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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