“A steady attack on the white race . . . served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair.”
Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father
Shortly before launching his career, first as a community organizer and then as a radical bomber, Bill Ayers took a job as a merchant seaman.
“I’d thought that when I signed on that I might write an American novel about a young man at sea,” says Ayers in his memoir, Fugitive Days, “but I didn’t have it in me.”
Although Ayers has tried to put his unhappy ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. Indeed, it infuses much of what he writes. This is only natural and often distinctive, as in an appealing Ayers’ metaphor like “the easy inlet of her eyes.”
Less natural is that much of this same nautical language flows through Obama’s earth-bound memoir, Dreams From My Father. For simplicity sake, I will refer to the memoir’s author as “Obama.”
Ayers is particularly eloquent when writing about the “fury” of the elements as, curiously, is Obama. Consider the following two passages, the first from “Fugitive Days”:
“I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city.”
The second from “Dreams”:
“Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds.”
These two sentences are alike in more than their poetry, their length and their gracefully layered structure. They tabulate nearly identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a standard in the field.
The “Fugitive Days” excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12 th grade reading level. The “Dreams’” excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12 th grade reading level. Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.
A comparable nature passage from my novel, “2006: The Chautauqua Rising,” scores a 61.6 with an 11 th grade reading level. The samples I submitted from my own semi-memoir on race, “Sucker Punch,” score in the 63-76 range.
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. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. He 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.”
In “Dreams,” we read of the “whole panorama of life out there” and in “Fugitive Days,” “the whole weird panorama.”
Ayers writes poetically of an “unbounded horizon,” and Obama writes of “boundless prairie storms” and poetic horizons—“violet horizon,” “eastern horizon,” “western horizon.”
“I can imagine him standing at the edge of the Pacific,” says Obama referring to his grandfather, “his hair prematurely gray, his tall, lanky frame bulkier now, looking out at the horizon until he could see it curve.”
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.”
As a point of contrast, the author of Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” never uses “calm” as a noun and uses “current” almost always as an adjective to mean “contemporaneous.”
The difference between the two Obama books on the word “current” is striking. In “Dreams,” there are four uses of “current” as noun and two as adjective. In “Audacity,” there is one of use of “current” as noun and twenty as adjective.
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.” The word “tangled” does not appear in “Audacity.”
Am I suggesting that Obama used different ghostwriters for the two books? Yes, at least in part.
There is no doubt that Obama contributed to both, and for “Audacity” Obama could have afforded more than one writer or editor, but there is something about the sea imagery that distinguishes “Dreams.”
Although not necessarily related to the sea, but perhaps inspired by it, are the emotionally charged words that appear frequently in both “Fugitive Days” and “Dreams”: fierceness, fury, rage, despair, and cruelty.
(Both books, by the way, make frequent use of the colon.)
Ayers writes of another panorama, this one “an immense panorama of waste and cruelty.” Obama employs the word “cruel” and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in “Dreams,” twice as many times as in “Audacity.”
On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of “despair,” as in the “ocean of despair” cited above. Ayers speaks of a “deepening despair,” a constant theme for him as well.
Then, of course, there is what Obama calls a “rage at the white world [that] needed no object.” On this subject too one sees in “Dreams” a hint of the nautical in phrases like "knotted, howling assertion of self" and "withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage."
In Fugitive Days, Ayers talks of an “uncontrollable rage” as though it were a storm. One wonders whether the Weathermen’s inaugural act of mass violence, the “Days of Rage,” has its roots in Ayers’ maritime experience.
There are any number of intriguing non-nautical word connections between “Dreams” and “Fugitive Days,” but one that deserves mention is the repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls “our constructed reality.”
“But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie,” writes Obama, “something I’d constructed from the scraps of information I’d picked up from my mother.”
“That whole first year seemed like one long lie,” Obama writes of his first year in college in Los Angeles, one of at least a dozen references to lies and lying in “Dreams,” a figure nearly matched in “Fugitive Days.”
As intriguing as these word connections are, there are some objective, data-driven ways to prove authorship, one of which goes by the name “cusum analysis” or QSUM.
This analysis begins with the measurement of sentence length, a highly significant and telling variable. To compare the two books, I selected thirty-sentence sequences from “Dreams” and “Fugitive Days,” each of which relates the author’s entry into the world of “community organizing.”
“Fugitive Days” averaged 23.13 words a sentence. “Dreams” averaged 23.36 words a sentence. By contrast, the memoir section of “Sucker Punch” averaged 15 words a sentence.
More to the point, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from “Audacity” averages more than 29 words a sentence and clocks in with a 9th grade reading level, three levels below the earlier cited passages from “Dreams” and “Fugitive Days.”
To do a complete QSUM analysis requires skill and software beyond my proverbial pay grade. My thanks to those who have gotten me this far. The intro to QSUM and the Flesch analysis, as well as the pdfs of “Audacity” and “Dreams,” have all come courtesy of WND readers.
If anyone knows someone capable of taking the analysis the next step, please contact me through my website, cashill.com. Most such scholars reside within the universities, and that scares me.
One final subjective note about the introductory quote. As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of “Dreams,” I would never have used a metaphor as specific as “ballast” unless I knew exactly what I was talking about.
Seaman Ayers obviously did.
Below is the preceding WND.com series: Did Bill Ayers Write Obama's "Dreams"?":
Test shows Ayers penned Obama's 'Dreams'
Posted: October 19, 2008
5:57 pm Eastern
© 2008
As I have contended in previous articles, there is considerable and growing evidence that Bill Ayers made a significant contribution to Obama's "Dreams from My Father."
