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What I Learned from Obama's Pop
American Thinker ^
| 3-7-2010
| Jack Cashill
Posted on 03/06/2010 10:19:02 PM PST by smoothsailing
March 07, 2010What I Learned from Obama's Pop
By Jack Cashill
"Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!"
- Alice in Wonderland
A little more than a month ago, I began my first descent into the rabbit hole of Barack Obama's origins, a place known to swallow reputations whole. What prompted my inquiry was an e-mail from a correspondent asking my opinion of "
Pop," a poem published under the 19-year-old Obama's name in the spring 1981 edition of Occidental College's literary magazine,
Feast. Having no prior bias going in, here is what I have concluded coming out.
- Questioning Obama's origins is a legitimate enterprise. Even by their own humble standards, the major media -- including Obama's biographers -- have done an impressively slack job in tracing the president's uncertain roots.
- Obama was almost assuredly born in Hawaii. There is no evidence that puts him elsewhere. Undoing the Kenyan possibility is the high likelihood that the "marriage" between Barack Sr. and Ann Dunham was a sham.
- Much depends on that marriage. "My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation," said Obama, establishing the romantic narrative in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. His father was from Kenya. His mother was from "a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas."
- To paraphrase Harry Reid, Obama was no ordinary "Negro." Said Joe Biden of Obama's background, "I mean, that's a storybook, man." Enough depends on this story that Team Obama would and has dissembled to preserve it.
- For starters, Ann Dunham spent her formative years in Washington State, several of them in the progressive cocoon of Mercer Island. It was to Washington that she returned for a year immediately after Obama's birth, a fact missed by every Obama biography I could find.
- Baby Barack spent most of his first year in Washington as well, another fact overlooked by the biographers.
- There is not much storybook to a romance in which the mother leaves home immediately after her son's birth. Barack Sr.'s close friends have no memory even of a relationship between him and Dunham.
- When Barack Sr. left Hawaii a year after Obama's birth, Ann's father Stanley was there to see him off with smiles. He would always speak well of the black man who knocked up his daughter and then abandoned wife and child -- mighty unusual behavior from a father-in-law.
- There was a marriage license from another county, Maui -- a classic way to avoid local notification -- and a divorce, but if there was a wedding, then no one attended it. There was no ring, no photos, no leis.
- Ann Dunham met Barack Sr. in Russian class. (In 1960, people like Lee Harvey Oswald took Russian classes.) The possibility that the Dunhams recruited Barack Sr. to front for a less savory impregnation of Ann by a black man makes more sense than the fabled romance. Obama looks nothing like Barack Sr.
- No, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the father was Malcolm X.
- This brings us back to "Pop." Every mainstream reviewer I could find has argued that the subject of the poem was Obama's grandfather, Stanley Dunham. None of them asked why Obama would write a poem about his "Gramps" and title it "Pop." None addressed the questions of paternity implicit in the title and in the confrontation between son and father figure.
- On closer examination, the poem is almost assuredly about Obama's African-American mentor, the communist Frank Marshall Davis. There are two good reasons to assert this. One is that "Pop" recites a poem that he had written. Davis was a poet. Dunham was not.
- The second reason is that "Pop" actually appears to have been written by Davis about his own relationship with Obama.
- A stronger case can be made for Davis's authorship than for Obama's. For one, "Pop" has a different style altogether from a silly adolescent poem called "Underground" published under Obama's name along with "Pop" in Feast. Critic Warwick Collins rightly describes "Pop" as "by far the more powerful and complex" of the two, and his is the consensus opinion.
- For another, "Pop" closely resembles in style, language, and subject a matter a poem published by Davis in 1975 called "To A Young Man." The literary analyst who unearthed this poem -- I have referred to him as "Mr. West" -- has argued for Davis as "Pop" from the beginning.
- In each of the two poems in question, the young man is the narrator. In each, 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/ Hal 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.
- Both poems are published with a seeming typo that may, in fact, be a pun.
In "To A Young Man," as cited above, the old man says, "Since then I have drunk/ Hal a hundred liquid years/ Distilled." On first reading, I presumed the capitalized "Hal" to be a reference to young Prince Hal of Shakespeare's Henry IV with an allusion to old man as Hal's wayward guide, Sir John Falstaff. The sentence reads better, however, if the old man, fifty years older than his young friend, says, "I have drunk half a hundred liquid years."
-
In "Pop," the older man "Stands, shouts, and asks
/For a hug, as I shink." Most reviewers simply dismiss "shink" as a typo, the right word being "shrink." Still, as poet Ian McMillan notes in the U.K. Guardian, "shink" literally means "to be hit in the face with a penis." I am not making this up.
