Posted on 10/22/2008 9:39:00 AM PDT by Amityschild
Bruce Heiden, professor of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University, makes the fascinating claim in his website "The Postliberal" that Barack Obama agrees with my assertion that he did not actually write his own memoir, Dreams From My Father. Heiden finds his evidence in the 1995 Introduction to the book.. Says Heiden:
According to Obama, he did some writing on another book, not a memoir but "an essay on the limits of civil rights litigation in bringing about racial equality" (xiii; all citations refer to the 2004 paperback edition). This book was never finished, and it doesn't exist. Obama says that his work on the "civil rights litigation" project was aborted by personal memories that forced themselves upon him: "I found my mind pulled..." (xiv). But he doesn't say how these memories turned into the book Dreams from My Father. In particular, he doesn't say he wrote the book. He says that Dreams "found its way onto these pages" (xvi).
As shall be seen, Heiden's analysis is cute but not too cute. Although he does not address the issue of Bill Ayers' likely involvement, Ayers deserves a critic like Heiden, one who is willing to finesse his way gleefully through Ayers' fun house mirrors. Ayers is nothing if not spooky, and he never hesitates to boast about it. "Memory is a delicate dance of desire and faith, " he tells us in Fugitive Days, "a shadow of a shadow, an echo of a sigh. We cheat. We steal. We remember in our favor." The Obama of Dreams has learned evasiveness at the side of a master.
Although Obama devotes his 1995 Introduction to relating where Dreams came from, he says not a word about actually writing it. According to Heiden, Obama accepted the role of writer only after publishers insisted he was one. Heiden describes the process:
"[Obama] did not exactly agree to write a book, but rather to do some writer-like things, that is, to clear his agenda for time to write, and ‘put thoughts to paper'. Would the transition of thoughts to paper involve words?"
Not surprisingly, Obama can never bring himself to say any more about the actual writing process than the curiously passive, "What has found its way onto these pages is a record of a personal, interior journey."
Heiden finds the Preface to the 2004 reissue even stranger than the 1995 introduction, especially since the two run back to back in the 2004 edition In the 2004 Preface, Obama says he "went to work" on Dreams, but he still does not say that he wrote it. "Obama's narrative then skips straight from ‘went to work,'" says Heiden, "to the completed book's publication." This review cannot do just justice to Heiden's sophisticated and often amusing deconstruction of Obama's work, here summarized in one dazzling sentence:
As Obama tells it, his authorship of Dreams was miraculous, because although he lacked the writing skill to be the author of anything, and he didn't want to be the author of a memoir, and he resisted becoming the author of a memoir, and he tried in vain to become the author of a different kind of book, and he never had an idea of being the author of anything until one or several publishers had the idea first and he agreed to accept the opportunity they offered to be an author, and even then he only considered himself an author as long as his publisher was selling his book, after which he reverted back to a complete non-author, reverted so completely that he wasn't even moved to reread his book when political opponents were using it against him--because, in short, despite all the reasons Obama gives why he couldn't have written a book like Dreams from My Father, and despite the fact that, according to Obama's account, he didn't write Dreams from My Father, nevertheless Dreams from My Father somehow "found its way" onto the page with Barack Obama's name under the title as the author. That's a miracle. It couldn't have happened.
Heiden describes this chain of events as "a miracle." He adds, "It couldn't have happened. So I infer that what Obama's fantastically unbelievable story probably means is that Obama did not write Dreams from My Father. He obfuscates the truth, but he does not completely bury it with an outright lie like, ‘I wrote Dreams from My Father.'"
As President Clinton proved, so much in progressive America ultimately depends on what the definition of "is" is.
Touche’
Oh! was it that Unrepentant Terrorist who Obie only saw in passing in the neighborhood once in awhile? That guy who has something major in common with Osama Bin Ladin?
The guy who bombed the Pentagon just like Osama Bin Ladin?
Its almost like they have a common friend! Osama Bin Ladin has stated he hopes Obama wins and so does Bill Ayers. Does one think Obama appreciates both of their Good Wishes?
What's the use. Evertime I do, YOU WAKE ME BACK UP!!!
;-)
But Senator Obama is no JFK.
I've waited months to say that.
Has anyone here actually read this book? I don’t care to waste my time with it, but I was just wondering. Jack Cashill seems to admire the skill in the language of DOMF, aside from the authorship issue. It sounded like one big long leftist rant about how terrible American society is, which seems very boring.
