"Obama, do you like figs? Nice, jucy...ripe...figs?"
Posted on 03/05/2010 5:42:54 PM PST by pissant
In 1981, the 19 year-old Barack Obama published two poems in the spring 1981 edition of Occidental College's literary magazine, Feast.
One is a silly adolescent ode to "apes that eat figs" called “Underground.” The second is an obviously superior poem called “Pop.” Critic Warwick Collins rightly describes it as "by far the more powerful and complex" of the two, and his is the consensus opinion.
Several mainstream reviewers have chosen to see in "Pop" the seeds of the literary genius that would flower in Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. A closer inspection, however, shows an early sign of Obama’s willingness to take credit for something he could not himself write.
This chicanery would reach fruition in Dreams, the acclaimed literary success that laid the foundation of the Obama genius myth. The evidence that Obama pal and mentor, Bill Ayers, largely ghosted this memoir now overwhelms the objective reviewer.
“Pop” too is almost surely ghosted, and the ghost in this case would have been an earlier Obama mentor, the communist poet and pornographer Frank Marshall Davis. What makes Davis’s involvement interesting is that the poem is surely about him as well.
My confidence in this thesis derives not just from the startling difference in style and sophistication between “Pop” and “Underground,” but from the equally startling similarities between “Pop” and a 1975 Davis poem titled “To A Young Man.” (Kudos to my correspondent who unearthed it.)
In each of the poems, the young man is the narrator. This is more obvious in “Pop” as the poem was published under Obama’s name. In “To A Young Man” the young man’s narration is implicit.
In both poems, the old man, the Davis character, is discussed in the third person. In the 1981 poem, the narrator calls him “Pop;” in the 1975 poem, “the old man.”
In each poem, when this older character speaks to the young man, he does so without benefit of quotation marks. In “To A Young Man,” the Davis character says on one occasion:
Since then I have drunk
Half a hundred liquid years
Distilled
Through restless coils of wisdom
Note the similar flow of language in “Pop”:
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
As is evident in these two short samples, both poems are written in free verse and make ready use of what is called “enjambment,” that is the abrupt continuation of a sentence from one line into the next.
There are parallels in word choice as well as style. “Neat” means without water or ice. “Neat” and “Distilled” both suggest a kind of alcoholic purity. Each of these words is emphasized by isolating it from the flow of the text.
In each case, too, the older man shares his wisdom with a “young man” who may not be eager to hear it. The young man of “Pop” dismisses that wisdom as a mere “spot” in his brain, “something / that may be squeezed out, like a/ Watermelon seed between/ Two fingers.”
Comparably, the narrator of “To A Young Man” observes that the old man “walked until/ On the slate horizon/ He erased himself.”
Whether “squeezed out” or “erased” from the young man’s consciousness, the Davis character understands just how tenuous is his hold on the lad. For all his awareness, however, he finds a certain drunken satisfaction in the exchange.
Towards the end of “To A Young Man,” the old man “turned/
His hammered face/ To the pounding stars/ Smiled/ Like the ring of a gong.”
“Pop” also concludes on an upbeat note, “I see my face, framed within / Pop’s black-framed glasses/ And know he’s laughing too.”
There is no reason to believe that the “young man” of the 1975 poem is Obama. The reader is told that the younger fellow is twenty years old and that the old man is fifty years older.
Davis was precisely seventy in 1975, but Obama was no more than fourteen. Lacking too in the 1975 poem is the intimacy and anxiety that characterizes “Pop.”
In fact, “Pop” hints at both a blood relationship between the two men and a sexual one. The very name of the poem implies paternity, and in the poem the young man uses reflections and mirrors to show a physical resemblance between himself and the old man.
As to a possible sexual relationship between Obama and the admittedly bi-sexual Davis, the poem offers some intriguing evidence: “Pop . . . points out the same amber/ Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and/ Makes me smell his smell, coming/ From me.”
Although it is impossible to confirm that Davis either sired Obama or sexually abused him, this imagery does at the least reek of some unsavory boundary violation.