Among other indicators, I have cited the stunning parallels in nautical metaphors and postmodern themes, as well as the nearly miraculous transformation of Obama from struggling hack to literary giant in just a few years.
On Friday evening I received a welcome call from a member of Congress who has found the evidence as convincing as I have and has intervened to have writing samples tested through a university-based authorship program.
Although no such program is fully reliable, all preliminary comparisons that I have run have tested positive.
Two comparable nature passages – from "Dreams" and Ayers' memoir, "Fugitive Day," respectively – scored very nearly identically on the Flesch Reading Ease test.
On sentence length, a significant and telling variable, 30-sentence sequences from "Dreams" and "Fugitive Days," each dealing with "community organizing," scored very nearly identically again, "Fugitive Days" averaging 23.13 words a sentence and "Dreams" averaging 23.36 words a sentence.
By contrast, the memoir section of my own book about race, "Sucker Punch," averaged 15 words a sentence and tested significantly higher than either book on the Flesch Reading Ease test.
I also tested verb repetition in all three books, using as a base the first 60 distinctive verbs in "Fugitive Days." In "Dreams," an eye-popping 55 of those verbs appear. In "Sucker Punch," 37 do, this despite the fact that I am closer in age and education to Ayers than Obama is.
Ayers' involvement in Obama's memoir is not nearly as improbable as it might sound. Ayers served as something of a literary guru for his radical Hyde Park neighbors in Chicago.
Rashid Khalidi attests to this in the very first sentence of the acknowledgements in his 2004 book, "Resurrecting Empire."
"There are many people without whose support and assistance I could not have written this book, or written it in the way that it was written," he writes. "First, chronologically, and in other ways, comes Bill Ayers."
A friend of the PLO, even back in its terrorist days, Khalidi was as tight with Obama as he was with Ayers. Obama acknowledged as much when he toasted Khalidi on his departure from Chicago in 2003.
It would seem as natural, in fact, for Obama to have made use of Ayers' famed "dining room table" and the literary help that came with it as it was for Khalidi.
In fact, based on comparisons of style and word selection, Ayers seems to have had a much greater impact on Obama's work than on Khalidi's.
New evidence suggests that there was a good deal of literary back-scratching going on in Chicago's Hyde Park. Obama, for instance, wrote a short and glowing review of Ayers' 1997 book, "A Kind and Just Parent," for the Chicago Tribune.
Obama, whose photo is shown with the review, describes Ayers' book as "a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system."
In that same book, perhaps with a self-congratulatory wink, Ayers cites the "writer" Barack Obama as one among the celebrities in his neighborhood.
Ayers' likely ghosting of "Dreams" matters not so much because of what Ayers was, but rather because of what Ayers is: a man still intent on destroying an America that, in his own words, post 9-11, "makes me want to puke."
The congressman's real concern is that Ayers may have influenced Obama's political philosophy as much as he seems to have influenced his literary style. Consider the following passage from "Dreams":
Some [tourists] came because Kenya, without shame, offered to re-create an age when the lives of whites in foreign lands rested comfortably on the backs of the darker races; an age of innocence before Kimathi and other angry young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta started to lash out in street crime and revolution.
– Barack Obama, "Dreams from My Father"
Although Obama's memoir is generally more restrained and politic than Ayers' "Fugitive Days," passages like the one above make one wonder which is the real Obama.
The reference to "angry young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta" reflects Ayers' worldview of America as a "marauding monster," one that terrorizes its own citizens of color just as it does those in the third world.
Ayers does not define himself as being part of this monster but rather sees himself and his colleagues as saboteurs "behind enemy lines."
Curiously, Obama used the exact same phrase – "behind enemy lines" – to describe his own status while working in corporate America.
Obama's best defense here is that he did not write these passages and may not have understood their implications. For one, given his age, "Mekong Delta" was not likely a part of his vocabulary.
Ayers and his radical friends, however, were obsessed with Vietnam. It defined them and still does. To reflect their superior insight into that country, they have shown a tendency to use "Mekong Delta" as synecdoche, the part that indicates the whole.
In his 2001 memoir, "Fugitive Days," for instance, Ayers envisions "a patrol in the Mekong Delta" when he conjures up an image of Vietnam.
Ayers' wife, Bernadine Dohrn, pontificated about "a hamlet called My Lai" in a 1998 interview, but to flash her radical chops, she located it "in the middle of the Mekong Delta," which is in reality several hundred miles from My Lai.
In "Sucker Punch," though I write extensively about Vietnam, I make no reference to the "Mekong Delta." I have never written those words before this article.
Similarly, Ayers would have had a much deeper connection than Obama to "Detroit," whose historic riot took place, shortly before Obama's sixth birthday.
Ayers was posted to Detroit the year after the riot and experienced its fallout firsthand. In 2007, on his blog, he "commemorate[d]" the 40th anniversary of what he predictably calls the "Detroit Rebellion."
For obvious reasons, the media and the Obama camp have held Obama blameless for knowing anything about anything before 1970.
"Why is John McCain talking about the sixties?" one Obama ad asks. "McCain knows Obama denounced Bill Ayers' crimes committed when Obama was just eight years old."
The fact that the Weather Underground did all of its bombing in the 1970s, a conscious deception on the part of Obama and his handlers, is not at issue here.
What is at issue is that, if my thesis is correct, Obama has maintained an intimate working relationship with a self-described "communist" whose actions Obama now calls "despicable" and "detestable" only because he has to. Excerpted from World Net Daily.com at:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78546
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.
Excerpt from American Thinker October 22, 2008 by Jack Cashill at: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/10/ohio_state_prof_obama_denies_w.html