The Conservative Cave

Current Events => Politics => Topic started by: 5412 on May 26, 2009, 11:11:59 AM

Title: Who wrote BO's book and why it matters
Post by: 5412 on May 26, 2009, 11:11:59 AM
Hi All,

Kinda long but a very interesting article in the American Thinker plus a reference to a question posed to Ayers.

regards,
5412


 

  Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters - http://www.americanthinke...eams_and_why_it_ma_1.html 

 
Return to the Article

May 24, 2009

Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters
By Jack Cashill

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.

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."

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.

<snip>

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.

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.

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."

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.


Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/who_wrote_dreams_and_why_it_ma_1.html at May 26, 2009 - 11:34:40 AM EDT


excerpted for copyright/fair use guidelines. -- Chris
Title: Re: Who wrote BO's book and why it matters
Post by: Chris on May 26, 2009, 06:33:46 PM
:lmao: The Bouncy That Launched A Thousand Ships. :-)