- 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, the older man 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 bisexual 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."
- It is impossible to confirm that Davis either sired Obama or sexually abused him, but 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" ("Pop") of a world where "one plus one" does not necessarily make "two or three or four" ("To A Young Man").
- 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.
- This chicanery would reach fruition in Dreams, the acclaimed literary success that laid the foundation of the Obama-as-genius myth. The evidence that Obama pal and mentor Bill Ayers largely ghosted this memoir now overwhelms the objective reviewer.
- In the final analysis, Davis, a pornographer with a stated fondness for young white women, makes as likely a suspect to be Obama's blood father as Barack Sr. Team Obama's evasiveness about the birth certificate and other questions of origins may have something to do with paternity issues.
- Questions about Obama's citizenship remain in play. His seeming adoption by the Muslim Lolo Soetoro and his removal to Indonesia cloud the issue of nationality. Obama was, in fact, registered at school there as "Barry Soetoro," a "Muslim" and an Indonesian citizen.
- Contrary to rumor, Obama could have traveled to Pakistan on an American passport in 1981. Whether he did or not is another question. It was not until April 2008 at a San Francisco fundraiser that Obama casually let it be known that he had traveled to Pakistan at all. Curiously, he had not mentioned this trip in either of his two books or in any prior public discussion of Pakistan.
- Raising suspicions further was the fact that two weeks before the Pakistani admission, someone had improperly accessed Obama's passport on three occasions. That someone worked for John Brennan at Analysis Corp, a company with fewer than a hundred employees. A former CIA operative then advising Obama, Brennan is now Deputy National Security Adviser.
Curiouser and curiouser! Those dependent on the major media for their news know close to none of the above. They have been coached to believe that only Mad Hatters and "birthers" would dare question the self-serving slop of disinformation that the media have dished out in the age of Obama. Well, off now to see Alice -- something of a homecoming for me, as I have lived in Wonderland for the last several years.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/what_i_learned_from_obamas_pop.html at March 07, 2010 - 12:16:36 AM CST
TOPICS: Editorial; Extended News; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: figments; hispast; jackcashill; lessons; obama; obamafamily
To: smoothsailing
The whole Obama history thing freaks me out.
Are we in a 2010 Twilight Zone episode?
2
posted on
03/06/2010 10:32:04 PM PST
by
Rosamond
To: smoothsailing; All
So, if we are to believe this, then Obama was difinitely born in US territory of an American mother. And his father was possibly a Kenyan, but could have been an American black citizen of questionable tastes. Well, I am glad the citizenship question is solved.;-) Now if we just knew the answer to Indonesia.
3
posted on
03/06/2010 10:52:53 PM PST
by
gleeaikin
To: smoothsailing
B. Hussein Obama’s parents weren’t legally married. Therefore, he’s a bastard. I think we all pretty much knew that anyway.
4
posted on
03/06/2010 10:57:39 PM PST
by
boycott
To: smoothsailing
5
posted on
03/06/2010 11:14:41 PM PST
by
neverdem
(Xin loi minh oi)
To: onyx; penelopesire; seekthetruth; television is just wrong; jcsjcm; BP2; Pablo Mac; ...
6
posted on
03/06/2010 11:56:03 PM PST
by
STARWISE
(They (LIBS-STILL) think of this WOT as Bush's war, not America's war- Richard Miniter)
To: STARWISE
this tongue in cheek paragraph jumped out at me:
The possibility that the Dunhams recruited Barack Sr. to front for a less savory impregnation of Ann by a black man makes more sense than the fabled romance. Obama looks nothing like Barack Sr.
it's a placemark comment, I'm coming back to the entire article later. Meanwhile, enjoy this image of someone who DOES look like the foreign student from Kenya:
7
posted on
03/07/2010 12:25:06 AM PST
by
Fred Nerks
(Fair dinkum!)
To: Tex Pete
8
posted on
03/07/2010 12:58:50 AM PST
by
Tex Pete
(Obama for Change: from our pockets, our piggy banks, and our couch cushions!)
Fascinating. The UK Daily Mail [IIRC] had a pre-election article musing that Obama’s father might well have been Davis.
I think some people know the truth. Just wonder if it’s being used as leverage currently or held back for future negotiations.
9
posted on
03/07/2010 1:01:44 AM PST
by
FreeStateYank
(I want my country and constitution back, now!)
To: STARWISE
I have long thought that Frank Davis was the one who fathered this abomination and I think the charges about his relationship and behavior with the boy are most probably true.
I think it is pretty obvious that he is a psychological mess and we have seen articles this past week questioning his sanity.
