Rhode Island/Jack Cashill

We went to Rhode Island over the last couple of days because my wife had arranged with a young and very talented photographer to shoot our children on a sand dune.

So, we loaded up, and drove across the state to the border of Connecticut and over. The traffic in New Haven was intense, so we were about a half an hour late.

I unloaded the children and wife in a town called Watch Hill, Rhode Island, about a mile from the western border with Connecticut. This town is on a jutting spit of land and features delis, art shops, an old-fashioned carousel, a light house, and 17 million dollar homes (according to the Real Estate window). Parking was difficult as most parking was for residents only, as were most of the beaches. A sign said, "Private beaches, but public toilets!" As if this was fair compensation. I used the toilet then spent an hour trying to find my family. I couldn't, so I got a local newspaper and sat by the Carousel, watching kids go around and try to catch the brass rings.

The local paper had a story about high school bullying and suggested that schools set up anonymous suggestion boxes.

Meanwhile, I moved in front of the Real Estate Office, because some parents were anxiously staring at me near the Carousel (thinking me a potential perp, perhaps), and got out Deconstructing Obama, by Jack Cashill. Cashill is a popular conservative writer who has tried to argue that all of Obama's written work is really that of terrorist Bill Ayers. His book was published in 2011 and I don't know for sure why I'm reading it. I wanted to see what methods he would use to demonstrate the link. It's summer and I wanted to read something way out of my usual territory. When this book came out in late Winter I read about it and was interested but just now got around to reading it. From the start of the book Cashill makes it clear he HATES CNN, and liberals, and can barely stand them, but he is kind of funny about it, and is difficult to just write off. He has a Ph.D. in English, and at least writes clearly.

The first forty pages say nothing except how he got interested in making the link between Obama and Ayers and how he hoped to wreck Obama's candidacy with this link in 2008, but he didn't make the deadline.

Then, he offers a comparison on p. 48 between Obama's prose and Ayers' prose:

Here's Ayers from a book called 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" (cited on p. 48).

Here's Obama, 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" (48).

They're both discussing Chicago. I've been to Chicago only once so can't vouch for the accuracy of either description. Suffice it to say that Cashill believes there is a close match between the two passages, and uses the Flesch Reading Ease Score to indicate they both receive a score of 54 on a scale of 1 to 121.

Then he argues that Obama's use of the word "midafternoon" is striking, especially insofar as Ayers uses the term, too. This may be because it is frequently used in Chicago. Cashill is from Kansas. I've lived in the northwest and the northeast and haven't heard the term used, but it might be a regionalism, especially if there is something weird about the midafternoon weather in Chicago, as the passages indicate.

I shrugged my shoulders and looked up. The family had returned from the shoot, and all were still alive. The photographer Sarah and her husband Wes were young people making a living in Mystic, CT. We chatted for ten minutes or so. Wes said he works at a factory that makes airplane parts in Groton, and he seemed sensible, down to earth, and very soft-spoken, all of which were to me very appealing qualities. He told me that Conan O'Brien has a house in Watch Hill. As we drove out of town there was a gigantic hotel looming over the ocean and the full moon glittered down over the water. Elegant people pulled up to the hotel. It looked to me as if the recession had never hit Watch Hill. I was just so glad it wasn't me keeping the economy going or having to show up at fancy hotels like this. I much prefer to remain quiet and mostly unseen.

We then went to our motel in a town called Westerly, and checked in. The price was quite high: about 90 dollars, but we paid it. Then we went to Wal-Mart to buy groceries and a sleeping bag, because the beds were tiny, and I would end up sleeping on the hard-wood floor. The reason we chose the motel (Aqua Inn) is that they promised internet service, but we couldn't make it work, and the Indian man and his wife were asleep and we didn't want to wake them.

We got up and went into the swimming pool. I supervised the kids while Riikka caught up with email (another resident of the hotel and the Indian couple's third-grader explained how to log in, although the mother didn't know and the dad was elsewhere) and packed. Some workmen with tattoos were building a watercourse near the pool, and all five were chainsmoking. As we checked out one of the men said to me, "I rarely comment, but you deserve a prize for attentiveness to your children. We rarely see that here."

My son said, "Dad, if he said you deserve a prize, why didn't he give you one? Shouldn't you get a real prize?"

That son is going into fifth grade. He's already better than me at math (quicker in addition and subtraction), but his understanding of analogical language needs work, or perhaps just more experience.

In the late morning we went to the beach in Misquamicut, RI, and although the beach was free you had to pay for parking. All day was 25 dollars most places but we found a place for 12 dollars, and walked over the sandy dunes to a seven-mile long beach filled with parasols and probably a half million visitors. The cumulous clouds drifted over rapidly as there was a strong wind. It was about 72 degrees. People ate onion rings and hamburgers and cotton candy and other glop and smoked cigarettes.

