Dr. Franklyne Emmanuel Ogbunwezeh
Am 03.07.2011 um 00:33 schrieb Tracy Flemming <cafenegritude@gmail.com>:
> 4 curious errors in Obama's 'Dreams'
> Jack Cashill
> Posted: June 09, 2011
> 1:00 am Eastern
> © 2011
>
> In the retelling of his life in the acclaimed 1995 memoir "Dreams from
> My Father," Barack Obama embellishes and fabricates at will. He is
> particularly cavalier with dates. He gets these wrong as often as he
> does right.
>
> Obama does not, however, make an unusual number of errors in regards
> to general knowledge. Let me cite the four such errors I found and
> explain why they deserve our attention.
>
> Obama misquotes the Carl Sandburg poem "Chicago." Instead of writing
> "Hog Butcher for the World," he writes, "hog butcher to the world."
>
> In discussing radical anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon, Obama misspells
> his first name as "Franz."
>
> Obama refers to the South African city of Sharpeville, the site of a
> notorious massacre, as "Sharpsville."
>
> On another occasion, Obama misspells the name of rebel slave leader
> Denmark Vesey as "Denmark Vescey."
>
> Those few critics on the left who have bothered to look at my book
> "Deconstructing Obama," instinctively scoff at my thesis, namely that
> domestic terrorist Bill Ayers took over the book from a floundering
> Obama and put his own stamp on it.
>
> One minor clue to Ayers' involvement is that in his book "A Kind and
> Just Parent" Ayers misquotes the Sandburg poem in exactly the same way
> as Obama does, "hog butcher to the world."
>
> Jack Cashill's literary investigation uncovers revelations galore
> about Obama's alleged life narrative. Order the book "Deconstructing
> Obama: The Life, Love and Letters of America's First Post-Modern
> President"
>
> To be sure, there is much stronger evidence than this: the
> comprehensive postmodern patois that Obama and Ayers share, the
> matching 55 nautical metaphors, the identical educational
> philosophies, the shared use of the Conrad-like triple parallels, the
> nearly fetishistic eye and eyebrow metaphors, the three stunning
> parallel stories, the same weary '60s worldview, the borrowed Ayers
> girlfriend in "Dreams," the inarguably similar Homeric openings, the
> dramatically inferior writings of Obama before and after "Dreams," and
> more.
>
> Leftist critics routinely ignore most of this and fix on the seemingly
> trivial, like the Chicago poem. "Not an uncommon slip-up," Washington
> Post book editor Steven Levingston assured his readers when I first
> posted this online in 2009.
>
> In his review of my book in 2011 for the same Washington Post, Craig
> Fehrman made the same point. Among the "flimsy examples of stylistic
> overlap," Fehrman cites the fact that "Obama and Ayers both misquote a
> line from Carl Sandburg's famous poem 'Chicago.'"
>
> When I first read this, I had to wonder whether graduate student
> Fehrman had actually read the book or was merely trying to suck up to
> book editor Levingston. I say this because I had included an
> explanatory note about Levingston's criticism in "Deconstructing
> Obama."
>
> "To slip up in the same way," I wrote in the book, "Obama and Ayers
> must make a series of identical choices." For starters, they both have
> to refer to the poem, a natural for Ayers who grew up in Chicago in an
> era when students memorized poems, but not for Obama, who misquotes
> the poem even before he moves to Chicago.
>
> Obama could have adapted any number of noted phrases from the poem,
> "City of the Big Shoulders" for instance, or "Player with Railroads."
>
> In "Livin' the Blues," Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis, whose
> favorite poet was Sandburg, paraphrases him, referring to Chicago as
> that "broad-shouldered brute of a burgh."
>
> Instead, both use the same five words in isolation and no others. Both
> must get the third word wrong and no other, and both choose not to use
> capital letters the way Sandburg does. It was most likely that Ayers
> misquoted Sandburg from memory.
>
> In a similar vein, both authors misspell Frantz Fanon's first name as
> "Franz" and incorrectly refer to the South African city of Sharpeville
> in the possessive as Sharpsville (Obama) and Sharpesville (Ayers).
>
> It is not that these mistakes are uncommon, but rather that both Ayers
> and Obama have to make multiple choices to make the same mistake.
> Before writing this book, I had not heard of Sharpeville.
>
> Perhaps more telling, almost every time Obama makes a mistake, Ayers
> makes the same mistake. Yet, even when Ayers later corrects the error,
> he leaves clues as to his handiwork.
>
> "They did fight. Nat Turner, Denmark Vescey," an irate Obama says of
> America's slaves in "Dreams." In "Fugitive Days," published six years
> later and three years into the Google era, Ayers gets the spelling
> right.
>
> Here, Ayers cites "Nat Turner's uprising, Denmark Vesey's revolt" as
> positive examples of democratic action. What intrigues in this case is
> the use of the same two names in the same order, the latter name
> obscure save in radical circles.
>
> In any number of cases like this one, Obama seems to mimic Ayers'
> insider radical jargon. When the young Obama pontificates about "angry
> young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta," the voice of
> someone edgier and more aware works its way into print.
>
> In fact, Ayers and his radical friends were obsessed with Vietnam. The
> war there 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, when conjuring up an image of
> Vietnam, Ayers envisions "a patrol in the Mekong Delta."
>
> In a 1998 interview, Ayers' weatherwoman wife, Bernardine Dohrn,
> lectured about "a hamlet called My Lai," but to show her radical
> savvy, she located it "in the middle of the Mekong Delta," which is in
> reality several hundred miles from My Lai.
>
> Similarly, Ayers would have had a much deeper connection than Obama to
> Detroit, whose historic riot took place shortly before Obama's 6th
> birthday.
>
> Ayers was posted to Detroit the year after the riot and experienced
> its meltdown firsthand. In 2007, on his blog, he chose to
> "commemorate" the 40th anniversary of what he predictably calls the
> "Detroit Rebellion."
>
> Both Ayers and Obama have scenes in which clueless "State Department"
> officials – plural – link Indonesia with the march of communism
> through the archaic, colonial-sounding "Indochina."
>
> Both talk of the West's "imperial culture" and see themselves "behind
> enemy lines" in corporate America. Isolate any one of these matches,
> and it means nothing.
>
> Add them up, and the case is closed.
>
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