If you look up “plagiarism” in the dictionary, it says: “See Democratic Party”
Yes. 0bama did not exist in precisely the form Ayers required, therefore it was necessary for Ayers to invent him through DOMF.
I’ve decided that “Dreams” is the autobiography of William Ayers had he actually been born the poor black child he so wishes he had been.
I have.
Jack Cashill seems to admire the skill in the language of DOMF, aside from the authorship issue.
He qualified that, I believe. He admires the quality of some of the language employed in "Dreams from My Father," but finds much of it confusing -- and probably purposely so -- as well as boring in needless details and endless conversations. It's the kind of book in which you'll be hard-pressed to go back and find some reference or passage once you've read it, because there's not much logical order to it. A pad of annotated post-it notes is essential if you plan on finding any passages quickly.
It sounded like one big long leftist rant about how terrible American society is, which seems very boring.
Make that repeated soliloquies on the problem of race, racists and inequities caused by race -- launched on the flimsiest of excuses. For example, he writes of his parents' marriage and his birth in Hawaii, then launches into a history of miscegenation (interacial marriage) and racial discrimination against blacks -- but there were never any laws against miscegenation in Hawaii, and even his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, wrote extensively about how Hawaii was relatively free of discrimination against blacks; in fact, to Davis' delight, whites (haoles) were more likely to encounter discrimination there during the era Obama was born and grew up.
In general, the book raises more questions than it answers, and I doubt that many people, including the media, have slogged through the entire thing, page by page, until the merciful end.
LOL! That’s exactly what it was. Not that Barry was ever poor or even all black. But Barry was just Ayers’ vehicle for his fantasy, since every wealthy white radical regarded blacks as the authentic aggrieved “revolutionary,” and they wanted more than anything else in the world to be one of this heroic group. Trust me, I grew up and went to school with people like Ayers 40 years ago.
I disagree. Some people consider that his only qualification for president. It does matter if he actually wrote it.
Dreams of Neal Kinnock's father?
Nahhhh, wrong end of the ticket.
One thing many people don’t point out (with regard to the soliloquies on race, etc.) is how obviously influenced the book is by things that would not have influenced Obama, but would have been very significant to Ayers, who is about 15 years older, in other words, a different generation. The rants in Dreams seem to be very much influenced by Frantz Fanon, and even by Jean Genet and other French writers, who had built a cult of the heroic alienated criminal black male, sometimes a political terrorist, and sometimes not officially so. But it counted anyway, because the personal was the political, and therefore people like Eldridge Cleaver could claim that raping white women was a political act because it was meant to punish white men, who were, of course, the oppressors.
Be that as it may, by the time Obama decided that he had found a hook by identifying himself as black, those writers had passed their glory days. But not for whoever wrote Obama’s book.
JFK’S ghostwriter was Arthur Schlesinger, liberal yes, but a good American. If Ayres wrote Obama’s dreams, I have a problem
On a more specific level, Cashill's also pointed to Obama's use of the term "Mekong Delta" -- a phrase full of meaning to Ayers, but not likely to be in Obama's vocabulary.
Stokely Carmichael also appears in both Ayers' and Obama's books -- almost 20 years apart -- as an occasion of disappointment to Ayers in riot-torn Cleveland in 1966, telling the white man to get out of the way (after Ayers had spent the summer there convincing himself that he was solid with the brothers: "...by that time, I also thought I was black.")
In Obama's book, he appears in a lecture at Columbia in about 1985, and he is an old man who seems to throw Obama into confusion and despair, "It was like a bad dream...." Much like Ayers felt that day in Cleveland.
The more you examine the evidence for Cashill's theory, the more sense it makes.
If anyone asks Hussein any questions which make him uncomfortable, then they will be branded a racist.
I have written several studies and/or reports in the past 40 years, one of which was turned into a major Senate study on terrorism in Vietnam. I still have my original notes, investigative writing, and exhibits in a box in my basement.
The same for a book I did on the Holocaust.
It is time that Obama produce his working scripts of his books, including handwritten notes, as well as carbons or computer-saved text.
Yeah, and John Kerry will produce his SF180 military service form.
Hey devil. Throw away your winter coat. It ain’t gonna happen.
Yep! You hit the nail on the head.
Obie had just arrived from KRYPTON, and was sitting on his fire escape at his walkup on East 94th Street smoking his crack pipe; when a Brilliant Light came down and etched his Manuscript in Pure Gold. Obie then zeroxed his manuscript onto mere mortal paper and hocked the Gold for more Crack!
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