http://tinyurl.com/3vuc9x
- - -
A newly discovered anecdote from Bill Ayers' 1993 book "To Teach" solidifies
the case that he is indeed the muse behind Barack Obama's "Dreams From My
Father."
In the book, Ayers tells the story of an adventurous teacher who would take
her students out to the streets of New York to learn interesting life
lessons about the culture and history of the city.
As Ayers tells it, the students were fascinated by the Hudson River nearby
and asked to see it. When they got to the river's edge, one student said,
"Look, the river is flowing up." A second student said, "No, it has to flow
south-down."
Not knowing which was right, the teacher and the students did their
research. What they discovered, writes Ayers, was "that the Hudson River is
a tidal river, that it flows both north and south, and they had visited the
exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."
In his 1995 book, "Dreams From My Father," Barack Obama shares an intriguing
story from his own brief New York sojourn.
He tells of meeting with "Marty Kauffman" at a Lexington Avenue diner, the
man from Chicago who was trying to recruit him as a community organizer.
After the meeting, Obama "took the long way home, along the East River
promenade." As "a long brown barge rolled through the gray waters toward the
sea," Obama sat down on a bench to consider his options.
While sitting, he noticed a black woman and her young son against the
railing. Overly fond of the too well remembered detail, Obama observes,
"They stood side by side, his arm wrapped around her leg, a single
silhouette against the twilight."
The boy appeared to ask his mother a question that she could not answer and
then approached Obama:
"Excuse me, mister," he shouted. "You know why sometimes the river runs
that way and then sometimes it goes this way?"
The woman smiled and shook her head, and I said it probably had to do
with the tides.
Obama uses the seeming indecisiveness of this tidal river as a metaphor for
his own. Immediately afterwards, he shakes the indecision and heads for
Chicago.
This one anecdote holds a host of problems for Obama. For one, the East
River would be hugely out of his way no matter where he lived in New York
and especially if he lived anywhere near the Columbia campus on the upper
West Side.
More troubling, his serendipitous journey to the river enables him to tell a
story that is transparently fabricated and almost assuredly hatched in the
weathered brain of Bill Ayers.
Even were there no other clues, Obama's frequent and sophisticated use of
nautical metaphors makes a powerful case for Ayers' involvement in the
writing of "Dreams."
Despite growing up in Hawaii, Obama gives no indication than he has had any
real experience with the sea or ships. His answer to the boy that the
backflow "probably had to do with the tides," if anything, confirms his
inexperience.
Ayers, however, knew a great deal about the sea. After dropping out of
college, he took up the life of 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."
The experience had a powerful impact on Ayers. Years later, he would recall
a nightmare he had while crossing the Atlantic, "a vision of falling
overboard in the middle of the ocean and swimming as fast as I could as the
ship steamed off and disappeared over the horizon."
Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the
language of the sea will not let him go.
"I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience,"
Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same
nautical language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.
"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers 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. Obama 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."
Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen
times on wind alone. "The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly
exposed," he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of
the word "flutter."
Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency. Early
in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her own ship,"
not a substantial one either but "a ragged thing with fatal leaks" launched
into a "sea of carelessness."
Obama, too, finds himself "feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship."
He also makes a metaphorical reference to "a tranquil sea."
More intriguing is Obama's use of the word "ragged" as an adjective as in
the highly poetic "ragged air" or "ragged laughter."
Both books use "storms" and "horizons" both as metaphor and as reality.
Ayers writes poetically of an "unbounded horizon," and Obama writes of
"boundless prairie storms" and poetic horizons - "violet horizon," "eastern
horizon," "western horizon."
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."
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."
In "Dreams," we read of the "whole panorama of life out there" and in
"Fugitive Days," "the whole weird panorama." Ayers writes of still another
panorama, this one "an immense panorama of waste and cruelty."
Obama employs the word "cruel" and its derivatives no fewer than 14 times in
"Dreams."
On at least 12 occasions, Obama speaks of "despair," as in the "ocean of
despair." Ayers speaks of a "deepening despair," a constant theme for him as
well.
Obama's "knotted, howling assertion of self" sounds like something from the
pages of Jack London's "The Sea Wolf."
My own semi-memoir, "Sucker Punch," offers a useful control. It makes no
reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms,
storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering,
knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky.
None. And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the
ocean.
If there is any one paragraph in "Dreams" that has convinced me of Ayers'
involvement, it is this one, in which Obama describes the black nationalist
message:
"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."
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 most surely did.
- - -
Just a guy in his neighborhood.
Who worked with Obama to dole out millions to far left-wing, anti-American
groups, not to mention ACORN, launched Obama's political career in his
living room, and possibly wrote huge swaths of Obama's personal memoirs.
And just so happens to be the same guy who founded the Weather Underground
to wage war against his own country, and as recently as 2006 was in Caracas
praising Hugo Chavez' Venezuela as a "model" for education reform.
- Bob
_______________________________________________
Post Messages to: [email protected]
Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox
OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech
Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox
This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the
author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added
to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
