Ayers may have found a much more lethal weapon to
use against the 'marauding monster' called America than any pipe bomb
he could have ever built." The most traction this has gotten in the
mainstream conservative press was an October blog post by National
Review contributer Andy McCarthy, in which he credited Cashill for
raising "significant questions about whether Obama is the rara avis
he's portrayed to be."
For The Washington Times, these are still "significant questions."
--------
Did Bill Ayers Help Obama Write "Dreams Of My Father"?
http://www.kxmc.com/News/Nation/379988.asp
May 24 2009
After hearing leftists mock Sarah Palin for daring to write a book
about her experiences running on a Presidential ticket, and using a
fully acknowledged collaborator to do it, Jack Cashill at the
American Thinker decided to take a closer look at Obama's book Dreams
of my Father. His conclusion? It's pretty clear that Bill Ayers
collaborated with Obama on it.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/who_wrote_dreams_and_why_it_ma_1.html
It's a long article that's worth reading in total, but here's a taste:
More convincing still are those complex tropes in Dreams that appear,
only slightly altered, in Ayers' books. ...
In To Teach, Ayers recounts the story of an ambitious teacher who
takes her students out to the streets of New York to learn about its
culture and history. These students ask to see the nearby Hudson
River. When they get to the river's edge, one student says, " Look,
the river is flowing up." A second student says, "No, it has to flow
south-down." Upon further research, the teacher discovers "that the
Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south,
and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."
In Dreams, written two years later, Obama takes an unlikely detour to
the exact spot on the parallel East River where the north-flowing
tide meets the south-flowing river. There, improbably, a young black
boy approaches this strange man and asks, "You know why sometimes the
river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?" Obama
tells the boy it "had to do with the tides."
Personally, I don't really care if Obama did collaborate with Bill
Ayers on his book. Of course, given how toxic Ayers is politically
and how extensively Obama seems to have claimed Ayers' experiences as
his own, the reality of that much-hyped book doesn't reflect well on
Obama himself. But whatever.
My real problem is how often Obama is touted as this heady
intellectual, this cultured and philosophic man, when he so clearly
isn't. It is liberal dogma that liberals are intellectuals and
conservatives are ignorant rubes, but that seems to have more to do
with the insecurities of liberals than reality.
.
