http://bit.ly/9C7nsb - - - It is during this memorable weekend that Obama experiences something of a racial epiphany. "I realized that our two worlds, my friend's and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I'd eventually live in hers." This realization inspires Obama to break off this relationship despite a gracious reception by the girl's parents.
Remnick concedes that Dreams is not to be taken at face value. He calls it a "mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping." On any number of points, all fairly trivial, he attempts to sort out the fact from the fancy. On the subject of this critical relationship, the one and only in Dreams before Michelle, he falls conspicuously silent. The reader of The Bridge would not know that Obama had such a relationship. Christopher Andersen was more curious but made little headway in confirming the story or identifying the woman. "No one," he writes, "including his roommate and closest friend at the time, Siddiqi, knew of this mysterious lover's existence." Abhorring a vacuum, I have ventured to fill it. Given Remnick's list of the allowable ways to interpret Dreams -- verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping -- I choose "D" for the mystery woman: "invention." In the absence of any contrary information, best evidence argues for an invention largely of Bill Ayers' contrivance. As I have argued from textual analysis, and as Andersen has confirmed from his own reporting, Obama had help with the book. As Andersen tells it, after four futile years of trying to finish the contracted book, a "hopelessly blocked" Obama delivered his family's "oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes" to "friend and neighbor" Ayers for a major overhaul. Ayers appears to have taken Obama's shapeless mass of a manuscript and fitted it into a Homeric framework. We know that Ayers is keen on the classics. Early in his own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, he tips his Homeric hand. "Memory sails out upon a murky sea -- wine-dark, opaque, unfathomable," he writes with a knowing wink. "Wine-dark sea" is trademark Homer. Ayers seems to have had fun with the project. Indeed, in January 2009, Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times literary critic, described the structure of Dreams as "a quest in which [Obama] cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home." Three weeks earlier, I had made the identical argument on these pages. Any number of incidents in Dreams recall Homer's Odyssey. In his quest, Obama encounters blind seers, lotus-eaters, the "ghosts" of the underworld, whirlpools, a half-dozen sundry "demons," and even a menacing one-eyed bald man. These encounters likely run the full range of stylistic possibilities from verifiable fact to artful shaping to pure invention. The mystery woman recalls the temptress Circe. Like Obama's unnamed girlfriend, Circe lives in a "splendid house" on "spacious grounds." She too wants her lover, Odysseus, to stay forever. Like Obama, Odysseus has shared his bed with this alien seductress for one year. But her world can never be his. "You god-driven man," Odysseus's mates warn him, "now the time has come to think about your native land once more, if you are fated to be saved and reach your high-roofed home and your own country" (Ian Johnston translation). If Obama's friend nicely fills the Circe role, then she is almost surely grounded in the real-life person of Diana Oughton, Ayers' lover who was killed in a 1970 Greenwich Village bomb factory blast. Ayers was obsessed with Oughton. In Fugitive Days, he fixes on her in ways that had to discomfit the woman that he eventually married, their fellow traveler in the Weather Underground, Bernardine Dohrn. Physically, the woman of Obama's memory, with her "dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes," evokes images of Oughton. As her FBI files attest, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes. The two women share similar family backgrounds as well. In fact, they seem to have grown up on the very same estate. - - - Cashill has Obama and Ayers so completely nailed on the matter of Ayer's undeniable control over the narrative of Dreams that the only reasonable thing the media can do is ignore or ridicule his brilliant literary forensics. - Publius -- "It ought never to be forgotten, that a firm union of this country, under an efficient government, will probably be an increasing object of jealousy to more than one nation of Europe; and that enterprises to subvert it will sometimes originate in the intrigues of foreign powers, and will seldom fail to be patronized and abetted by some of them. Its preservation, therefore ought in no case that can be avoided, to be committed to the guardianship of any but those whose situation will uniformly beget an immediate interest in the faithful and vigilant performance of the trust." [Federalist Papers #59] _______________________________________________ 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.