As compensation, Davis may well have slipped this “green young man” a poem for publication. Such an everyday fraud would not have seemed unethical to an old man used to the “flim and flam” of a world where “one plus one” does not necessarily make “two or three or four.”
Trained to believe that nothing adds up and the deck is stacked against him, Obama has seemed from the beginning entirely comfortable with his counterfeit literary career.
PING
I have suggested for some time that “Pop” is about young Barry and his mentor, and that it suggests sexual perversion.
This is an interesting addition to that thesis—that the author might have been Davis rather than young Barry. It is, certainly, an accomplished poem, and unlike Barry, Davis was an experienced writer.
“Pop” was published in the Occidental College student paper, but can be found reprinted in the NY Slimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/us/politics/18poems.html
Or maybe it was just a young impressionable poet using the style of his mentor and stealing an idea.
~~PING!
Barry couldn’t afford a TelePrompter then I guess.
And, without knowing that you took that position, I have been in agreement with it. He is an incredibly damaged person.
I have heard instead that - Davis sired Obama when his mom went astray with Davis. He supposedly took pictures of her while she was naked in suggestive poses. It could’ve happened then.
Interesting. I did notice when reading the above poem and the “apes eating figs” poem how crappily written the “apes” one was compared to the “Pop” poem.
Until more evidence is dug up about 0bama, no one knows. Or rather, those who know aren’t telling (yet).
Yes, that’s possible, but not known.
Frank Marshall Davis was a KGB agent sent by Stalin. The Communists of that time believed that ALL sexual morality was simply bourgeois illusion and that religion, along with conventional morality, was the opium of the proletariat, something that had to be eliminated. Davis’s pornographic autobiographical novel describes sex with minor girls, including a menage a trois conducted with his equally slimy wife, as well as pederastic sex with small boys.
Evidently he would sit up evenings with young Barry and give him scotch to drink. It seems likely enough that his grandfather was aware of much of this and approved of it. One way to prove you were a good Communist was to scorn traditional morality and bring your family up to scorn it.
It’s not impossible that Davis could have been Barry’s covert father AND his molestor, both. That’s the kind of guy he was, according to his own book. But no way to tell.
Thanks. I’ve been following his series!
Interesting research/analysis by Cashill as usual. Thanks for posting.
"Obama, do you like figs? Nice, jucy...ripe...figs?"
Here is a search tha talks about the possible link for that information.
I saw a better article last year about this possible paternal link between Obama and Davis and that is why Obama won’t release his birth certificate; and why his writing does not match his writing from his first book. The writing is more in line with what Davis style is. But I forgot to save it. I thought I had.
Who knows!
Both are lousy poems.
I forgot to add that the article I read implied that Davis’s influence and money is how Obama got to go to the elite colleges that he did - because his white grandparents couldn’t have afforded them - or the trip around the world that Obama took.
I don’t know.
Yes, I think that Obama is a malignant narcissist and also is probably gay. Both these severe psychological disorders presumably result from his having been abandoned by his father and his mother, and molested by his “mentor,” who was chosen for him by his grandfather.
It depends what you mean by “lousy poem.” “Pop” is disgusting, and therefore not something you would want to spread around, but I think it’s quite skillfully written for a piece of pornographic trash.
I hadn’t really thought about that aspect of it until reading Cashill’s article just now. But he’s quite right. It’s probably above Obama’s skill level as a writer. Obama is barely capable of expressing himself without a speechwriter to put it on the teleprompter for him. The few things we know he wrote are pedestrian. Could he have written that poem? If so, it’s far better than anything else he has written, stylistically.
I have not studied Barry's writings, but I know what I have read is not the language of an educated man. It is sophomoric at best. Having now seen the other poem that Cashill revealed, I can see that they are written by the same person. No two people would use the same poetic structure and the same idioms. I think that Davis is probably the father and Obama the first was probably paid to be the cover. Obama the second bears no resemblance to the Kenyan. Just my speculation. FWIW
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