WingRight

Is Obama really the author of his memoirs?

WorldNetDailey has a fascinating commentary from Jack Cahill that explores the question of whether there is any real evidence that Obama had the literary talent to write his two books without substantial help.

He didn’t start off very well.

In 1981, Occidental’s literary magazine published two of Obama’s poems – “Pop” and “Underground.” These poems are only a little sillier than the average undergraduate’s, but they show not a glint of promise. From “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 …

Los Angeles media critic Kevin Roderick rightly described the exposure of Obama’s two published poems as a “semi-cruel exercise.”

In a similar spirit, the Independent of London headlined its article on Obama’s early poetry, “Pop goes myth of Obama the young prodigy.”

Somehow, Politico unearthed a single unsigned case comment from the Harvard Law Review that Obama reportedly wrote, although it is interesting that he forgot this piece until someone reminded him of it. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say, it’s pretty bad, even by law review standards. It’s clear that he didn’t win a write-in contest to become a law review member.

But then somehow, those few years later, this 33 year-old amateur with no paper trail beyond a hack legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes produced what Time magazine has called – with a straight face – “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”

The public is asked to believe that Obama did this on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I don’t buy this canard for a minute.

Lo and behold, Mr. Cahill’s literary sleuthing leads to another potential link between Obama and Bill Ayers, the author of his own memoir of a young terrorist bomber, entitled “Fugitive Days.” Ayers may have been a ghostwriter for Obama.

I won’t quote the lengthy original analysis, which you should read it in its entirety, but here is a sample of the Ayers/Obama literary style:

In reading Ayers, one senses that he is unaware how deeply his seagoing affects his language. “Memory sails out upon a murky sea,” he writes at one point.

Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. Obama also has a fondness for the word “murky” and its aquatic usages.

“The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs,” he writes, one of four times “murky” appears in “Dreams.” Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone.

“The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed,” he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of the word “flutter.”

Not surprisingly, Ayers uses “ship” as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book, he tells us that his mother is the “the captain of her own ship,” not a substantial one either but “a ragged thing with fatal leaks” launched into a “sea of carelessness.”

Obama, too, finds himself “feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship.” He also makes a metaphorical reference to “a tranquil sea.”

More intriguing is Obama’s unusual use of the word “ragged” as an adjective as in the highly poetic “ragged air” or “ragged laughter.”

Both books use “storms” and “horizons” both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an “unbounded horizon,” and Obama writes of “boundless prairie storms” and multiple horizons – “violet,” “eastern,” “western.”

In “Dreams,” we read of the “whole panorama of life out there” and in “Fugitive Days,” “the whole weird panorama.”

Ayers often speaks of “currents” and “pockets of calm” as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in “a menacing calm” or “against the current” or “into the current.”

The metaphorical use of the word “tangled” might also derive from one’s nautical adventures. Ayers writes of his “tangled love affairs” and Obama of his “tangled arguments.”

Tags: Obama //