I stood in the surf and worked forward in the Cashill book, underlining passages while children surfboarded and threw peewee footballs and seagulls soared overhead (one hit me directly with poop, so I was forced to wade in and wash off before continuing the book).

Suffice it to say that Cashill believes that Obama is not a writer, and so could not have written Dreams From My Father. He thinks that someone else did, and builds the case that Ayers did.

I was willing to entertain this idea. He finds striking resemblances between Ayers and Obama's writing in terms of sentence structure, nautical references, and an ur-text that is perhaps found in the works of Joseph Conrad, especially Heart of Darkness. I kept reading, and was willing to buy some of it.

I was willing to entertain the notion that Ayers had written the book. I hadn't read much of Ayers, but in the tiny passage above, there is, in addition to the quantitative resemblance, an enormous difference IN QUALITY. Obama's passage is so far superior to the Ayers' passage that it struck me with a huge force. Whoever wrote the Obama passage has an enormous sympathy for the world, is outwardly turned toward it, and loves the world deeply. The Ayers' passage on the other hand is bitterly twisted and inwardly turned, and whoever wrote it felt lost and half-crazy as they wrote. That's a subjective reading, but let's read them again to try to substantiate the difference.

Here are some of the words in the Ayers' passage: "fury," "cold" "chilly" and "angling."

"Fury," is an especially bitter term.

Something is wrong with the person who wrote this passage. They are paranoid and ready to strike back against a too-harsh world.

In the Obama passage on the other hand, "boundless" prairie storms come rolling in, and the city lights are reflected in the clouds: a fascinating and beautiful image. One hates the world. The other loves it, with an almost "boundless" love.

There are superficial resemblances, but one of these writers has an ugly view of the world, and the other writer's is sublime. Based on this passage, I don't think they are the same writer.

I was now on about p. 200. The wind was blowing hard and my older daughter complained of a headache. Our older boy was having a great time with his surfboard (it's just a tiny thing, but resembled a surfboard), so we said another twenty minutes. He glided on waves and was proud of his prowess.

We packed up and got back in the car, and drove back through Connecticut and stopped at the IKEA in New Haven. The kids and I had the cheapest specials (about $2.50 for macaroni and cheese with a drink), while Riikka shopped for solutions.

Back on I-84 we got home and I finished unpacking, let the comments through, went to bed, and finished the last ninety pages of the Cashill book this morning.

In the last ninety pages Cashill's credibility slips badly. I'm no progressive, but when he compares them to a great white shark, I stopped and underlined:

"A liberal can have a fixed set of values, much as conservatives do. But a progressive, by definition, is always progressing. Like a great white, if one stops moving, it dies" (223).

An absolutely fascinating image that recalls Woody Allen's description of love from Annie Hall (is that correct?). But Allen's use of the term is comic and deliberately off. Cashill's use is angry and demeaning.

Are progressives really like "a great white"?

I don't see them this way. If anything, they are like lemmings. Angry talkative lemmings, at times, wandering in the wilderness, much as the Jews were during the attempt to escape from Egypt. If Obama is their Moses, it's not as if they want to keep moving. They want instead to found the New Jerusalem. Conservatives on the other hand do not believe we will ever have an earthly kingdom that is like Eden. We are fallen. We will do as well as we can to follow God's word, but the New Jerusalem is something that only God will provide. We cannot build it ourselves. We are locked out and must do our best to understand and follow His word, having broken the Covenant in the Garden.

Liberals and progressives can be deluded. The Nobel Peace Prize was given not only to Obama, but to Rigoberta Menchu, a woman who lied about her entire background when she wrote her book about being an Indian Woman in Guatemala, in which she makes up most of her facts and situations to create sympathy for her cause.

When Cashill is reviewing the evidence against the progressives he is quite thorough (he spends three pages on Menchu in order to undermine Obama's garnering of the Nobel). He claims they are both literary frauds. His evidence for the similarity between Ayers and Obama's writing is extensive and is the heart of the book. It's about 150 pages in length. It's not bad, and in the course of this he talks a lot about quantitative modes of analysis.

But he confuses quantity with quality.

Obama's quality is far superior to Ayers'. Obama's writing, if it is indeed his, has always a warmth and love in it for the world. He's somewhat careful, and cautious, it's true, but there's a love in his writing, whereas in Ayers' writing there is a rancid hatred that I find appalling and one-sided. Plus there is the problem of the Obama poem "Pop," which we reviewed on the blog several years ago. While not a masterpiece, the poem could stand as one of Bukowski's poems, and as a Beat poem. It's good. The other poem about the water grotto is terrible, but everyone writes bad poems. I write a hundred bad poems for every good one.