10
posted on
03/07/2010 8:55:01 AM PST
by
Bahbah
(Only dead fish go with the flow)
To: Bahbah
I think it is pretty obvious that he is a psychological messcombined with self medication....God help us!
11
posted on
03/07/2010 9:31:01 AM PST
by
hoosiermama
(ONLY DEAD FISH GO WITH THE FLOW.......I am swimming with Sarahcudah! Sarah has read the tealeaves.)
To: hoosiermama
12
posted on
03/07/2010 10:34:17 AM PST
by
defconw
(I'll keep my guns, religion and money. You keep the change.)
To: smoothsailing
IIRC there were naked photos of someone who looked a lot like Stanley Ann in a room with the kind of furniture as might be found in a 1950s Waikiki apartment...
13
posted on
03/07/2010 11:33:50 AM PST
by
Menehune56
("Let them hate so long as they fear" (Oderint Dum Metuant), Lucius Accius, (170 BC - 86 BC))
To: smoothsailing
For starters, Ann Dunham spent her formative years in Washington State, several of them in the progressive cocoon of Mercer Island. It was to Washington that she returned for a year immediately after Obama's birth, a fact missed by every Obama biography I could find. Baby Barack spent most of his first year in Washington as well, another fact overlooked by the biographers. There is not much storybook to a romance in which the mother leaves home immediately after her son's birth. Barack Sr.'s close friends have no memory even of a relationship between him and Dunham. When Barack Sr. left Hawaii a year after Obama's birth, Ann's father Stanley was there to see him off with smiles. He would always speak well of the black man who knocked up his daughter and then abandoned wife and child -- mighty unusual behavior from a father-in-law. There was a marriage license from another county, Maui -- a classic way to avoid local notification -- and a divorce, but if there was a wedding, then no one attended it. There was no ring, no photos, no leis. Ann Dunham met Barack Sr. in Russian class. (In 1960, people like Lee Harvey Oswald took Russian classes.) The possibility that the Dunhams recruited Barack Sr. to front for a less savory impregnation of Ann by a black man makes more sense than the fabled romance. Obama looks nothing like Barack Sr.Which all leads me back to the Honolulu Advertiser birth announcement. I know that's supposed to be the end of the story... But.
In 1960 Hawaii, the "surf culture" was in it's heyday. A lot of those same people inhabited Haight-Ashbury by 1967-68, and some of them were throwbacks to the Beats of San Francisco's North Beach from the 50s. Yes, the surfers were pot smokin' (although hashhish was just as available in the pacific rim) and took speed, and LSD (it was a prescribed medication then, and freely available on the black market) and were "free love" advocates. (This stuff wasn't invented in 1968 ya' know.)
I know this because I knew one girl in particular (a "surfer") who lived in Hawaii through the 60s, got pregnant in Hawaii, had the baby at home in Hawaii, and registered the kid's birth here in California.
All Stanley Ann's mother (Obama's grandmother) had to do was go to the Advertiser and give them the info. You can enroll a kid in public school based on the newspaper's birth announcement. And there you have it. Paper trail.
14
posted on
03/07/2010 12:16:36 PM PST
by
GVnana
("Obama is incredibly naive and grossly egotistical." Sarkozy)
To: GVnana
Which all leads me back to the Honolulu Advertiser birth announcement.Thanks for the info, GVnana. I've always questioned the reliability of that birth announcement.
I worked in the newspaper business for twenty years and know that you can have just about anything published in a newspaper if you're willing to pay the line rates. To the newspaper, birth notices, wedding announcements, classified ads, etc., are all considered nothing more than revenue enhancers.
To: smoothsailing
16
posted on
03/07/2010 12:40:20 PM PST
by
Cacique
(quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat ( Islamia Delenda Est ))
To: smoothsailing
If the reason he is withholding his BC information is because it reveals that his father is Frank Marshall Davis, wouldn’t that put the whole citizenship issue to rest?
17
posted on
03/07/2010 12:43:51 PM PST
by
my_pointy_head_is_sharp
(The Wright Bros never imagined that in the future weÂ’d be stripping naked in order to fly.)
To: my_pointy_head_is_sharp
I guess so, but it would expose a huge fraud at the same time.
To: smoothsailing
Yep. For the life of me, I don’t know why anyone takes that announcement so seriously. I figure grandma placed the announcement so little Barack could go to school.
19
posted on
03/07/2010 2:47:33 PM PST
by
GVnana
("Obama is incredibly naive and grossly egotistical." Sarkozy)
To: smoothsailing
It just keeps getting better and better!
20
posted on
03/07/2010 3:53:59 PM PST
by
STD
(-Obama's Riding Upon The Pale Horse of Islam)
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