Like most Americans, I don’t have much time for Bill Ayers. Yes, I know he’s central to the vast left-wing conspiracy to elect Muslim Black Socialist Black Communist Black Muslim Blackity Black Black Black President Barack Hussein Super-Allah Obama, but he’s also a former terrorist — and no mincing words, that’s what he was. If you use violence against civilian targets to further political aims, you’re a terrorist, and while Ayers was ultimately not convicted of any crime, that doesn’t make him innocent. I have little time for the man.
That said, because Ayers and Obama — both professors at the University of Chicago — crossed paths a few times, Bill Ayers has become a Svengali figure in the right-wing mythology of Barack Obama, secret Kenyan. For bizarre, half-assed reasons, conservatives have convinced themselves that Ayers secretly wrote Barack Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father, because everyone knows African-Americans can’t write — I mean, Barack Obama just isn’t that good a writer. No, really.
This is, of course, incandescently offensive, but pretty much par for the course from the right, so one tends to ignore it, because the alternative is caring whether Bill Ayers lives or dies, and I don’t.
That said, my disdain for Ayers does not inculcate me from the ability to be amused by massive conservative fail, and that’s when one has to note that something wonderful has happened:
Anne Leary creates traffic and attention to her previously obscure blog with a picture of Bill Ayers and a “conversation” that sounds like suspiciously like a letter to WorldNetDaily’s forum:
Dear WND – I am a blogger from the midwest and I never thought this would happen to me…Leary (and you should be) claims that she said “Hey you’re Bill Ayers…” and a guilt-ridden Ayers immediately broke down and admitted that he wrote Barack Obama’s book.
Yep. A conservative blogger sits down next to Bill Ayers, and tell him that she’s a conservative blogger, and Ayers immediately tells her that he wrote Dreams from My Father, and she reported that as fact. Was Ayers serious? Of course not. Criminy, even Jonah Frickin’ Goldberg can see through this. But that didn’t stop much of the wingnutosphere from jumping on this as proof — proof! — that Bill Ayers is actually president.
You don’t have to like Bill Ayers to find that highly amusing.
Jonah shocked me with that post, but fortunately he’s reconsidered and is back to being unbelievably stupid.
I agree with Andrew McCarthy that a great deal of the intellectual right’s interest in Obama stems from his abilities as a writer, and therefore if he did not actually write Dreams from My Father — and especially if it was ghost-written by Ayers, thereby indicating an extremely close relationship — we should know.
However, Cashill’s analysis is incredibly bad.
One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama’s casual speech.
Yes, one does. There is a great deal of both the joking references to his wife in his off-the-cuff talk (in Dreams he talks about her annoyance with black men’s basketball obsession) and of the more high-flown rhetoric in work like his speech on race.
Cashill ignores the one rhetorical tic that did stick out at me when I read “Dreams” — Obama’s pervasive use of the word “bitter.” It’s even on the back cover of the paperback version.
I change no names, create no composite characters, alter no chronologies. Most memoirs observe the same conventions.
Bullshit. I’ve never heard of Jack Cashill, but some of the actually-well-known memoirists of our time do this. Pat Conroy does exactly this in “Water Is Wide.” Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” alters chronology. Scott Turow’s “One L” changes names. (A wise move when you’re writing about lawyers.) David Sedaris goes even further and has been accused of outright fiction. Madeline L’Engle’s children labeled her Crosswicks Journals fiction. Even Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” possibly the most important memoir ever written about the Holocaust, doesn’t live up to what Cashill claims are the norms of memoirs.
And this is just silly:
In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim.
Little acclaim? Compared to whom? “Dreams” got positive reviews from the NYT book review, which many writers would give up at least a thumb joint (you can hold a pen and tap a space bar with the nub) to get. It also was praised in the LA Times book review. Ayers referred to Obama as a writer in order to make the case that his neighborhood was rich in culture and thus a great environment for children’s intellectual development.
Perhaps most laughably, Cashill says that Obama’s LSAT scores would be an “intermediary sign of impending greatness.” I made a 172 on the LSAT; my husband made a 175; one of my friends made a 178. None of that is predictive of our ability to write a memoir.
Cashill sounds like an envious hack. The biggest acclaim of his career has been a Mid-America regional market Emmy (56 categories among TV stations in Missouri; Des Moines and Dubuque, Iowa; Little Rock, Ark.; Paducah, Ky.; and Shreveport, La.). Which in his bios almost always is described simply as an “Emmy,” like what Ken Burns picks up, rather than something for which a single Midwestern TV station will typically get literally a dozen nominations each year.
Cashill doesn’t appear to know Obama’s speaking or the memoir genre well enough to be analyzing Obama’s work for signs of other authors.
If you use violence against civilian targets to further political aims, you’re a terrorist, and while Ayers was ultimately not convicted of any crime, that doesn’t make him innocent. I have little time for the man.
Good for you. Many on the right have been accused of drinking “Anything associated with Obama is evil” Kool-Aid. Some apparently have, so fair enough. But too many on the left have their own brand of drink, called “Anything associated with Obama is good and right and light-bringing.” Glad to see that you have the straight story about this person and that there’s something you and I can unequivocally agree on.
As to the rest; right at the outset it seemed pretty far-fetched to me, so I never gave it any credence.
Anne Leary creates traffic and attention to her previously obscure blog with a picture of Bill Ayers and a “conversation” that sounds like suspiciously like a letter to WorldNetDaily’s forum:
A letter to WND forum – no, no, that’s classically how the letters to Penthouse Forum used to start back in the day. At which point a wildly improbable sexual fantasy would follow. In fact, IIRC at one point it became it’s own magazine.