The last fifty pages of the book focus on Obama's confusing heritage, and evaluate evidence that Jimi Hendrix is his dad, or an "unknown black male," or possibly Frank Marshall Davis, the poet. The poem "Pop" is probably about Davis. I will buy this. But Cashill claims that Davis used Obama's mother as a nude model, and impregnated her, and then had sex with her (his own?) underaged son, and that this is what the poem represents!

He claims that Davis was gay or bisexual, and especially liked underaged boys, but wasn't particular about what he did. Davis wrote a book called Sex Rebel, about his affairs with men boys and women.

"There is enough talk in Sex Rebel about the taste and texture of semen to merit the suspicion that the 'breath' and 'amber stain' references in 'Pop' refer to the exchange of something other than whiskey. There may have been a whole lot of 'shinking' going on chez Davis after all" (284).

Is semen amber when it stains? I think this designation is wrong, on a forensic basis, and presents an absolutely monstrous scenario that would be worthy of a Nero, but Obama is no Nero.

On p. 282, Cashill says that "to shink" may not be a typo but may refer to slapping someone in the face with a penis (he cites evidence for this as a slang term in the gay community). However, it has other slang usages, too. It's an obscure aspect of the poem, but Cashill imports the worst possible meaning, and then builds a bizarre scenario around it that no jury would buy.

To top it off, Cashill claims that Obama never wrote the poem at all, and that it was a gift from Davis, "As compensation for exploiting the young Obama, Davis may have slipped this 'green young man' a poem for publication... Trained to believe that nothing adds up and the deck is stacked against him, Obama has seemed from the beginning entirely comfortable with a counterfeit literary career" (285).

So, Cashill writes off Dreams as belonging to Ayers, and then writes off Audacity as the work of a speechwriter named Favreau, and then writes off the early poem "Pop," as the work of Frank Marshall Davis.

For me this was too much. I've now read four books on Obama: Kloppenberg's, D'Souza's, Obama's Audacity, and this one. I felt sympathy for Obama by the end of this book. I felt disgusted by Cashill's sliming of Obama.

Obama's early poem "Pop," is a very fine poem, especially for a nineteen-year old writer. If that is actually Obama's work, then he'd have been capable of writing everything else he's written. My problem with Obama is not so much the writing and its quality, but the viewpoint. He's too much in love with the world, and doesn't understand the dangers and the terrors that America faces, and he has too many Marxists in his background. I think Obama himself tries to be reasonable, and is trying to understand the limitations of his background. Cashill brings up the Muslim issue again, on stretched terms. To his credit, Obama did get OBL. He went outside the lines when he did it, but the Pakistanis at some level must have allowed it. Generally speaking, Obama has worked inside of legal lines. He and his wife do not appear to be thugs. I think the right goes too far when they won't allow the presidential couple brains or talent or general decency. They have cute kids, and although they may have made mistakes in getting close with Ayers and Wright, I don't think they are evil opportunists. They may have been given some opportunities on the basis of their race, but they did the best they could with those opportunities. America should be proud of them.

They are good people. Perhaps too good. I think some distrust of the Chinese, and of terrorists like Ayers, and more thorough background checks into the people they employ (Van Jones, and the couple who snuck into the White House) would help them out. Obama knew the communist Frank Marshall Davis as a boy, and can't help his mother's poor choices. Davis played the role of Falstaff to a young Henry Vth, but I really doubt if they had oral sex. More likely Davis introduced Obama to the world of poetry and politics, but I doubt if he exploited the boy.

I came away from the book believing that Obama is a patriot and not a pinhead, and that Jack Cashill is one-sided to the point of zealotry. In his attempt to tarnish the Obamas, he loses perspective. Everyone loses perspective when there is so much at stake, but this book needed better vetting.

It may be that Obama had help with the two books. Most writers have some help. For my three volumes of literary criticism I had help from several anonymous readers, from professors I had worked with, and my wife. Almost no one writes well by themselves. For my novel I also had some help from the editor and my wife, too.

Obama's spirit is present in the books and the poems assigned to him. He's a good man. You can see on his face that he's a good man.

I hope he isn't reelected, but if he is, and there's a good chance of it (if the economy turns around) we could do far worse. I think he was probably just a tad superior to John McCain in talent but I preferred McCain. I would like someone with humor and a sense of the bottom line to run for the Republicans: either Giuliani or Huckabee.

Meanwhile, I have other things to do: I have to get the beach sand out of the car, my shoes, and water the cucumbers.